Resisting Trumpist Reaction (and Left Accommodation)

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RESISTING TRUMPIST REACTION (AND LEFT ACCOMMODATION): MARXIST-HUMANIST INITIATIVE’S PERSPECTIVES FOR 2018

ADOPTED DEC. 10, 2017

Part I TRUMPISM IN POWER, AIDED BY THE SOFT-ON-TRUMP LEFT, THREATENS LIFE AND LIBERTY

It may not be possible to stop US president Donald Trump before he launches the country and the world into a monstrous war, even a nuclear war, with North Korea or Iran. Similarly, the real threat Trump poses to Americans’ civil rights and liberties could be just as fatal to revolutionaries and progressives. The unthinkable must be acknowledged and our support for the Resistance to Trumpism must be intensified. A crucial aspect of this process is to fight the continuing attempts to “normalize” Trumpism. In September, erstwhile critics of Trump suddenly described him as bipartisan, reasonable, and a new man, merely because he said that he loves the DREAMers (undocumented immigrant youth) and seemingly cut a deal with Democrats regarding their legal status. Nothing became of the alleged deal. Around the same time, even supposedly liberal Hollywood compromised its opposition to Trumpism. At the Emmys (an American TV awards ceremony), former White House spokesman Sean Spicer was recruited to perform a surprise comedic bit, playing himself. The audience roared. It was as if his months of lying to the public and attempting to intimidate the news media were all just theater, instead of actions for which he should be denounced and punished. It is wearying, but necessary, to keep saying “this is not normal.” Otherwise, we may come to accept the unacceptable. Another crucial aspect of the fight against Trumpism is to combat and root out the idea that the left can somehow win over Trump’s base and turn white nationalists towards revolutionary socialism.1 As we discuss in a later section of these Perspectives, that is a pipe dream of a segment of the “left” that wants power for itself, and which acted in ways that helped Trump win the 2016 US election. Marxist-Humanist Initiative (MHI) redoubles its commitment to fight such accommodation. Trump must be removed and Trumpism must be rooted out. What Trump Has Already Accomplished Trump’s history in office is a nine-month long push to resurrect and legitimize racist, white supremacist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, anti-labor, anti-immigrant, and anti-poor sentiment and We use the term white nationalist to refer to the ideology of people like Trump, Steve Bannon, and Pat Buchanan, and not only neo-Nazis and members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. In an important recent essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Trump “the first white president” and writes that “his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.” 1

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action––and to help the rich, including through policies and laws that exploit and destroy the earth. It is true that he has not succeeded in getting a single major piece of legislation through Congress. And the Resistance, as well as pushback from some federal judges and ethical civil servants, have blocked some of his intended actions and have forced him to moderate others. Nonetheless, the scope of Trump’s power and the harm it has already done are shocking. The following is a partial list of what he has accomplished: 1. Taken the US to the brink of nuclear war with North Korea, and kept us on that brink 2. Encouraged violence against African-Americans, immigrants, Jews, the left, and the press 3. Encouraged and legitimated racism, Nazism, and white supremacy (see our editorial on Charlottesville) 4. Increased deportation of immigrants and instituted a phase-out of the DACA program 5. Imposed three “Muslim ban” travel restrictions, yet to be finally adjudicated illegal 6. Reduced the quota for refugees to be admitted to US in 2018 to a paltry 45,000 (out of 22.5 million refugees world-wide) 7. Failed to send vital aid to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after the hurricanes that hit them (he has also been lax since then on providing aid to these islands as well as Texas and Florida) 8. Reduced and reversed enforcement of criminal and civil anti-racism laws 9. Reduced and reversed enforcement of LGBT rights 10. Banned transsexuals from serving in the military, even though many are serving, and no one was bothered by it 11. Cheered on Congress’ multiple attempts to redistribute tax money from the poor to the rich by reducing health-insurance requirements and subsidies, including Medicaid, and backed congressional “repeal and replace” bills that would end health insurance for 21– 30 million people 12. Issued executive orders to weaken the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) by reducing the number of conditions and people it covers, and by making it harder to sign up for, which threatens to cause it to collapse 13. Taken administrative actions to harm women’s health, including by permitting employers to exclude contraception from health insurance coverage; he also backs legislation to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks and to defund Planned Parenthood 14. Re-instated the “gag rule” that bars any foreign aid that includes funds for abortion or even for information about abortion 15. Pushed Congress for tax cuts that will benefit only the very rich, but hurt the poor and middle class 16. Proposed a budget and tax “reform” that would create a massive budget deficit that would ultimately have to be contained by slashing funds for education, transportation, infrastructure, and health programs for the elderly, poor and disabled

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17. Rescinded administrative policies meant to reduce risks, created by Wall Street, to individuals and to the stability of the financial structure of the country and the world, increasing the likelihood of future financial crises 18. Rescinded, through decree or decimation of enforcement agencies, consumer protection polices intended to curb abuses by drug companies, manufacturers, and agribusiness 19. Rescinded, through decree or decimation of enforcement agencies, protections of workers’ rights, health and safety 20. Taken the US out of the Paris Climate Accords and encouraged climate-change denial 21. Deregulated federal lands and waters causing dangerous environmental exploitation and pollution 22. Encouraged opposition to scientific knowledge and supported faith-based ideology instead 23. Appointed a right-wing ideologue to the Supreme Court, increasing the chance that it will soon tilt all the way to the right 24. Made a shambles of the Departments of State, Environmental Protection, Education, Health, and others; many nonpartisan experts are gone and Trumpite ideologues are making policy 25. Increased US participation in the wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all over the Middle East and the world 26. Failed to do anything about ageing infrastructure 27. Cut funds for health, education, and scientific research 28. Pardoned former sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to cease extreme racial profiling and harsh detention of immigrants2 29. Reversed a requirement for pay transparency that would have helped address the pay gap between white men and almost everyone else 30. Reversed the decision to put the first woman––the great Black Abolitionist, Harriet Tubman––on US paper currency 31. Engaged in rampant, illegal self-dealing to enrich himself, his family, and business friends, establishing a kleptocracy beyond anything ever before seen in the US 32. Continued his public insults of and attempts to intimidate women, people of color, and anyone who disagrees with him––even judges, Congresspeople, and “gold star” military family members (who have lost a loved one during military action) 33. Threatened to cut US payments to the United Nations, which would force it to cut programs that aid the poor

This pardon also signaled to Trump’s appointees and cronies that they need not rat on him in an attempt to save themselves from prosecution in the ongoing investigations of his campaign’s cooperation with the Russian government as it interfered in the US election, because he will pardon anyone involved who is convicted of a crime. 2

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34. Turned a blind eye as Myanmar’s security forces have launched a campaign of murder, rape, and arson against the majority-Muslim Rohingya population of the country’s Rakhine state, causing more than 500,000 people to flee into neighboring Bangladesh

“F–––ing Moron,” “Heading Towards World War III” As Trump continues to threaten North Korea with obliteration, and that country’s government responds in kind, US diplomatic, military, and security-establishment leaders are warning that he is undermining diplomatic efforts and very possibly goading Kim Jong-un, head of North Korea, into starting a war with the US. An alternative scenario is that a trigger-happy Trump could cause a war accidentally. The fact that he stayed “on script” when he spoke to the South Korean National Assembly on November 7—when he was just 35 miles from the North Korean border— does not mean that he will not revert to “fire and fury” rhetoric when he leaves the area. Although the literal words of his speech did not descend to that level, it was so insulting and bellicose that he sounded as if he were a hair’s breadth away from launching nukes. Trump recently told a meeting of top US military and civilian leaders that he wants to increase the US nuclear arsenal ten-fold, even though it is already able to kill everyone in the world many times over. This impelled his own Secretary of State to refer to him privately as a “f–––ing moron.” Stuart Rollo, an international-security researcher, warned in the New York Times that a US nuclear buildup would be profoundly destabilizing: “American nuclear advances threaten to start a new arms race and change the logic of mutually assured destruction, which has undergirded nuclear stability since the 1950s.” World leaders are holding their breath to see what may develop. Many are simply shunning Trump. Yet he himself takes the Korean threat of nuclear conflagration so unseriously that he continuously insults Kim Jong-un and calls him “Little Rocket Man.” And according to an October 12 Quinnipiac University poll (question 48), a frightening 46% of Republicans approve of the possibility of a preemptive strike against North Korea that Trump has been threatening. Military analysts are scared, because a “second Korean war” would likely cause one million casualties on the first day alone, including hundreds of thousands of US citizens in the area. Top officials in Trump’s own government have recently warned Congress of the danger. But no one believes that Trump will refrain from tweeting provocations against Kim Jong-un for very long. His provocations motivated Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee to warn in October that “we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.” (Corker also announced that he would not run for another term in Congress, which frees him to criticize Trump publicly and to act on principle.)

Blatantly Racist, Deliberate Neglect of Puerto Rico Trump’s treatment of Puerto Rico––whose residents are US citizens––is particularly shocking. As of November 5, 46 days after Hurricane Maria struck the island, 60% of its population still 4

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lacked a power source to provide electricity and cell phone towers. Thousands still have no access to clean drinking water or sufficient food. The death toll is increasing due to the spread of disease, especially diseases transmitted through unclean water. Nothing like that dire emergency exists in Houston or Florida, which were hit by hurricanes about the same time. This disparate federal standard of aid reflects naked racism. Trump has not hidden his disdain for Puerto Ricans or his belief that they are unworthy of substantial US government aid (see this article, written ten days after the hurricane; conditions have improved little since then). Puerto Rico’s economy had already been in a severe crisis, with a power grid on the verge of collapse and a power company that was bankrupt. It has an enormous debt to bondholders that is impossible to pay. A half million people had already moved to the mainland since the Great Recession set off a permanent local recession. Now, thousands more are leaving because of the hurricane. Families are being torn apart as parents send their children to the mainland US because their schools are closed. The ageing and de-skilling of the population accelerates. The dangers exacerbated by Trump’s deliberate neglect may destroy the island’s future. But to Trump and his white nationalist-stacked government, this is fine, just as it is fine for him to continue to insist that there were “good people” among the white supremacists who marched and murdered in Charlottesville. His attempts make racism legitimate are indeed frightening.

The Republican Party Will Not Stop Trump As terrifying and morally repugnant as Trump is, there is little reason to hope that the Republican-controlled Congress will try to stop him. It is true that Corker, as well as two other Republican Senators––Jeff Flake and John McCain––have called his actions a “danger to democracy” and a “debasing of the nation.” And most other Republican congresspeople are reported to agree with them. Yet almost none of them will say so publicly. As a number of pundits have pointed out, this is reminiscent of McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy scared the whole government into going along with him for many years, as he conducted an antiCommunist witch hunt and ruined the lives of thousands of people. Trump is by no means popular among Americans. His approval rating is at a historic low among US presidents of the last 72 years. The elections for state officials in several states on November 7 resulted in a big sweep for the Democratic candidates. The winners included many women and people of color, as well as a transgender woman, Danica Roem. She won a seat in the Virginia legislature, ousting a 13-term conservative Republican who had boasted that he was Virginia’s “chief homophobe.” The voter turnout was high and a major issue was healthcare—people don’t want to lose it. The latest election was widely seen as a referendum on Trump, and he lost decisively. So why does the Republican Party continue to stick by him? The answer is that Trump’s support among the “base” that brought him to power remains unshakeable. This base does not constitute a majority of Americans; it may not even constitute a 5

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majority of Republican voters. But it is particularly rabid, and it disproportionately turns out to vote in Republican primary elections, so it wields outsized power over the careers of Republican politicians. And candidates selected by this narrow base can and do win general elections as long as enough mainstream-Republican and independent voters continue to regard such candidates as lesser evils than their Democratic opponents. Thus, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are cowed by, and do the bidding of, the base ––and the moneyed interests that underwrite this base, such as the Mercer family that funds Breitbart. And thus, Trump continues to “play to the base” instead of pursuing policies and behaving in ways that the majority of the country wants. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Trump’s business ties to Russians connected to the regime of Vladimir Putin, that country’s president. He is also investigating the Trump campaign’s collusion with that regime to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election and obstruction of justice by Trump and his underlings. Mueller has begun to indict people from the election campaign for various crimes. It appears as if enough evidence has emerged to prove that Trump committed “high crimes and misdemeanors”––the requirement for impeachment––but the investigation process is not moving fast enough to prevent more devastation by Trump right now. Even were it proceeding more rapidly, it is very unlikely that Trump will be removed from office via the impeachment process as long as Republicans control Congress. A majority of the House would have to vote to impeach him, and two-thirds of the Senate would have to vote to remove him. Given that support for Trump among his base is unyielding, and given the power that this base exercises over Republican politicians, this is almost inconceivable unless and until the Republicans suffer a landslide electoral defeat—hopefully, next year, when the whole House of Representatives and a third of the Senate is up for election. And for the same reason, it is unlikely that Trump’s Cabinet will remove him via the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. The best hope for Americans and people throughout the world (whose disapproval of Trump is even stronger than it is at home) is instead popular mobilization from below––i.e., the Resistance, which we discuss in detail later in these Perspectives. On September 15, a group of political scientists disclosed polling results which indicated that 61% of Americans opposed to Trump “would join a general strike to help end the Trump presidency.” This of course does not mean that we would be making Mike Pence the president. A general strike that brings down Trump could surely bring down Pence and the rest of the Trump regime as well. Trump’s Threat to Liberal Democracy The more Trump is forced into a corner by the Mueller investigation and the Resistance, the more likely it becomes that he will respond with repressive measures against leftists and liberals ––banning our organizations, jailing those of us in the US, inciting violence, etc. It also becomes more likely that he will try to suspend civil liberties such as voting rights, freedom of speech, and rights of those charged with crimes. He may even take extraordinary measures to protect himself, and his family and friends, from prosecution and impeachment, such as trying to

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suspend parts of the Constitution and trying to put himself above the law by pardoning himself in advance of criminal charges. Trump frequently rails against the news media, for exposing his lies, and rails against the judicial system, for thwarting his policies. He could easily provoke a Constitutional crisis by jailing journalists or defying the courts. In our August 2016 editorial that warned against the extraordinary dangers of Trump and Trumpism, we wrote: [T]he upcoming election is fundamentally a referendum on civil liberties, freedom of the press, and separation of powers in the U.S. government. A Trump victory would be a decisive victory for those who regard these rights as expendable; and they will be expendable. The fact that the authoritarian strongman who rules over us came to power “democratically,” and the fact that a majority of voters effectively endorsed his plans, would be used to legitimize the abrogation of more than two centuries of bourgeois democratic rights. This remains all too true–except that Trump was elected by a minority whose votes counted for more than the votes of the majority in the Electoral College. His Justice Department is throwing the book at “violent” anti-Trump protesters, such as “antifas” who tossed garbage cans at a protest during his inauguration. Some of them have been indicted for felonies, as has one anti-racist Charlottesville demonstrator. And Trump continues to use rallies to incite his base to attack protesters and the media. His administration is surely gearing up for the possibility of jailing potential troublemakers, as evidenced by such measures as forcing DreamHost, a web-hosting company, to turn over data from a protest website; demanding that states turn over voters’ personal information to the federal government; and giving military weapons to urban police departments. The latter two actions are primarily aimed at suppressing the Black and Latino vote and any uprisings, but the measures are also part of unprecedented federal data-gathering and militarization of the police that may enable Trump to pre-empt nascent rebellions from the left and help those on the right. At an August 22 “campaign rally”—three years before the next presidential campaign––Trump launched into another virulent denunciation of the “lying press” (a literal translation of the German Nazi epithet Lügenpresse). The purpose of Trump's continual attacks on the media is not only to discredit the now daily exposés of his lies and illegal actions. These attacks are also a dangerous assault on the freedom of the press. Furthermore, if Mueller issues an indictment of Trump, or even a report detailing his criminal, possibly treasonous, activity, these attacks will have conditioned Trump's supporters to reject Mueller's findings, to embrace Trump's “alternative facts” instead, and to rise up to protect him. Yet, despite everything that has already taken place during Trump’s presidency, it may still seem to some that we are caught up in, or whipping up, “hysteria.” It is true that there has not been a sweeping crackdown against leftists––yet. This can give rise to the illusion that the left is safe

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under this presidency (even if the undocumented, people of color, and other minorities are not). However, in light of the many warning signs that scream out at us, the relative absence of repression to date actually means only that the contradictions have not yet reached the point where Trump feels threatened enough, or, conversely, thinks his hold on power is secure enough, to mount a full-scale strike against civil rights and liberties. We note that a great many Jews in Nazi Germany initially pooh-poohed warnings about the dangers of Hitler’s regime. Those who have criticized MHI for our critical defense of liberal democracy do so from a privileged position. They are not the Black people being shot by cops, the immigrants being deported, or other “collateral damage” that this so-called “left” considers an acceptable price to pay for Trumpism’s challenge to the “neoliberal” status quo. Varieties of “Leftist” Accommodation to Trumpism, and the Marxist-Humanist Alternative A great many factors combined to hand Trump the presidency. A relatively small one, but one that may have been decisive in the election and may be decisive in the future, was accommodation to Trumpism among parts of the “left.” One variant of soft-on-Trump “leftism” stems from the attitude that one should practice politics that make one feel good, without regard to its effect. Such people “righteously” refused to vote in a way that would have maximized the likelihood of Trump’s defeat, even in swing states that can—and did—decide the presidency. The number of votes cast for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in each of the three states that proved to be pivotal to Trump’s ElectoralCollege victory (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) exceeded his margin of victory. In addition, an unknown number of people chose not to vote at all, taking to heart the message–– emanating from Stein and many supporters of Bernie Sanders––that Hillary Clinton was as bad as or worse than Trump. We are just now beginning to learn the extent to which the Putin regime fomented such sentiments through exploitation of social media. Other destructive politics arose from a single-minded, narrow anti-neoliberal “leftism” which insisted that neoliberalism is a greater threat to humanity than proto-fascism.3 In an interview with WGBH during the election season, Stein went so far as to declare that “[t]he answer to neofascism is stopping neoliberalism. Putting another Clinton in the White House will fan the flames of this right-wing extremism.” As one commentator shrewdly noted, her plan was to stop Trump by electing him president! Yet, despite the horrors of Trumpism we have experienced thus far, not to mention those that lie in wait, the notion that neoliberalism is a greater danger than Trumpism doggedly hangs on. Glen Ford, editor of Black Agenda Report, as well as other “deep state” and conspiracy theorists, touted this line in June of this year, at the Left Forum in

By anti-neoliberal “leftism,” we do not mean opposition to neoliberalism—which no one on the left supports—but tendencies that oppose neoliberalism while shirking from opposition to capitalism in all of its forms, especially tendencies that seek to make common cause with the far right, celebrate the rising popularity of reactionary alternatives to neoliberalism as a progressive blow struck by the working class, and/or regard neoliberalism as the main enemy. 3

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New York City. (An MHI-sponsored Left Forum panel, Confronting “Anti-Neoliberal Left” Collaboration with Trumpism and the Far Right, put forward a diametrically opposed position.) Another attitude that contributed to soft-on-Trump “leftism” was the “after Trump, our turn” view. Actress and left activist Susan Sarandon, a Sanders supporter who later endorsed Stein, expressed this attitude as follows. “Some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately. If he gets in, then things will really explode.” Of course, the “after Trump, our turn” attitude is only an update of the “after Hitler, our turn” thinking of the German Communist Party of the 1930s (see note 9 below). It seems that those who will not learn from history are dooming the rest of us to repeat it. And there were other destructive attitudes that fueled softness toward Trump within the “left.” There were Putinites, and the barely-distinguishable “anti-imperialists” who preferred Trump in order to enhance Putin’s power and thereby weaken the power of the US. There were those who wanted nothing more than to punish the Democratic Party––irrespective of the consequences for the people of the US and the rest of the world––after their effort to take over the party failed. Finally, there were some nihilists who just wanted to “burn it all down.” What all of these currents have in common is that they either downplayed the enormity of the threat that Trumpism poses or did not care enough about that threat. They therefore did not feel the need to act in a principled and effective way in a bourgeois election. Instead, they engaged in play-acting at revolution, casting pointless and self-indulgent votes at the ballot box that benefited the forces of reaction. We are proud that we bought into none of this. MHI warned against “The Extraordinary Dangers of Trump and Trumpism” before the election, in our August 2016 editorial. We were mocked and denounced for that editorial and for our statements that followed. Yet nearly everything we warned about has already come to pass. We are not trying to score points against our soft-on-Trump critics by telling them “we told you so.” The point is that those who helped enable Trump’s victory can still change their ways, and acknowledgment of wrongdoing is a precondition for real change. Otherwise, the best we will see from them is a change in their line, not the needed re-evaluation of everything––all of their political positions and political aims––that would allow them to identify the underlying reasons why they were so disastrously wrong. And, in the meantime, publicly holding them accountable for the consequences of their actions helps to prevent others from coming under their influence. But the crucial point is not the mere fact that they were wrong while we were right. To put it bluntly, it did not take great insight to “predict” that Trump would do the things he said he would do! The crucial point is to understand why we were able to “predict” this when they were not. It did not take great skill on our part to reject the many rationalizations for “waiting and seeing” what Trump might do, or for giving him “the benefit of the doubt.” MHI was able to see what was coming because “[w]e have no interests separate and apart from” the interests of “working people and freedom movements of African-Americans and other minorities, women, youth, and all those around the world who are struggling for self-determination.” Consequently, we were not burdened by a desire to spin events with the aim of capitalizing on them to advance the

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special interests of our organization or our program for action. We saw what was coming because we analyze trends and take action on the basis of principles derived from Marx’s philosophy of revolution. This philosophy looks to the independent, emancipatory self-activity of the masses and a philosophy of human liberation as the motive forces for social change. It does not regard any party, movement, or program that allegedly “represents” the masses as the motive force for social change. It rejects, as substitutionist, all notions that the interests of a particular party, movement, or program are tantamount to the interests of humanity. When such self-serving elitism is not allowed to cloud one’s understanding of Trump and Trumpism, their retrogressive trajectory has been palpably clear from the start. Of course, saying “we told you so” is not a sufficient response to the enormity of the threat that Trumpism poses. In subsequent sections of these Perspectives, we therefore discuss the Resistance and how to combat white nationalism in the tradition of Marx, as well as left populism and “post-truth” politics.

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Part II THE RESISTANCE: A PERMANENT STATE OF REVOLT AGAINST TRUMPISM

The Resistance––the groundswell of grassroots activism in opposition to the presidential candidacy and subsequent election of Trump––has been phenomenal. MHI has reported on some of the many protests on our website. The protests have dealt with a huge range of subjects. Even Trump’s very presence at home and abroad incites oppositional demonstrations. This opposition, expressed by millions of people across the US, is the principal reason why Trump has not yet done even more harm than he has done to date, and the principal reason why his grip on power appears to be weakening. The Resistance has stayed Trump and Congress’ hands through its massive, interracial, intergenerational, multi-gender protests, which have taken many forms.4 The protests have been continuous. This permanent state of revolt across the US underlines the Resistance movement’s firm and indefatigable commitment to get rid of Trump, not to reform him. This was already becoming clear on Day 1 of his presidency. Mass resistance to Trump and Trumpism erupted the day after his inauguration, in the form of Women’s Marches that were the largest single-day protest in US history. As we said at the time, they represented a clarion cry “[t]hroughout the country and around the world …. [B]etween three-and-a-half and five million people served notice to [Trump] and his government that we will not sit idly by as he tries to take away our rights, freedoms, and well-being.” The most noteworthy feature of the Women’s Marches was that they “opposed not just one facet of Trumpism; they opposed it in its totality. … [They] took the unprecedented action of rising up spontaneously against this President, this

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A partial list of the subjects of protests includes immigration; racial justice and white supremacy; gender discrimination; healthcare reform; US warmongering on the Korean peninsula; climate change, science, and truth; collusion with Russia; Trump’s support for Turkey’s Erdogan; and freedom of the press. The protesters have come from wide-ranging sections of society, including women; African-Americans, Latinos, and other people of color; LGBTQ people; workers; youth; children and their families; the elderly; those with additional support needs; and immigrants. The forms of protest include demonstrations; sit-ins in Congress, meetings, and airports; emails and letters; phone calls; consumer boycotts; football players “taking a knee”; crowds massing and shouting to prevent “alt-right” speakers on campuses; and more. There have been public “die-ins,” slo-mo People’s Motorcades, and ironic “sponsor a Nazi” marches. Protesters have dressed up as Margaret Atwood’s ‘Handmaids’ and environmentalists have lit up public buildings in green. Graffiti and wall projections have satirized Trump, “RESIST” has been spelled out on the ground for aerial impact, and a giant “Trump Chicken” was inflated within sight of the White House. 11

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government, on its very first day, in opposition not just to some specific policy or action, but to Trump and Trumpism themselves.” Although the Resistance is naturally centered in and largest in the US, the people of America are also receiving a good deal of solidarity from abroad. To this day, Trump is not prepared to visit the UK, a supposed special ally, for fear of facing humiliating public protests. His visits to other countries are consistently met with public opposition, and the masses in many countries continue to petition their politicians to stand up to Trump’s sexist, racist, xenophobic agenda, whether or not they are facing an imminent visit from him. “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA” is being chanted across Europe, and in South Korea during his visit there. Resistance to this American president is global.

Leading Edge of the Resistance Also Challenges the Democratic Party The soft-on-Trump “left” has persistently tried to dismiss the Resistance, and criticize support for it and our recognition of its importance, by claiming that it is nothing but a tool or project of the Democratic Party. We dare such critics to explain the challenge to the Democrats that has emerged within the Resistance. Consider, for example, what took place after Trump’s September announcement that he was terminating the DACA program, which defers the deportation of 800,000 young people (“Dreamers”), mostly Mexicans and Central Americans, who were brought into the US illegally as children. Reaction to Trump’s termination of the program was swift. Marches, hunger-strikes, pickets, and one-day general strikes were surprisingly successful in building support for the Dreamers’ cause. This impelled the Democrats in Congress to intervene. They negotiated with Trump in an attempt to save DACA in return for granting him greatly increased border security. But the DACA youth made it clear that they will not permit the Democratic Party to control or compromise their demands. On September 18, Dreamers shut down a news conference called by Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi to announce her proposed DACA replacement bill. The Dreamers protested because the proposed bill protected only them, not undocumented immigrants who came to the US as adults. During Pelosi’s nationally-televised news conference, they shouted her down: “Democrats are not the Resistance [to] Trump. We are.” ‘We are not your bargaining chip.” "Fight for all 11 million." “All of us or none of us.” This protest is proof-positive that the Resistance is not a tool or project of the Democratic Party. (The Resistance certainly does include a great many people who vote for Democrats––given the current state of US politics, a progressive mass movement without Democratic voters is an impossibility––as well as some people with roles in party institutions, but that is another matter.) The protesters understood that the deal congressional Democrats were trying to strike with 12

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Trump was meant to serve the interests of politicos, not ordinary people, and that it was using them as bargaining chips. Nonetheless, and in marked contrast to the soft-on-Trump “left,” they identified themselves with the Resistance. In this way, they struck an important blow to maintain the independence of the Resistance from bourgeois politicians.

Saving Health Care Four times over the summer and fall, the Resistance stopped the abolition of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress tried to ram through Congress. Through continuous protests, both in the halls and offices of Congress and in the politicians’ home districts, women, the elderly, and the sick and disabled forced some of their representatives to back down from their reactionary promises to “repeal and replace Obamacare” and thereby eliminate the healthcare insurance of 20 million or more people. It has been remarkable to watch groups of ordinary people jamming “town hall” meetings, and chasing their Congresspeople down the block after they have cancelled such meetings or refused to respond to questions that were asked during them. It has been heart-breaking to hear the testimonials of people who will literally die if they lose their health insurance, and to see the police grabbing disabled sitters-in, yanking them out of their wheelchairs, and forcibly removing them from the US Capitol. From the moment when Trump took his first steps to repeal the ACA, people across the US began creatively and angrily protesting. Numerous different communities and grassroots groups came together to demand that their voices be heard, and that their interests be represented and acted upon. They knew the devastating impact the proposed repeal would have had, and they articulated their opposition to it in no uncertain terms. Ordinary people took charge of coordinating campaigns and they successfully flooded phone lines and offices of elected representatives to demand that they represent their constituents and vote against repeal. People lined the streets––from Brooklyn to San Diego––in public “Die-Ins,” holding tombstone props listing causes of death, contrasting the horrific reality of having to choose between paying rent or medical bills, and stating that “repeal and replace” was meant to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Zombie protests in Houston mocked Trump’s refusal to kill the bill, while highlighting the life-and-death nature of this issue. When this organic and creative campaign was countered by deplorable instances of police officers manhandling disabled peaceful protesters, those viewing the news reports at home were shocked. All this ultimately forced the hands of a few Republican senators who, on multiple occasions, cast decisive votes against repealing and replacing the ACA. The various forms of protest showed the determination of ordinary people to defy Trump’s agenda. They also showed that tens of millions of Americans are reaching for a different society, a society in which the interests of ordinary people come before the interests of those who dare to rule us, a society in which healthcare for all is a right.

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The Struggle Against Racism and White Supremacy A further feature of the Resistance is widespread recognition of the white-supremacist agenda behind Trump’s presidency, and a unanimous commitment to fight this. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) campaign that began four years ago, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, was the first to call out President Trump for being a white supremacist. Since then, there has been some discussion about changes in the tactics and focus of the BLM movement, but what is indisputable is that its anti-racist agenda has converged with that of the Resistance movement, with both finding common ground in opposition to Trump. As we noted in our August 2017 editorial, awareness of white supremacism has increased and has brought an added dimension to the Resistance. Every new initiative of Trump’s in this area–– his appointment of Breitbart’s Steve Bannon as his Chief Strategist, his attempted imposition of the infamous “Muslim ban” a week after taking office, his never-ending “promises” to build a wall along the US- Mexico border, his attacks against the BLM and even against football players who “take a knee” to protest racial injustice, his defense of the armed white supremacists who terrorized Charlottesville, his intentional neglect of the humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico–– each one of these moves brings forth greater recognition of his white-supremacist agenda and greater opposition to it. When Trump responded to the murder in Charlottesville of anti-fascist protestor Heather Heyer by suggesting that Neo-Nazis and anti-fascist protestors were equally bad, about 700 solidarity events were held in protest during the weeks that followed. There were protests against police murders and harassment of Black men and women, against judicial systems that never convict white cops for killing Black people, against monuments to the Confederacy and to racists and misogynists, against lack of representation on the local level, as well as against voter suppression by the states. All of these things are now under fire daily; and people are marching, marching, marching. Since the Charlottesville massacre, white supremacists have been emboldened by the publicity they received, Trump’s indirect support, and the growth of their organizations. They have expanded their rallies and speeches around the country. But everywhere they go, they have been met by protesters who invariably outnumber them. There are marches of antifa, and Jews, and mothers with babies in hand. Anti-racists are also engaged in identifying and outing white supremacists, causing some to lose their jobs or to be rejected by their families. They have also had some successes in their efforts to shut down white-supremacist websites and publications. Marches against police murders of Black youth continue unabated all over the country. St. Louis has experienced nightly marches against police violence for the past two months, ever since the acquittal of a white former policeman who fatally shot an African-American man. The protesters aim to disrupt the city’s economy in order to bring attention to its institutional racism. They have paralyzed the city at night for weeks, and have suffered hundreds of arrests. Women’s Movements in the Forefront One notable feature of the Resistance is that women, and especially women of color, dominate the field in intensive, continual, and creative protesting. They know that Trumpism is a threat to 14

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women’s lives and women’s bodies in particular. During the 2016 US election campaign, momentum was already gathering against “Trump the misogynist.” Women’s organizations have continued to be in the forefront of the Resistance, and women have been among the leadership of every kind of anti-Trump action.5 Women of color have been leaders in all the protest movements against Trump, from BLM to women’s health issues. Issues of unequal pay and advancement were raised by women at the March 8 (International Women’s Day) march in midtown Manhattan, as well as at the union and immigrant-dominated march downtown later in the day. And Trump’s misogyny has enraged women, bringing many who had never protested before out into the streets, carrying signs saying “Pussy Grabs Back,” in most every kind of protest. The National Organization for Women (NOW) has been consistently speaking out and marching for every particular demand of the Resistance. Recently, it has sponsored fascinating discussions investigating the close relationship between white nationalism and misogyny. After more than nine months of street protests, a Women’s Convention, organized by the multiracial leaders of the January 21 Women’s Marches, was held in Detroit at the end of October. Four thousand women attended to discuss defeating Trumpites at the ballot box in 2018, running for political office, fighting sexual harassment and rape, and many other subjects. Despite a $295 entrance fee, one apparent aim of the organizers was to appeal to minority and poor women in particular, in order to help overcome the perception that feminism is “bourgeois” and to foster unity among all the anti-Trump movements. Tamika Mallory, one of the organizers of the Convention, implored participants to practice a feminism that unites women across issues of ethnicity, religion, race, gender, and economic status, and to bring change to their local communities. She said, “If your feminism is the difference between Bernie and Hillary [Clinton], it does not represent me. ... I want to know what you are doing on the ground in your community. Who have you saved? Who have you lifted?” Congresswoman Maxine Waters was another featured speaker. She concluded her talk “by leading a spirited chant of ‘Impeach 45’ aimed at Trump.”

New and Old Organizations Flourish Hundreds of new organizations have sprung up as part of the Resistance. Taking its name from the US Pledge of Allegiance, “Indivisible” was established by former Democratic congressional staff members. Its mission is to “resist the Trump Agenda.” It produces informational material and offers advice––drawing on lessons learned from the “Tea Party” (a recent right-wing predecessor of Trumpism)––on how to stop Trump from implementing his agenda by targeting the members of Congress in one's local area. It also functions as a clearinghouse to publicize affiliated local groups and their activities, and to facilitate their communication with one another. See our editorial on the Women’s Marches and many other articles in our web journal, With Sober Senses. 5

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But Indivisible does not set an agenda for these affiliated groups, much less for the Resistance as a whole. Already well-established civil-rights and civil-liberties groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center, have attracted millions of dollars in contributions since Trump was elected and are actively engaged in opposing unlawful aspects of his agenda.

New Developments Rapid development in the level and scope of Resistance activities goes hand in hand with a development in the spirit and substance of its activities themselves. Encouraged by successes, such as halting the repeal of the ACA, people are developing a keen awareness of the power of collective action. The understanding that people need to speak for themselves is an emerging theme that feeds the independence of the movement. Every time someone picked up a phone to call their senator, they were saying that their voice can make a difference. As this collective swell of voices began articulating ideas about what repeal of the ACA meant to them, we witnessed a development of the ideas within, and the creativity of, the Resistance movement. The shutting down of Pelosi’s news conference by undocumented youth that we discussed above was another expression of the power of people speaking for themselves. These grassroots activists succeeded in articulating an inclusive humanist agenda for migrants’ rights to a nationwide audience. There is indisputable evidence of the intermerging of issues within the Resistance movement. We saw this first on the Women’s Marches back in January, as men, transgendered people, and people of color marched hand in hand, and we see it repeatedly in the cross-section of protesters fighting the repeal of the ACA, protesting immigration practices, and confronting neo-Nazi marches on campuses across the US. The most significant new intermerging is the convergence of anti-racist and Resistance movements that we discussed above. This is a new and all-too-rare blow to the racism that remains the critical obstacle to the unification and forward movement of the country’s forces for freedom.

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Part III ECONOMIC MYTHOLOGY OF THE LEFT-POPULIST ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM

The ideological crisis that began at the start of the Great Recession continues to unfold. The crisis laid bare the inability of mainstream political thinkers and parties to solve or even explain the crisis. In the US, both Democratic and Republican parties are in open crisis, challenged by the emergence of populist factions that reject the ideas and tactics that their parties have pursued for decades. Trump and his white-nationalist base represent a creeping fascism which seeks to destroy democracy and is blatantly anti-humanist in its attacks on science, equality, reason, and freedom. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders’ “Our Revolution” sees an opening for the reconstitution of a left economic populism that harkens back to the social democracies of yesteryear. In Europe, similar movements are afoot, spurred on, in part, by the ideological fallout from the Great Recession. Radical-right populists have made significant electoral gains all across the European continent, advancing an anti-immigrant and anti-European-Union (EU) politics that rails against “establishment elites.” Many of these parties have ties to fascist movements. Meanwhile, figures on the left like Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK have advanced a left-populist counterattack with many similarities to the economic populism of the US. Corbyn in particular has had notable success. He not only succeeded in taking control of the Labour Party and shepherding it to a defeat in the 2017 elections that was considerably narrower than had been expected. He has also succeeded in drawing much of the British left and many youth into the party and rekindling enthusiasm within it. The new-found support for Labour within much of the left has taken place despite the fact that there are serious splits in the party over the country’s impending exit from the EU and despite the narrow nationalism of its current Manifesto (“a Labour government will put the national interest first”). The thirst on the left for electoral success and a left-populist alternative to neoliberalism has largely crowded out concern for the effects of Brexit on workers’ rights, human rights, and divisions between native and immigrant workers. While the analysis in this part of our Perspectives focuses on the US case, many of its arguments should shed light on developments across the pond. The developments sketched above should be understood within the context of a global economy that has never rebounded strongly from the Great Recession. Although the US unemployment rate has fallen from its high of 10% in 2009 to 4.3% in 2017, it would be a mistake to take this as an indicator of a thorough recovery, because the unemployment rate fails to count as unemployed those who have stopped looking for work. The US labor-force participation rate––

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the percentage of the adult population that is either working or actively looking for work––has not recovered at all, falling from 66% in 2007 to 62%, where it has hovered for the past 3 years. The employment-population ratio––the percentage of the adult population that is working––has had an anemic recovery.6 These figures suggest that high unemployment remains a significant problem for the US economy. Furthermore, the share of workers who hold precarious jobs (the “precariat”) has risen as self-employment and the “gig-economy” have expanded, and a large percentage of new job growth is in low-wage sectors. These trends suggest that the low unemployment rate disguises an underlying malaise that continues to afflict many parts of the working class. The ideological crisis of capitalism, combined with continued economic precariousness, opens the door for economic-populist programs, which harken back to the postwar economic boom of the 1940s and 1950s, and promise that proper state intervention into the economy can bring about a return to boom conditions. In addition, some on the left believe that economic populism is the only way to fight Trumpism. They argue not only that a left alternative to Trumpism must stand for something, but also that the something it stands for should be an economic-populist program that can appeal to parts of Trump’s base by addressing its “economic distress” (an alleged fact that will be discussed later in these Perspectives). A significant number of the “Sandernistas” (Bernie Sanders supporters) are downwardly mobile, college-educated young people who have emerged from college saddled with debt only to face a job market significantly bleaker than their parents faced a generation earlier. This has made for a new generation of young “radicalized” people who are attracted to the Sanders narrative, especially as populist leaders have taken on the cause of student debt. This part of the leftpopulist base is complex in the sense that it combines the unfulfilled expectations of a highlyeducated and, on the whole, relatively well-off segment of society with a desire for some sort of systematic social change and a break with the status quo. The demographics of this base help to account for certain aspects of the Sandernista ideology, such as the focus on student debt and health care––issues which are of a material interest to its base––and the desire for redistributionist politics that do not threaten the capitalist mode of production. The packaging of old, reformist ideas as “revolutionary” is a particularly cynical aspect of the populist marketing campaign that has made the Sanders brand so attractive to young people looking for a political identity. Left and right populists share a conviction that the status quo must be overthrown, and a deep suspicion of elites and establishment politicians. Right populists tap into a long US tradition of white nationalism and authoritarianism. It is a political current that is anti-democratic and antihumanist. As we discuss in a later part of these Perspectives, while Trump’s election campaign contained some economic ideas (protectionism, lowering taxes, repealing the Affordable Care Act, etc.), it was his naked racism and authoritarianism that galvanized his base. This dynamic has continued into the present as his base continues to maintain its loyalty to Trump despite the fact that he has failed to follow through on any of his economic promises. Instead, loyalty is maintained through Trump’s attacks on internal and external enemies, much in the same way that Nazism maintained its loyal base. 6

The data are from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 18

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Left populists are vying for space within the larger anti-Trump Resistance. Left economic populism, which seeks to give the Resistance a cohesion by prioritizing social-democratic economic reforms, does not necessarily appear in a pure form. Populist organizations, like Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, often combine populist economic proposals with other issues, like criminal justice reform or LGBTQ rights. Nevertheless, economic populists contend that it is economic populism alone that can create a broad electoral base by appealing to economic interests across the political divide. This creates a conflict when economic appeals to so-called “white working class”7 Trump voters require left populists to downplay or ignore anti-racist, anti-sexist, and pro-immigrant politics. For instance, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said of Trump’s position on immigration that he was “actually pleasantly surprised to hear him say that the system is broken and [the problem is] legal immigration as well as undocumented people. … This is the first time you heard the president talk about legal immigration being used to drive down wages. We’ve been saying that for a long time.” The AFL-CIO’s stance seems to be to resist Trump on specific issues that affect union organization but not to offer blanket resistance or speak out against racism within the union membership. Meanwhile, the Working Families Party, part of a coalition of union-based organizations that attempt to resist Trump while also advocating a leftward turn in AFL-CIO politics, goes door to door with flyers that only advertise economic policies like universal health care, even though its platform actually includes support for immigrants and BLM. The fact is that there are a great many Trump voters within the AFL-CIO, especially in the building trades. Leftists in the union movement do not know how to go about confronting the racism and the proto-fascist element within their own organizations, and so they hope that pure economism will create the social cohesion they need to advance a pro-worker agenda. By taking such a tactical stand, they are playing a dangerous game. As we discussed in Part II of these Perspectives, racism and sexism have done more to divide the US working class than anything else. By not prioritizing anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-fascism, unions stand on the slippery slope of appealing to nativist, nationalist, and racist ideas in an attempt to hold onto a broad constituency. Another reason to reject left economic populism is that it is based on ideas that are incoherent and incorrect. On close examination, it exists in a sort of mythological space. 7

Because the US working class is multiracial, multiethnic, and multinational––40% of it consists of Latinos, Blacks, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans—the term “white working class,” which suggests that the working class is white, is misleading at best. And use of this term in current political discourse is divisive and racist; it takes for granted that the interests of white workers differ from those of other workers. That assumption is antithetical to the causes of proletarian internationalism, national liberation, and the freedom of every individual. In addition, the term “white working class” is typically applied to whites without college degrees. This is a misuse of the concept of working class, since businesspeople and other nonworkers without college degrees get included in the working class, while millions of proletarians who have at least four-year college degrees are excluded. For example, 11.4 million of the 52.4 million US employees with at least four-year college degrees––more than one-fifth of the total–– are teachers (other than administrators) or healthcare workers (other than doctors and dentists). Another 9.2 million are sales or office workers (other than supervisors). 19

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The Mythology of the Populist Left

Neoliberalism as a Political Project For some time now, left thinking has characterized our age as a neoliberal age, blaming all of the economic ills of our time, from rising inequality to the Great Recession, on neoliberal policies. This characterization is based on an assumption that the development of capitalism is shaped by political will and by the ideas behind this political will. It is reinforced by a further myth, that the New Deal was responsible for the US economy’s recovery from the Great Depression. Yet the economic trends associated with neoliberalism (sluggish growth, global financial instability, rising debt burdens, decline in compensation growth, rising inequality, and decline in infrastructure spending) all began prior to the ascension of Reagan, Thatcher, and other neoliberals, while Keynesians were running the show. It is more plausible to understand these trends as an expression of the economic crisis of the 1970s and the failure of global capitalism to fully recover from that crisis. And it was the massive destruction of capital that occurred during the Great Depression that set the stage for recovery, not the New Deal.8 To blame individuals or neoliberal philosophy for the secular tendencies of global capitalism over the last 40 years is to ascribe superhuman powers to individuals––the power to impose their will on a mode of production that has its own autonomous laws that operate behind the backs of producers and politicians. Such voluntarism stands in opposition to Marx’s method of treating economic actors as personifications of economic categories. Today, capitalism seems to limp along uncertainly after the Great Recession. It is not clear that any massive economic expansion on the scale of the postwar boom is in sight. This means that it is unlikely that the massive social spending proposed by left populists can be achieved without harming capital and thus the economy. In addition, the capitalist class is not faced with a militant, organized labor movement that is forcing it to offer the carrot of social democracy as a concession. Ford’s $5 Day An iconic tidbit of left mythology is the story of Henry Ford who, it is said, brilliantly discovered that by paying his workers higher wages, $5 a day, they could buy more Ford automobiles, thus boosting the economic fortunes of the Ford Motor Company. This legend is used to advocate the theory that raising wages is good for the capitalist economy because it boosts consumer demand and therefore profits. However, Ford actually raised wages to attract a stable workforce, not to sell more cars. Indeed, it is impossible to boost profits by paying your workers more. Raising

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Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession. London: Pluto Press, 2012, pp. 23–24, 48–73, 76–77. 20

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wages cuts into profits, even if those workers go out and buy back their own product with their wages.9 The logic behind the Ford parable is one of class compromise. The parable furthers the false notion that what is good for workers is good for capitalism. It fits perfectly into the antineoliberal world view that sees contemporary problems as the result of badly managed capitalism rather than capitalism per se.

Ideal Deal The calls for a new left populism often display an overly romantic and optimistic picture of postwar America. They harken back to the “glory days” of American prosperity in the postwar boom of the mid-20th century, when the US had a relatively robust welfare state, wages rose, policy makers saw a big role for the state in the maintenance of capitalist growth and regulation of class conflict, the state invested in big infrastructure projects, and the US had a strong manufacturing base that employed many people. The commonly repeated tale of prosperity and upward mobility is primarily a tale of prosperity for unionized male workers in certain industries, not for the working class as a whole. Further, this subset of workers paid for their rising fortunes by sacrificing their political power as the union movement ossified into a bureaucratic adjunct to the Democratic Party. Left populists also seem to conveniently forget that the macroeconomic philosophy of the postwar boom––the Keynesian trade-off between employment and inflation––came into contradiction with reality in the 1970s, when the economy experienced rising unemployment and rising inflation simultaneously. This serious failure of both theory and policy is often ignored and unaccounted for in the contemporary left enthusiasm for the miraculous, stabilizing power of state intervention in the economy.

Off-shoring as the Big Job Killer Bernie Sanders’ and others’ plan to reverse free-trade agreements in order to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. Trump promised this too. However, while jobs certainly have left the US as companies have sought out cheaper labor overseas, automation has been the

If Ford workers receive $1 million more, the company’s profit is reduced by $1 million unless the workers go out and buy more Fords. If they spend all of their wage increase on extra Fords, it might seem that the company fully recoups the profit it has lost. However, to produce the extra cars, Ford has to buy extra non-labor inputs, so its net reduction in profit will be equal to the cost of these extra inputs. If only some of the extra wages are spent on extra Fords, the net reduction in its profit will be equal to the cost of the extra non-labor inputs needed to produce the extra Fords plus the portion of the wage increase that its workers don’t spend on extra Fords. Thus the company suffers a drop in profit in all possible cases. 9

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biggest job killer over the long run. Many of the jobs that left for overseas would have eventually been replaced by robots anyway. The left-populist instinct to blame neoliberal free-trade policy contains many dangers. For one, it potentially divides the international working class, as workers of different countries compete to be exploited by capital, all the while ignoring the struggle between labor and capital (in the form of machines) in the workplace. It relies on nationalism and xenophobia, rather than workingclass solidarity, to mobilize a mass base. Finally, this anti-free-trade politics raises the question of whether the manufacturing jobs that came back to the US would really be jobs we want, and how long they would last before being taken over by robots.

Social Democracy is Left Politics Many hold the assumption that social-democratic politics are inherently leftist politics. Even those who criticize Sanders for being too reformist still often share the assumption that there is something essentially leftist about the social-democratic project he represents. Venture capitalist and self-described plutocrat Nick Hanauer gave a much better characterization of social democracy in a recent memo to his “Fellow Zillionaires”: if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. There we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: social democracy is there to save capitalism, not to fight it.

Political Implications We need to think critically about how to engage in the Resistance against Trumpism while also critically engaging with left populism. MHI is not a political party and it is not our role to take positions on every issue and platform. Rather, our role is to help in the development of thought that lays the ground for revolution. In this regard, there are some theoretical distinctions that we can make that can be helpful in framing how the Resistance relates to calls for a left economic populism. Fighting for Concessions vs. Claiming to Solve Capital’s Contradictions There is a difference between fighting for concessions from the capitalist class on the one hand, and campaigning to run the capitalist state better than the capitalists on the other. Leftists should not be involved in the impossible task of saving capitalism from its internal contradictions. This will only end badly––as was illustrated by Syriza’s humiliating capitulation to the EU, after having persuaded the Greek anti-austerity movement to leave the streets and channel its energy into electoral politics. The left should support workers’ struggles for concessions from the

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capitalist class, especially ones that make the working class stronger politically and contribute to its self-development. But it should never defend these struggles by invoking the false narrative that what is good for the working class is good for capitalism. Whether or not a particular concession, say state spending for health care, should be fought for at a particular place and time is not something that can be answered in the abstract. But what should be said is that it is wrong for the left to project the false idea that concessions which help the working class will be good for capitalism.

Voting vs. Supporting The anti-neoliberal aesthetic, especially among young Sandernistas, is such that many would rather allow Trump to be elected than to dirty their hands voting for a centrist neoliberal like Clinton. As the 2018 midterm elections approach in the US, we are bound to encounter the same discussions we encountered in 2016 when we wrote that the extraordinary dangers of Trump and Trumpism make it important for people to understand the difference between voting against Trump and supporting Clinton. “Supporting” constitutes a wider sphere of thinking and action than “voting” does. One can vote against Trumpism, even if that means voting for a centrist, without being in support of centrism.

Fighting Neoliberalism vs. Fighting Capitalism––including Proto- and Neo-Fascism Once one takes into consideration the foolhardy and dangerous nature of the left economicpopulist project, it becomes apparent how meaningless a gesture was made by those who abstained from voting for Clinton in order to purify themselves for the Bernie revolution. Convinced that building a left-populist political movement is more important than defeating fascism, many left populists now play a dangerous game. Some even seek common cause with Trump to the extent that he represents an attack on the neoliberal order. The possibility now exists that such sentiment may assist the rise of fascism. It has now become common even to see defenses of Trump coming from within the left, such as Chris Cutrone’s comment that “Anti-Trump-ism is the problem and obstacle, not Trump.” In last year’s US election and this year’s presidential election in France, strikingly large sections of the left refused to vote for the centrist, preferring to “go down with the boat.” Left intellectual Slavoj Žižek advised French voters to abstain from voting in that country’s second-round presidential election, arguing that “there is no real choice between [Emmanuel] Macron and [Marine] Le Pen,” i.e., between a neoliberal centrist and a neo-fascist. This thinking comes from those who view neoliberalism, rather than capitalism, as the enemy and who therefore prioritize fighting against neoliberalism over developing real anti-capitalist ideas.10 When ideas become tangled like this, when the line between right and left starts to blur, Like Jill Stein, whom we quoted above, and many others, Žižek argues that neoliberalism leads to fascism and that therefore Macron and Le Pen are essentially the same. Such an argument exactly mirrors the Comintern theory of “social fascism” prior to WWII, which argued 10

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it means that fascism is creeping into the political sphere. It is crucial to make distinctions that can help untangle this mess of ideas. One such distinction that we must project is that the critique of neoliberalism is a misplaced critique; it blames ideology and politics for the contradictions of capitalism. We also must make it clear that replacing neoliberalism with social democracy will not resolve these contradictions. And finally, we must make clear the extreme danger that fascist movements around the globe present. At the same time, we must reject the vulgar philosophizing of those who claim a false equivalence between all political forms of capitalist rule, whereupon neoliberalism or social democracy are regarded as just fascism in disguise, or as leading inevitably to fascism in accordance with some vulgar teleology. Capitalist states have taken many forms at different times in history and none of this history is pre-determined by the mode of production. There is nothing inevitable about the rise of fascism. It can be fought, and it must be fought.

Economic Populism is Not the Only Form of Left Politics There is an unchallenged preconception among some on the left: that every social issue can be reduced to an economic struggle and therefore that all left politics must begin with an economic platform. This is not the case. There are plenty of forms of political resistance to fascism that do not require an immediate economic platform. If we resist the call for economic populism, this does not mean that we undercut the ability of the left to engage in resistance in the here and now, holding out for the abolition of the capitalist mode of production in some distant future when conditions happen to be ripe. The Resistance is actively fighting for the rights of immigrants, fighting racism, and fighting against assaults on democracy. None of these fights requires a platform of economic reforms. In fact, the elevation of economic populism to the central position, as the key demand and focus of politics, is a potential threat to the fight against racism, sexism, and xenophobia in that it seeks to attract a proto-fascist base through an appeal to immediate self-interest rather than tackling the ideology of Trumpism head-on.

Ideas are Important At the center of the left-populist political vision is a popular leader who will seize the reins of the capitalist state on behalf of the masses. This reproduces the capitalist division between mental and manual labor in that the masses function only as bodies, only as numbers.

that social democracy led to fascism and that communist parties, like the Communist Party of Germany (CPG), should fight social democracy rather than fascism. The CPG followed this strategy until 1933 when Hitler came to power. Its entire membership was either killed or sent to the first Nazi concentration camps. 24

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Accordingly, as we will discuss further in the next part of these Perspectives, proponents of the new left populism seek to win adherents by appealing to popular superstitions and myths, and by offering easy answers in response to popular discontent. Left populism does not worry about the difficulty of delivering on its promises as long as they win new adherents with these promises. Above all else, this is what makes it populism. It is also the trait it has most in common with Trumpism. Bernie Sanders did not arrive at his platform and rhetoric through careful study of the history of 20th-century social democracy. Rather, he rose to popularity with a handful of soundbites that found an easy resonance among people. Although many economists argue that his economic plans are unrealistic and contain egregious mathematical errors, this does not phase his base. His base was already convinced, prior to examining the arguments, that he is correct. Yet, if left economic populists win elections but fail to deliver on their promises, right-wing populists will be in the wings, waiting to take over. This opportunistic relationship to ideas is everywhere in our culture, but it cannot form the basis for a real left project that aims to confront the central contradictions of our era and to posit a way out of them. Such a project requires the self-development of people, which in turn requires that they take ideas seriously and learn to think for themselves.

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Part IV COMBATTING “POST-TRUTH POLITICS,” IN PRACTICE AND IN THEORY

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth”––defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”––as their word of the year. The contemporary retreat from reason, objectivity, and truth is by no means a phenomenon limited to reactionary forces like Trump, the Putin regime, or the alt-right. Quite disturbingly, it extends to many on the left as well. Consider, for example, a piece by Chantal Mouffe supporting the “progressive left populism” of the French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Mouffe, who has had some influence on Spain’s Podemos party and is best known for her Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, written with the late Ernesto Laclau, contends that in order to “devise a left populism” it is necessary to “discard the dominant rationalist perspective in liberal-democratic political thinking and recognize the importance of common affects (what I call ‘passions’) in the formation of collective identities.” Moreover, she continues, “it is through … a collective will that results from the mobilization of the passions in defense of equality and social justice … that it will be possible to combat the xenophobic policies promoted by right-wing populism.” While Mouffe endeavors to substitute passion for reason, other leftist thinkers endeavor to substitute myth for reality in the struggle for social justice. A recent piece in Jacobin magazine, a publication with a growing influence within the US left, argues that “myths play a central role in people’s moral orientation” and that, as a corollary, “fact-checking,” deemed a hopelessly liberal enterprise, “does nothing to disabuse people of the myths that structure their worldviews.” Further, “liberal myths,” which are “weak” and face “crisis,” “cannot lead the struggle against Trump.” As such, the authors contend that “to fight this reactionary wave, we must construct our own reality, based on ideals and practices of solidarity and economic justice.”11 Fifteen years ago, a “senior adviser” to US President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl Rove) celebrated the exact same notion of constructing reality and contrasted it to what he disparagingly called “the reality-based community.” The embrace of unreason on the left must be fought head-on. Post-truth trends on the left present a danger to both the self-development and the self-activity of the working class and other forces of revolution. In another piece in Jacobin, “The Fallacy of Post-Truth,” the same authors maintain: “The people mourning the age of political truth belong to the extreme center. They are the technocrats and administrators who mistrust the experiences and suffering of regular people with as much fervor as the right-wing fringe.” 11

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The importance of battling post-truth politics becomes clear once we take seriously Marx’s understanding that only the working class can liberate the working class and MarxistHumanism’s stress on the fact that this requires that working people become fully-developed social individuals able to exercise the full “scope [of their] natural and acquired powers.” Posttruth politics is a direct impediment to the development of a clear understanding of our world and what is required to change it. Furthermore, while the emotional appeals and the like may prove useful to the left itself (for winning new followers or winning elections), such opportunism reproduces the familiar divisions in class society between mental and manual labor and between leaders and the led. For these reasons, post-truth thinking represents a real barrier to the selfdevelopment of the working class as an independent force for human liberation, and we need to wage an uncompromising battle against left populism that embraces post-truth politics.

The Vital Importance of the Fight for Truth and Reason We do not deny the importance of passions and emotions to human thought and action. No one ––not even the most fervent proponents of reason such as Plato and Hegel––denies this. We also recognize that it is typically easier to gain a hearing by means of emotional appeals than by means of evidence and reasoning. This is a deeply rooted fact; it is a product of human evolution. But this does not mean that we need to acquiesce in the face of post-truth politics: biology is not destiny, as the women’s liberation movement taught us. Indeed, in a world confronting imminent climate change and an upsurge of demagogic forms of populism, the destiny of the human race depends on our waging a fight against post-truth politics, and emerging victorious. In brief, the evolutionary basis of demagogy and other forms of unreason is that human brains (just like the brains of other animals) have evolved in a way that prioritizes the use of various mental “shortcuts” to make decisions and take action. As a result of subsequent evolution, we can instead base decisions and actions on complex reasoning processes, but we generally employ the mental shortcuts first and most frequently. Individuals with such brains had an evolutionary advantage, since reasoning takes a good deal of time and uses considerable mental resources, while reliance on these shortcuts enabled such individuals to draw conclusions, and take action, quickly and efficiently. These shortcuts were generally adequate to the circumstances within which our species evolved, which were neither socially nor technologically complex. Above all, our reliance on them enabled the human species to avoid extinction. For example, the individuals who survived long enough to reproduce were disproportionately those able to quickly run away from approaching predators, not those who began by mentally processing whether they had sufficient evidence to conclude that a predator was indeed approaching. We now live in societies that are vastly more socially and technologically complex. Yet the brain’s decision-making mechanisms that have emerged through evolution have not adapted to the changed circumstances. We are certainly able to employ reasoning processes, but the mental shortcuts continue to be the “defaults” we rely on to process information.

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However, these shortcuts are no longer adequate to protect us against the new threats to our survival that socially and technologically complex (i.e., capitalist) societies have created. Indeed, reliance on these shortcuts has itself become a major threat to the survival of the human species, as the millions of climate-change “sceptics” and followers of dangerous demagogues should make clear. We must fight post-truth politics as if our lives depend on it, because they do. We are at last compelled to face, with sober senses, our real conditions of life and our relations with our kind––not least, the real condition that truth and reason must play a crucially important role if we are to solve the pressing social and political problems of the modern age. MHI’s commitment to defending truth-telling and truth-seeking against “post-truth politics” is squarely in the tradition of Marx. In Capital, Marx praised economist David Ricardo’s public retraction of an incorrect theoretical claim he had made, calling it an example of “the scientific impartiality and love of truth characteristic of him” (see note 132 here). In an “Afterword” to the same book, Marx also severely castigated post-Ricardian economists for having allowed usefulness, expediency, and apologetics to displace truth-seeking as their primary objectives. The fact that “the class struggle … took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms,” he wrote, sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic. (The above examples could readily be supplemented with dozens more; Marx’s steadfast commitment to truth-telling and truth-seeking is obvious. Yet we unfortunately need to stress the obvious because of the recent popularity of efforts to attribute to Marx the opportunistic doctrine that the practical success of a proposition makes it true. The sole textual basis for this attribution is a misrepresentation of Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach. He wrote, “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking, in practice.” This statement is not about particular propositions. It is about “human thinking” as such. Marx was engaging with the Kantian question of whether human thought can grasp objective reality—arrive at “objective truth”—or only grasp reality as it appears to us. His statement has nothing to do with the claim that practical success makes a particular proposition true.) However, we cannot expect much help from the mainstream left in the battle for truth and reason. The post-truth sensibility that helped Trump win the US presidency is not a creation of the far right and new electronic-communications technologies alone. Much of the left has contributed to nurturing post-truth politics and needs to be held accountable. Philosophical trends on the left bear some responsibility, as we discuss below. Even apart from this, however, the standard practices of the left are to blame. Public meetings, conferences, podcasts, and journals of the left “tell it like it is” (i.e., validate the preconceived notions and prejudices of the faithful) and are replete with emotional appeals. Beyond very narrow confines,

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there is little debate, and almost no reasoned debate. There is very little fact-checking––and no theory-checking to speak of. And those who seek shelter in these left “bubbles” far too often regard truth-seeking and reasoned debate as threats. To be sure, the political and intellectual leaders of this left understand the importance of reason, at least instrumental reason, which helps them to make tactical and strategic decisions and promote their views effectively. The problem is that they “divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.” Reasoning and knowledge of truths are for them, but not for the faithful and certainly not for the unwashed masses. “Affective politics,” for which “the truth of a narrative isn't so much in its literal veracity as in its resonance and affective power,” is the way to win adherents and gain power. As we indicated above, MHI steadfastly opposes this vanguardist conception. The grounding of politics in emotional appeals may perhaps be sufficient to destroy the existing society. But it is a barrier to the creation of the new human society that needs to replace it––a society in which the “full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle” and in which “every cook shall govern.” Depriving people of access to truths, reasoned debate, and familiarity with conceptual thought is detrimental to their full development and their ability to govern themselves. Although we cannot count on the mainstream left to combat post-truth politics––and we especially cannot count on it to help clean up its own mess––it remains important to fight for truth and reason within the left. Many people, in the left as well as in the broader society, do not yet fully recognize that truth and reason are of crucial importance in the struggle for the survival of our species and the struggle for a new human society. Many do not fully recognize the techniques of persuasion that are used to manipulate them. We need to reach out to such people. Despite the lack of support that we expect from the mainstream left, we do have allies. On Earth Day (April 22), we joined about 40,000 others in New York City––and more than a million people in about 600 cities across the globe––in the March for Science. This was unprecedented, the first time “hundreds of thousands of people turn[ed] out to demand that truth be respected and employed.” On the same day, the “Pro-Truth Pledge” project was launched. Those who take the pledge commit to practices such as distinguishing between opinions and facts, asking people to retract false statements, and celebrating those who do so. A principal aim of the project is to pressure politicians and public figures to take the pledge, whereupon they can be held accountable by the pro-truth community for violating it. To date, close to 3000 people have taken the pledge. Bringing this and similar strategies into the left can help to combat post-truth politics within it.

Dialectical Reason as Counterweight to Post-Truth Epistemology Although the current embrace of unreason by many on the left should trigger alarm bells, the attitudes underlying it are hardly new. Epistemic relativism and social constructivism have been common in left thought for several decades now. Consider, for instance, the work of the

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economist Rick Wolff, perhaps the most prominent Marxist thinker in the United States. Since the 1980s, Wolff has advanced an Althusserian theory of “overdetermination,” in which “it is impossible to establish a definitive hierarchy of interpretations” and “it is not possible to establish ‘objective’ validity outside the frame of a particular analytical regime or project.” Thus, “the question of the choice between different theories or entry points involves not which is more accurate or true, but the consequences of choosing one rather than another.”12 (Wolff seems to be silent on the current post-truth climate.) A disdain for science has also been prominent in leftist thought for some time now. The postmodernist component of this disdain received attention in the “science wars” of the 1990s and the Sokal hoax. There is also an older, Romantic variant particularly prevalent in the ecology movement, like that found in the thought of eco-feminist Vandana Shiva. Left unreason also extends to a penchant for conspiracy theory; some recent examples include the 9/11 “Truth” movement, “false flag” theories, and the anti-Semitic conceptions of finance capital that were on display in the Occupy movement. As a good deal of popular commentary has observed, the new post-truth trend is firmly rooted in the influence of poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, including the work of late 20thcentury thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. The irony of the embrace of such putatively left-wing and liberal social theory by the alt-right and other forces of reaction has not been lost on these commentators. A New York Times opinion piece, for instance, notes that “Trump and Stephen K. Bannon probably don’t spend evenings poring over Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation or Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge,” but “parallels between Trump’s attacks on accepted knowledge and critical philosophy’s insistence that we interrogate truth claims suggest that not all assaults on the authority of facts are revolutionary.” Other commentators point to older philosophical roots, especially the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, who held that “there are no facts, only interpretations.”13 Figures ranging from Martin Heidegger and other intellectuals of Hitler’s Third Reich, such as political theorist Carl Schmitt, to the American Pragmatist thinker William James, have also been considered progenitors of the current post-truth trend. And there are even earlier progenitors. There is more than a whiff of today’s post-truth epistemology to be found in what Hegel identified as the “Third Attitude to Objectivity” (alternatively translated as the “Third Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity”) in his Smaller Logic. In our battle against today’s post-truth politics, MHI draws on Hegel’s discussion of the Third Attitude and the several commentaries on that discussion written by Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism. Indeed, our statement “The Self-Thinking Richard Wolff, “Toward a Poststructuralist Political Economy.” In J. K. Gibson Graham, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff, eds., Re/Presenting Class. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2001. 13 Time magazine’s April 3, 2017 cover, echoing Nietzsche’s statement about God, inquires, “Is Truth Dead?” 12

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Idea Does Not Mean You Thinking,” which we issued shortly after our organization was founded, helps to establish the objectivity of its reason for existence (raison d'être) by articulating the importance of organization for the “public process of demonstration and rigorous scrutiny” of ideas that reason and knowledge require. Marxist-Humanist Philosophy and Organization vs. Unmediated “Knowledge” Hegel’s account of the Third Attitude focused on the direct or immediate approach to knowledge of the Intuitionist thinker Friedrich Jacobi, a contemporary of his. It is an approach that rejects mediation––including proof, demonstration, and method––in favor of a direct or immediate knowledge. Hegel noted (para. 63 of the Smaller Logic) that Jacobi’s category of immediate knowledge includes “inspiration, the heart’s revelations, the truths implanted in man by nature, and also in particular, healthy reason or Common Sense, as it is called.” He likened this Attitude to the unmediated starting point of Cartesian philosophy: Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Descartes’ famed maxim, Hegel posited, “is the same doctrine as that the being, reality, and existence of the ‘Ego’ is immediately revealed to me in consciousness …. This inseparability [of thought and being] is the absolutely first and most certain knowledge, not mediated or demonstrated” (para. 76, emphasis added). Dunayevskaya, one of the few to have seriously explored Hegel’s presentation of the Three Attitudes to Objectivity, stressed that he focused on demonstration and proof. Throughout Hegel’s discussion of the Third Attitude, she noted, “the point … is on the necessity of proof” and “the whole attack is very, very deeply rooted against anything, whether Cartesian or Jacobi or Spinoza[,] that roots its philosophy in ‘unproved postulates, which it assumes to be unprovable’” (para. 62).”14 She also called attention to Hegel’s statements that philosophy “tolerates no mere assertions or conceits, and checks the free play of argumentative see-saw” (para. 77) because “all superstition or idolatry [would otherwise be] allowed to be truth” (para. 72). Dunayevskaya also focused on the issue of mediation in Hegel’s discussion of the Third Attitude. He contrasted Intuitionist philosophy, which Jacobi described as a “philosophy of faith,” to Christian faith. The latter, Hegel noted, “comprises in it an authority of the Church: but the faith of Jacobi’s philosophy has no other authority than that of a personal revelation.” Moreover, “Christian faith is a copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine” (para. 63). Thus, in addition to proof and demonstration, Hegel here identified two other mediations of knowledge, namely authority and a body of ideas (or system of knowledge). In her 1961 “Notes on the Logic from Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences,” Dunayevskaya observed: “Over and over again, Hegel lays stress on the necessity to prove what one claims, and the essence of proof is that something has developed of necessity in such and such a manner, that it has been through both a historic and a self-relationship which has moved it from what it was ‘in itself’ (implicitly), through a ‘for itself-ness’ (a process of mediation or development) to what it finally is ‘in and for itself’ (explicitly). Or put it yet another way, from potentiality to actuality, or the realization of all that is inherent in it.” 14

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But Dunayevskaya’s commentary identified yet another mediation that was implicit in his discussion: the Church itself, as an institution or organization that interprets and develops its principles. In a December 8, 1986 letter to George Armstrong Kelly, a Hegel scholar of some acclaim, Dunayevskaya noted that she now saw Hegel in “a new way”: “the dialectical relationship of principles (in this case the Christian doctrine) and the organization (the Church) are analyzed as if they were inseparables.” Dunayevskaya, of course, had no interest in Christian dogma; she was concerned, rather, with the relation of philosophy and organization. Viewing philosophy and organization as “inseparables,” she stressed the need for “organizational responsibility” for philosophy15––that is, the need for an organization to take responsibility for developing and projecting Marxist-Humanist philosophy. Inasmuch as the development of ideas requires proof and demonstration, a task that cannot be accomplished by individuals alone, there is a need for an organization to take responsibility to ensure that ideas are rigorously tested. Without the rigorous testing of ideas, there can be no forward development of Marxist-Humanist thought and there is a real danger of retrogression. At a fundamental level, then, organizational responsibility for philosophy means taking responsibility for ensuring that proof and demonstration are provided for ideas, both old and new. These arguments, developed in our 2009 statement on “The Self-Thinking Idea,” take on a new urgency in the current climate in which reason and truth face serious attack and appeals to emotion and personal belief, in lieu of rational argument and evidence, have become increasingly pervasive. Marx’s dialectic, as Dunayevskaya stressed, is not an applied science; it has to be recreated for every new period. This means that Marxist-Humanism is premised on the development of ideas. This makes a commitment to reason, objectivity, and truth an absolute necessity; and it demands that the pull of intuition, common sense, and personal belief be checked. Marxist-Humanism is also rooted in a rejection of vanguardism. Dunayevskaya’s 1953 letters on Hegel’s “Absolute Idea” and “Absolute Mind,” which she described as “the philosophic moment” of Marxist-Humanism, disclosed a dual movement of theory/practice––the movement from practice, which is itself a form of theory, and the movement from theory, reaching to philosophy. This dual movement is premised on a conception in which reason is not the privilege of intellectuals alone; it entails the self-development of both intellectuals and workers in tandem. Marx’s humanist conception of freedom is centered on the full and free development of the individual. His philosophy of revolution in permanence entails struggling against alienation in all its guises, including unreason. Thus, we repeat: the embrace of unreason on the left must be fought head-on. Hegel regarded the Third Attitude to Objectivity as “reactionary” (para. 76), a retrogression in the history of thought. The contemporary philosophical trends that have contributed to the embrace of unreason on the left represent a similar retrogression. Her December 8, 1986 letter to Kelly concluded: “In this way I see the dialectic flow in the third attitude to objectivity from a critique of the one-sidedness of the Intuitionalists to organizational responsibility.” 15

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Transcending the Limitations of Enlightenment Rationality and Capitalism In response to these trends, a number of popular commentators have called for a “return” to or a “rediscovery” of the Enlightenment. In the main, this shapes up as a sensible call for reason and truth in political discourse, a welcome antidote to postmodern fashions that would jettison the Enlightenment project wholesale. However, there are risks. There is the risk of papering over the contradictions of the Enlightenment, including racism, sexism, and the relation of the Enlightenment to capitalism. And there is the risk of overlooking Marx’s contribution, a new continent of thought, to the struggle for human freedom. For example, Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim argue in the pages of Jacobin that “if the Left wants to resist the alt-right’s growing power, it needs to return to the roots of Enlightenment rationality, which insists on the equality of all people and provides a strong theoretical basis for social transformation and universal emancipation.” They add, “from Descartes, Spinoza, and the French materialists to the French and Haitian revolutions to Hegel and Marx, we have a strain of thought that proceeds from an intelligible world to the full emancipation of humanity.” On the one hand, this is a salutary alternative to the social constructivism of their fellow Jacobin contributors, and its engagement with Hegel and Marx is more serious than that of other leftist commentators. On the other hand, it stops short of the heart of Hegel’s dialectic––absolute negativity, which Marx affirmed as “the moving and creating principle” (while also criticizing the dehumanized form it took in Hegel’s hands). In fact, Fluss and Frim’s return to the Enlightenment turns out to be “a return to Spinoza.” They promote a “Marxist Spinozism,” which endeavors to rescue Spinoza from Deleuze and Althusser. They never touch on Hegel’s famed critique of Spinoza’s concept of Substance: “In my view … everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.” By Subject, Hegel meant that which has movement and self-movement. Self-movement is the product, not of contradictions between things, but contradictions within things, and it was this that Hegel found to be absent from Spinoza’s concept. “Spinoza stops short at negation as determinateness or quality; he does not advance to a cognition of negation as absolute, that is, self-negating, negation” (Science of Logic, para. 1179). Thus, Hegel distinguished between two kinds of negation, or negativity: “abstract negativity,” which he termed a “first negation,” and “absolute negativity,” which he termed a “second negation” (Science of Logic, para. 210). Abstract negativity remains defined by what it negates, while absolute negativity transcends this dependent role of negation. It offers a new beginning from itself. Much of contemporary left thought and activity is characterized by a kind of abstract negativity: a marked inability to move beyond the boundaries of what it is opposed to––that is, to develop a new vision that transcends the bourgeois horizon. For instance, Chantal Mouffe’s left populism of affect and passions is tied to a “project of radical democracy … opposed to the notion that we need a revolution.” Similarly, as we discussed earlier in these Perspectives, the left populism of Bernie Sanders offers little more than a politics of economic redistribution that is driven by emotional appeals and a kind of denialism concerning economic conditions (especially recognition that successes of the welfare state were predicated on a booming economy that is not

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on the horizon today). This self-limiting character of most current left thought has a counterpart in the self-limiting character of many of today’s social movements. Given the failed revolutions and the counterrevolutions of the 20th century and their many horrors, this abstract negativity that frequently passes itself off as “socialism” is quite understandable. The prospect of a thoroughgoing, liberatory socialism, a new beginning that transcends the contradictions of bourgeois society, is not likely to grip the minds of a great many people without articulation of its content and demonstration of its feasibility. This impasse cannot be resolved by recourse to the affective dimension, the construction of mythologies, and the like. On the contrary, these retreats from reason are a symptom of that impasse. It is no coincidence that poststructuralist and postmodernist thought emerged as a pole of attraction in the wake of the defeat of both the May 1968 revolt in France and the broader revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s. Nor does the return to Enlightenment reason advocated by Fluss and Frim, shorn as it is of the dialectical reason of Hegel and Marx, open a path forward. Inasmuch as a position that begins from Spinoza’s Substance lacks a concept of internal contradiction, it occludes recognition of the possibility of capital engendering its own opposite, and thus tends to reinforce the reformist and substitutionist tendencies of today’s left populism. Overcoming the self-limiting character of many contemporary social movements requires engagement with absolute negativity–– development and projection of a viable and liberatory alternative to capital. Marxist-Humanism’s unique contribution to the present period is our effort to work out and project a viable and liberatory alternative to capital, grounded in Marx’s conception of a new society, particularly as detailed in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.

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Part V COMBATTING WHITE NATIONALISM: LESSONS FROM MARX

This part of our Perspectives seeks to draw lessons from Marx’s writings and practice that can help combat Trumpism and other expressions of white nationalism. In Section A, we argue that Trump’s election was not due to an uprising of the “white working class” against “economic distress” brought about by neoliberalism, but an expression of a long-standing white-nationalist strain of US politics. Section B examines Marx’s writings on and activity around Irish independence and the US Civil War. The foremost lesson we draw from this examination is that fighting white nationalism in the tradition of Marx entails the perspective of solidarizing with the so-called “white working class” by decisively defeating Trumpism and other far-right forces. Their defeat will help liberate the “white working class” from the grip of reaction and thereby spur the independent emancipatory self-development of working people as a whole. In the UK, the surge of support for Brexit last year, which secured the victory of the “Leave” forces, was driven largely by anti-immigrant backlash. In France, neo-fascist Marine Le Pen won more than a third of the vote in this year’s presidential election. Most ominously, the virulently racist and xenophobic Donald Trump is now US president, and he enjoys the firm support of avowed white supremacists. This nexus has given rise to a shocking increase in far-right violence, up to and including the recent murder in Charlottesville of anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer by a neo-Nazi. Clearly, we must combat this resurgence of white nationalism. And we must understand how to do so, and how not to do so. For Marxist-Humanists, the goal remains, as always, complete human freedom: the free development of each human being as the condition for the free development of all. What kind of responses to the threat of white nationalism help us to move closer to the realization of this goal, and what kinds do not? To aid us in working out an answer to that question, we will examine Karl Marx’s writings and praxis and seek to draw some lessons from them. In his day, Marx likewise had to confront white nationalism, and he developed some ideas about why it exists and how to overcome it. Specifically, we will examine some of Marx’s writings and activity around the US Civil War and around the struggle for Irish independence from England. Although these were quite different events, Marx regarded the problem of white nationalism in the US and anti-Irish prejudice in England as essentially the same thing: “The ordinary English worker … cherishes religious,

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social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the ‘poor whites’ to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.”16 Before we can turn to Marx’s writings on these questions, however, we need nail down the point that Trumpism really is an expression of an extremely entrenched and long-standing whitenationalist strain in US politics. If that were not the case, what good would it do to re-examine how Marx confronted the threat of white nationalism and try to draw lessons from his thinking and activity? Thus, we first have to expose the factual flaws in the narrative, which is quite popular in anti-neoliberal “left” circles and among “populist” liberals, that Trumpism actually is, and/or that Trump actually won the 2016 election because of, an uprising of the “white working class” against a rapacious neoliberalism that has caused its income to stagnate for decades. Immediately after the election, that line of argument seemed almost ubiquitous, especially on the left. In the wake of the Charlottesville massacre, it seems a lot less plausible than it did before. But the real case against it rests on other facts: (1) The income of the working class did not stagnate. (2) “Economic distress” was not the reason why Trump garnered exceptionally strong support—for a Republican—from a segment of the so-called “white working class.” And most importantly, (3) an examination of the historical record shows that Trumpism is not a response to neoliberalism or economic distress; it is a pre-existing condition.

A. Trumpism: A Pre-Existing Condition The Anti-Neoliberal “Left” Narrative The anti-neoliberal “left” and “populist” liberals frequently tell a story about the 2016 US election that comforts them by blaming their neoliberal adversaries and holding out hope of their own ultimate triumph: Trump’s victory was due to the forgotten “white working class,” which rose up against decades of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. For example, Cornell West’s instant analysis of the election was that [t]he monumental election of Trump was a desperate and xenophobic cry of human hearts for a way out from under the devastation of a disintegrating neoliberal order …. White working- and middle-class fellow citizens––out of anger and anguish – rejected the economic neglect of neoliberal policies and the self-righteous arrogance of elites. [… There was an] abysmal failure of the Democratic [P]arty to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people …. And in February, Boris Kagarlitsky, an apologist for Putin’s regime and self-described Marxist theoretician, opined:

16

April 9, 1870 letter to Sigrid Meyer and August Vogt. Because letters written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels are readily available in a variety of print and electronic versions, they are cited here and below by date and recipient(s) only. 36

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The collapse of the neo-liberal world order is a spontaneous and natural process, generated by its own self-destructive logic …. The victory of Trump is itself a consequence of the crisis …. No matter what the liberal pundits say, these were the votes of workers who brought him the victory. Not the so-called “white men”, but the working class, who openly and, largely, in solidarity, made a stand against the Washington establishment. … This really was an uprising of the forgotten and resentful provincial America against the spoiled people in California and the cosmopolitan officials from Washington, who comfortably exploit cheap labor of illegal migrants …. The crucial factoid regularly cited in support of what West calls “the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people” is the stagnation of middle-class incomes. For example, David Cay Johnston’s instant election analysis was that Trump won because many millions of Americans, having endured decades of working more while getting deeper in debt, said “enough.” From 1967, when Lyndon Johnson was president, to 2014, the average income of the vast majority of Americans rose by only $328 to $33,068. That’s just 1 percent above inflation after 47 years and this income stagnation applies, statistically, to the 90 percent, everyone who made less than $121,000 in 2014.

Middle-Class Income Stagnation? Johnston got his figures from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. For a long time, their work on income inequality was taken to be authoritative and incontrovertible in many circles. Under neoliberalism (i.e., since the early 1980s), they reported, middle-class income has stagnated in the US and there has been a massive and shocking growth of income inequality. However, in response to other researchers’ criticisms, they have recently abandoned the claim about stagnating income. In a paper written together with Gabriel Zucman last December, they conceded that bottom 90% pre-tax income growth is significantly greater than that estimated using the Piketty and Saez (2003) data, according to which average bottom 90% incomes has declined since 1980 …. The real income figures from Piketty and Saez (2003) underestimate the growth of bottom 90% incomes and exaggerate the share of growth going to top groups.17 They went on to state that “[t]here are three reasons why middle-class growth has been stronger than in the Piketty and Saez (2003) series.” First, they had adjusted for inflation by using an (inconsistent) inflation index that exaggerated how much inflation had occurred, thereby Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 22945, Dec. 2016, p. 32. 17

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underestimating “real” income growth. Second, they had looked at the income of “tax units” rather than individuals. Since the number of tax units has grown faster than the number of individuals (because of a declining marriage rate), their previous figures had diluted income growth per person. Finally, and most importantly, their previous work did not count tax-exempt income—such as employers’ contributions, on their employee’s behalf, to Social Security, Medicare, and private pension and medical-insurance plans—which has “grown significantly since 1980.”18 Revised estimates in their December paper, which addressed these problems, tell a very different story. Middle-class income growth was substantial. Between 1982 and 2014, the real per-person after-tax income of the bottom 90% of the population increased by 45%. For the middle 40%, the increase was 53%, and even the income of the bottom half of the population rose by 31%.19 Piketty, Saez, and Zucman also found that, once tax-exempt income is counted, the share of national income that employees receive did not decline throughout the neoliberal period. Prior to the Great Recession, there was no decline at all.20 In recent years, employees’ income share has declined (by a relatively small amount), but this decline was not caused by neoliberalism. It was caused by the recession and the economy’s failure to rebound briskly from it. This evidence lines up very well with what other researchers have found when they measure income using the methods that Piketty, Saez, and Zucman have recently taken on board. It is crucial evidence that the anti-neoliberal “left” explanation for Trump’s election is seriously flawed. If there was no stagnation of income caused by neoliberalism, globalization, or financialization, Trump’s win simply cannot be attributed to a working-class revolt against such stagnation!

Why Votes of Non-College Whites Flipped to Trump Yet even were the story about stagnating middle-class income correct, the narrative propounded by the anti-neoliberal “left” runs into other serious problems. One is the fact that Trump’s “base” has been sticking with him through thick and thin. His approval rating fell somewhat during the initial months of his presidency—apparently, some of the “reluctant” Trump voters became disenchanted—but it has remained steady during the last four months. This would not be happening if Trump’s election had been a revolt against neoliberalism, and for populist economic policies. He has been president for eight months, and there is still no jobs 18

Ibid., p. 33. The statistics cited by Johnston are likewise seriously affected by their failure to count tax-exempt income. 19 Ibid., Appendix 2, Table C3b. For the 1967–2014 period to which Johnston referred, Piketty, Saez, and Zucman’s figures indicate that, after inflation, the per-person income of the bottom 90% of the population rose by 60%. For the middle 40% of the population, the rise was 67%; for the bottom half, the rise was 47%. 20 Ibid., p. 42, Table 1 (top graph). 38

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program in sight. He repeatedly pushed hard for the passage of legislation to “repeal and replace” Obamacare that would have taken away medical insurance from more than 20 million people. And he has populated his administration with the super-rich, including Wall Streeters. So, if the support for Trump among his base had truly been rooted in economic distress and populist concerns, we should by now have seen the base flee from him in substantial numbers. That has not occurred. Another serious problem with the anti-neoliberal “left” narrative is that a substantial and growing body of research indicates that its explanation for why Trump won the election is just not correct. It is true that he received a substantially larger share of the votes of whites without a college education—the so-called white “working class”––than previous Republican presidential candidates had received. This single fact is the statistical hook on which the anti-neoliberal “left” explanation for Trump’s election hangs, but this fact means very little by itself. First of all, educational attainment is a rather imperfect proxy for social class as measured by income or occupation. Second, it is illegitimate to latch onto a fact about “working-class” whites voting for Trump and then “explain” the fact with a made-up story about this having been a working-class revolt against the economic distress imposed on it by neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. That story is no more than one of a great many possible hypotheses about why the shift occurred. It should not be accepted as correct unless the preponderance of additional facts indicates that economic distress was the main cause of the shift.21 However, they indicate that it was not. The controlled studies that have been conducted indicate that, if economic distress had any effect at all, it made people more likely to vote for Trump’s main opponent. The shift to Trump instead seems to have been due to some combination of racism, sexism, discontent with cultural change, anti-immigrant sentiment, and authoritarianism. 

In a post-election analysis, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver found that “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump.” There was a shift to Trump among whites without a college degree, but not because they tend to be lower-income. Once one controls for differences in education levels, “lower-income counties were no more likely to shift to Trump.” This fact alone strongly suggest that economic distress was not a driving force behind the shift to Trump.



Similarly, Stephen Clarke & Dan Tomlinson of the Resolution Foundation found that, although it initially appears that the shift to Trump was determined in part by income level and residence in a manufacturing area, these economic variables cease to be statistically significant predictors of the shift to Trump once one controls for level of education. What determined county-level differences in the extent of the shift to Trump

21

Actually, even that would be insufficient. The facts would have to indicate that the revolt was against economic distress caused by neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization––which is highly unlikely, since these processes have been taking place for several decades, while the shift in the vote of non-college-educated whites was sudden. Why haven’t they been voting to topple the “neoliberal world order” all along? 39

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were differences in education level, race, national origin, and age, not differences in these economic variables.22 

Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell of the Gallup organization analyzed a massive dataset on Trump’s favorability ratings between July 2015 and October 2016. They found that, after controlling for the influence of other variables, Trump was more popular among more affluent people—even if one looks only at non-Hispanic whites. In addition, “[h]is supporters are less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time”; support for Trump is not substantially affected by one’s occupation; nor is it affected by being exposed to international-trade competition and jobcompetition with immigrants, which “make[s] it very unlikely that direct exposure to harm from globalization could be a causal factor in motivating large numbers of Trump’s supporters.”



Analyzing a post-election survey of more than 4000 people, Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel found that, after controlling for the influence of other relevant variables, there was “little evidence to suggest individual economic distress benefited Trump.” Nor did “economic anxiety” influence the election choices of white voters. In contrast, “racial attitudes towards blacks and immigration are the key factors associated with support for Trump.” Two of their three variables that measure different dimensions of “racial animus” are “significant predictors of Trump support among white respondents, independent of partisanship, ideology, education levels, and the other factors included in the model,” and they have a quite sizable influence on Trump support as well.



Daniel Cox, Rachel Lienesch, and Robert P. Jones analyzed attitudes to Trump among whites without college degrees. Their analysis was based on a large pre-election national survey and four post-election focus groups in Cincinnati. Contrary to the story that Trump’s election was driven by “economic distress,” they found that, once one controls for other relevant variables, “being in fair or poor financial shape actually predicted support for Hillary Clinton among white working-class Americans, rather than support for Donald Trump.” Those who said that their financial situation was fair or poor were almost twice as likely as other respondents to support Hillary Clinton. The factors that actually stood out as predictors of Trump support were identification with the Republican Party, feeling that the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence, feeling like a stranger in their own country, favoring the deportation of undocumented immigrants, and believing that “investment” in college education is a risky gamble.



Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta sought to explain why support for Trump was substantially stronger among whites without college degrees than it was among whites with such degrees. Analyzing results of a YouGov survey conducted shortly before the election, they found that

22

They also found that county-level differences in labor-force participation had a statistically significant effect, but only in “battleground states,” and that recent changes in labor-force participation were not a statistically significant predictor of a shift in support for Trump. 40

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very little of this gap can be explained by the economic difficulties faced by less educated whites. Rather, most of the divide appears to be the result of racism and sexism in the electorate, especially among whites without college degrees. Sexism and racism were powerful forces in structuring the 2016 presidential vote, even after controlling for partisanship and ideology as well as age, income, gender, and race (pp. 24–25). (Furthermore, their “economic dissatisfaction” variable was based on answers to the question, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your overall economic situation?,” which is not really a measure of actual or even perceived economic well-being.23 It is arguable, especially in light of other research surveyed here, that the small portion of the gap in support for Trump that they attribute to “economic difficulties” might actually be attributable to “economic anxiety” rather than objective economic problems.) 

Matthew MacWilliams conducted and analyzed two surveys. One was a nationwide survey of 1800 Republican voters conducted at the end of 2015. The other was a survey, conducted two months later, of 538 people likely to vote in South Carolina’s Republican primary. In both cases, he found that “education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate.” The only statistically-significant variables were authoritarianism and fear of terrorism.



Christopher Weber, Christopher Federico, and Stanley Feldman came to a similar conclusion. They analyzed survey data on more than 4000 voters, collected after the November 2016 general election. After controlling for the influence of education, income, age, gender, and religiosity, they found that a voter who scored “high” on a scale of authoritarian attitudes had a 79% chance of having voted for Trump, while those who scored “low” had only a 30% chance of having done so. This 49-point gap is much greater than the 34-point gap between high- and low-authoritarians’ chances of having voted for Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for president, and almost double the 28-point gap between their chances of having voted for George W. Bush in 2000.

These studies do not add up to a single, unified explanation for why whites without college degrees were actually more likely to vote for Trump than for previous Republican presidential candidates. But the negative results are indeed univocal and unequivocal. Once the influence of other factors is controlled for, there is no evidence that the shift to Trump was a revolt of lowincome voters or people exposed to competition from imports or immigrant workers.

Trumpism is Wallace-ism Redux Yet the strongest evidence that Trump’s electoral victory was not an uprising of the forgotten working class against economic distress brought about by neoliberalism and globalization is the 23

Some people might say that they are dissatisfied because, even though they currently do not face serious economic problems, they wish that they were even better off or they are worried about the future. 41

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evidence that Trumpism is a pre-existing condition. It has unfortunately been with us all along, as the resurgence of atavistic and revanchist white supremacism helps to make clear. An examination of the presidential campaigns of George Corley Wallace, the long-time authoritarian, racist, right-wing governor of Alabama makes it far clearer. Wallace ran for president three consecutive times between 1964 and 1972. This was well before neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization came along and allegedly pummelled the working class. Yet the messages and authoritarianism of his campaigns are eerily similar to Trump’s, as is the strong support he garnered in the North as well as the South––particularly in the industrial Midwest where the flip to Trump occurred last year. Wallace became governor of Alabama in January, 1963. In his inaugural address––which was written by Asa Carter, who had started a paramilitary Ku Klux Klan organization in the mid1950s, and left it only after shooting two other members in a dispute over finances––Wallace famously promised to fight for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Five months later, he stood in the doorway of a University of Alabama auditorium to prevent enrollment of its first Black students. These two events were the first to bring him widespread recognition, and tons of fan mail, outside the South. The following year, when President Lyndon B. Johnson was in the process of getting the Civil Rights Act passed by Congress, Wallace decided to oppose him in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Although Johnson’s eventual nomination was assured, Wallace decided to run in select states outside the South—Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland—to demonstrate that his segregationist, “anti-elite,” and anti-Washington message was popular, not only in the South, but in the North as well.24 Wallace did surprising well in all three states. Even though Johnson was an incumbent president, and very popular (his approval rating at the time was close to 75%), Wallace received 34% of the vote in Wisconsin, 30% in Indiana, and 43% in Maryland against “surrogate” candidates standing in for Johnson. It is important to note that Wisconsin is one of the three states in the Democratic “firewall” that flipped to Trump in 2016. And it, as well as Indiana, are in the industrial Midwest—which globalization and neoliberalism had not yet turned into a Rustbelt. Martin Luther King commented that the results in Maryland showed that “segregation is a national and not a sectional problem.” Wallace swept all eight counties on Maryland’s rural Eastern Shore. It was estimated that more than 90% of white voters there cast their votes for him. (In 2016, Trump received 65% of the Republican primary votes on the Eastern Shore, compared to 54% statewide. In the November general election, his overall vote share in Maryland was only 24

During the period in which Wallace ran for president, 1964–72, the major parties’ nominating systems were very different from those in effect today. Party officials and elected delegates played a much larger role in choosing the nominee; there were relatively few primaries and caucuses in which voters (in effect) directly vote for presidential candidates. In 1964, there were only 17 primaries; in 1972, there were 22. 42

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35%, but he received 57% on the Eastern Shore.) Wallace voters in Glen Burnie, a suburb of Baltimore, “went to the polls with big grins on their faces,” according to a local newspaper editor. “I never saw anything like it. They were going to show Uncle Sam that they had had it.”25 They had had it with what, exactly? Globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization that would not arrive on the scene for another decade or more? This was the heyday of Keynesian “fine tuning” of the economy. In 1968, Wallace ran for president in the general election as a third-party candidate, against Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the vice-president. He received 14% of the vote, almost half of which came from outside the states that had been part of the Confederacy. Wallace might have performed even better had Nixon not co-opted his “law and order” message and his claim to be the candidate of “forgotten Americans,” in what Wallace biographer Dan T. Carter has described as “a desperate, undignified game of political catch-up.”26 Wallace once again competed as a Democrat in the 1972 presidential primaries. The battle against de jure segregation had by this time been lost, and Wallace did not try to revive it, but instead ran as an implacable opponent of efforts to achieve the integration of public schools through “forced busing.” In terms of the popular vote, the primary contest was a tight, three-way race between Wallace, Humphrey, and George McGovern, who ultimately secured the nomination. Humphrey obtained 26% of the nationwide popular vote; McGovern received 25%; and Wallace received 23%.27 Wallace ran in 17 of the 22 primaries held that year. He won five of them, and came in second in six others. As might be expected, he did very well in the South, winning primaries in all three southern states that held primaries––Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee––and pulling down an absolute majority of votes in the latter two. Yet Wallace also performed remarkably well outside the South. He won primaries in Michigan— where he again received an absolute majority—and Maryland. He came in second in Indiana, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.28 Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are the three Democratic “firewall” states that flipped to Trump in 2016. And they, as well as Indiana and West Virginia, are part of the Rustbelt. This 25

Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics, 2d ed. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000, p. 215; Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003, p. 125. 26 Dan T. Carter, “Legacy of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American Politics,” Journal of Southern History 62:1, Feb. 1996, p. 9. 27 The earlier front-runner, Edmund Muskie, ran a distant fourth, getting 12% of the popular vote, and dropped out of the race early. 28 His shares of the vote in the states mentioned were: Tennessee, 68%; Michigan, 51%; North Carolina, 50%; Florida, 42%; Indiana, 41%; Maryland, 39%; West Virginia, 33%; New Mexico, 29%; Wisconsin, 22%; Pennsylvania, 21%; and Oregon, 20%. Wallace also won the Texas caucus, coming away with 43% of its pledged delegates. 43

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was 1972, however, before globalization and neoliberalism; the region was not yet a Rustbelt. Nonetheless, Wallace won a majority of votes in one of these five states and placed second in the other four. Writing in 1996, Wallace biographer Dan T. Carter remarked that “Wallace, more than any other political figure of the 1960s and early 1970s, sensed the frustrations—the rage—of many American voters, made commonplace a new level of political incivility and intemperate rhetoric, and focused that anger upon a convenient set of scapegoats.”29 What were these voters enraged about? Globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization had not yet arrived on the scene. For a few examples of the political incivility, intemperate rhetoric, and anger to which Carter refers, consider the following Trump-like moments of Wallace’s campaigning. During the 1964 primaries, 1000 supporters—and about 75 protesters—showed up to hear Wallace speak in Serb Memorial Hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (which seated 600). The band played “Swanee River,” an infamous racist minstrel song, and the audience sang the Confederate anthem “Dixie” in English and Polish. The man who introduced Wallace, Bronko Gruber, singled out the only members of the audience who didn’t have the “cordiality to stand up” during the national anthem, “these two colored gentlemen here.” The crowd hissed and booed. Another Black protester, a minister, then shouted “Get your dogs out,” referring to a tactic used by Southern police to intimidate civil rights’ protesters. “I’ll tell you something about your dogs, padre,” Gruber replied. “[T]hree weeks ago tonight a friend of mine was assaulted by three of your countrymen or whatever you want to call them.” As the audience urged him on, Gruber continued, “They beat up old ladies, 83 years old, they rape our women folk, how long can we tolerate this?” Wallace said nothing about these comments.30 This behavior persisted. At a rally in Tennessee during the 1968 race, Wallace famously declared, “If some anarchist lies down in front of my automobile, it will be the last automobile he will ever lie down in front of.” New Republic columnist T.R.B. [Richard Strout] described a Wallace rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, shortly before that year’s election, as follows: “There is menace in the blood shout of the crowd. You feel you have known this all somewhere; never again will you read about Berlin in the ‘30s without remembering this wild confrontation.”31 When protesters interrupted this rally, Wallace said: “We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of ‘em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all.”32 Dan T. Carter, “Legacy of Rage,” p. 6. For fuller accounts of this meeting, see Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage, pp. 206–8, and Matthew J. Prigge, “Dixie North: George Wallace and the 1964 Wisconsin Presidential Primary,” Shepherd Express, Dec. 22, 2015. 31 [Richard Strout,] “T.R.B. From Washington,” New Republic, Nov. 9, 1968, p. 4. See also Michael A. Cohen, “Trump Rally Oozes Fear, Anxiety, and Paranoia,” Boston Globe, Apr. 7, 2016; Cohen writes that he “immediately thought” of Strout’s account of the Wallace rally when he attended a Trump rally on Long Island, New York in 2016. 32 Bill Barrow, “Are there echoes of George Wallace in Trump’s message?,” PBS NewsHour, March 24, 2016. 29 30

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Unlike Trump, Wallace did not succeed in becoming president. But how well might he have done in 1972 if he had not been burdened with certain disadvantages compared to Trump? What if he had had the advantage of not being a professional politician? The advantage of billions of dollars of his own money, to demonstrate that he could not be “bought”? What if he had been a TV star with 100% name recognition? What if he had had 24/7 media attention and assistance from right-wing and fake news like Trump enjoyed? And what if he had run as a Republican? This was the main thing that was new about the 2016 election. The Trumpite base is not new––it is not a reaction to neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. It is a pre-existing condition, as the look back at Wallace’s campaigns has shown. But until 2016, mainstream Republicans managed to retain control of their party, by making concessions to this base and placating it with racist and misogynistic “dog whistles.” In 2016, however, mainstream Republicans lost control. The base was allowed, for the first time, to vote for a Trump, not a mainstream Republican, in the general election. And thus the base wrongly seems––on the surface––to have emerged from out of nowhere, and to be a reaction to recent economic changes.

B. Lessons from Marx Taking the “Independent Movement of the Workers” Seriously—and Literally The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. –– Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party As we will see, Marx’s response to the threat of white nationalism was very different from that of much of the “left” today. The basic response of the anti-neoliberal “left” is consonant with its overall orientation, which can be called “Left First.” Its primary concern is to “build the left” and win victories—elections, campaigns, adherents, power––for itself. Accordingly, it regards common people as a “constituency” to win over in its quest for political power. And it seemingly has no compunction about winning them over by “meet[ing] them where they are at.”33 Thus, it offers an alternative version of “populism” that (it hopes) the authoritarian white-nationalist base that supports Trump, Le Pen, et al. will find appealing. As one of its most prominent proponents, Canadian political scientist Sam Gindin, put it last December, “Any attempt to fight the expected direction of the Trump presidency can’t start by blaming the white working class for Trump’s victory but must take the frustrations of the white working class seriously and win them to its side.” And when polls indicated that as many as 12% of those who voted for anti-neoliberal “left” French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon “Socialist Alternative used what we call ‘the transitional method’: We connect with the consciousness of everyday people, meet them where they are at ….” Ramy Khalil, “How a Socialist Won––Lessons from Kshama Sawant’s Historic Victory,” Socialist Alternative, Jan. 31, 2014. 33

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in the first round planned to vote for Le Pen in the second, Mélenchon’s supporters did not accept that this fact raises troubling questions about the character of his campaign. At least one even had the audacity to argue that it was a mark in Mélenchon’s favor, since it showed that his campaign pulled voters away from Le Pen!34 To be sure, the “Left First” types do not endorse explicit appeals to white-nationalist sentiments. Their words carefully condemn racism, xenophobia, misogyny, etc. The problem is rather that they seek to win over the authoritarian white-nationalist base by offering one or another “positive program” that does not fight the base’s authoritarianism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia head on. For instance, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara recently wrote that “Antifascist action is a moral and strategic imperative,” which should go together with “a positive program to contrast with the neoliberal consensus of the center.” For Sunkara, the positive and the negative “come before consciousness without reciprocal contact,” as Hegel put it. The negative component, antifascist action, is not allowed to “contaminate” the positive program that can supposedly win people over by “meeting them where they are at.” This approach is especially dangerous at this moment in history, because it normalizes Trumpism. It treats Trumpism, not as a threat and abomination that must be eliminated, but as a legitimate rival for the allegiance of the “white working class.” It seeks to out-compete its rival on the basis of an alternative-but-comparable “positive program.” This is also the approach encoded in the Democratic Party’s new “A Better Deal” economic program. The program rails against Wall Street, “[s]pecial interests, lobbyists, and large corporations,” while literally saying nothing against Trumpism or against xenophobia, racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. To understand Marx’s response to the threat of white nationalism, it is imperative to situate it within his overall political-philosophical orientation, and to recognize how sharply the latter contrasts with the “Left First” orientation sketched out above. Here are some of the most striking differences: 

Marx championed and encouraged what he called the “independent movement of the workers.”35 This is simple enough to understand if one takes it literally (as one should). But a long legacy of substitutionism—substitution of some other entity for “the workers”––has made it easy to misunderstand Marx’s meaning. For instance, Jill Stein’s Green Party is construed as an “independent movement” because it is independent of the (explicitly) pro-capitalist political parties and it advocates policies that would supposedly benefit the working class. The championing of such substitutionist “independence” encourages a further error: creation of false equivalences between pro-capitalist politicians, such as Macron and Le Pen, or Clinton and Trump. Macron and Le Pen may indeed be equally bad for the electoral prospects of Mélechon’s movement; and Clinton and Trump may indeed be equally bad for the electoral prospects of the Greens. Yet when one takes Marx literally, the question becomes: Are they equally bad for the future trajectory of the independent movement of the workers themselves?

34 35

This information was obtained through personal Facebook communications. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 10, sect. 7. 46

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Marx supported the independent movement of the workers as a necessary means to achieve the goal of overcoming class society and state domination over individuals, not as an end in itself (and certainly not as a means to further “the left”). From this vantage point, support from below for far-right “populism” is completely retrogressive, notwithstanding its “anti-elite” and “anti-establishment” character, because it rivets working people more firmly to class society and the state. As MHI wrote a year ago, We stand for emancipatory self-activity from below. There is no greater obstacle to this than figures such as Trump, who use racism, sexism, etc. to pit working people against one another, in order to divide and conquer them and have them fall in behind the great leader who tells them that “I alone can fix it.”

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Marx’s perspective was thoroughly internationalist. He recognized, of course, that solidarity across national borders strengthened working-class movements. He also staunchly opposed all forms of nationalism that sought to forge or strengthen working people’s identification with the ruling classes of “their” nation, since it is antithetical to their independent emancipatory self-activity: “The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.” “Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!”

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Largely for the same reasons—the liberation of workers from identification with “their” ruling classes and international solidarity—Marx opposed and actively fought, not only national and racial prejudices and privileges, but also economic and social conditions that divide working people from one another (e.g., into freemen vs. slaves, and natives vs. immigrants) and thereby foster these prejudices and privileges. This is a main, if not the main, reason why he supported victory for the North in the Civil War (especially once it became an explicit anti-slavery war) and Irish independence from English rule. In other words, the abolition of slavery in the US and English rule over Ireland were not only good for Blacks and Irish people. They were good for white and English working people as well. By weakening their identification with “their” ruling classes and eliminating privileges that kept them from solidarizing with Black and Irish workers, the abolition of slavery and English rule would help put white and English working people on the path of independent self-activity that aims to overcome of class society and class rule.

The contemporary analogue to this is, clearly, the perspective of solidarizing with the “white working class” by decisively defeating Trumpism, white supremacism, etc. Their defeat will help liberate the “white working class” from the grip of reaction and spur its independent emancipatory self-development.

Marx on Irish Independence In 1867, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians) rose up in armed struggle to win Ireland’s independence from England. Although Marx was sharply critical of their terroristic methods, he—as well as Frederick Engels and their organization, the International Working Men’s 47

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Association (IWMA; later known also as the First International)––actively supported the struggle and organized unsuccessfully to secure amnesty for Fenian political prisoners.36 However, it was not until the end of 1869 and start of 1870 that Marx worked out a forceful theoretical position in favor of Irish independence. He developed this position in private communications and in official documents of the IWMA, which adopted and worked to carry out his perspective.

English workers’ “own social emancipation” His principal reason for supporting Irish independence was not “humanitarian.” He was instead seeking to stimulate the independent emancipatory self-development of the working class, especially the English working class. In a November 29, 1869 letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, Marx stressed that his aim was not merely to “speak[ ] out loudly and decidedly for the oppressed Irish against their oppressors.” He wanted the English working class to fight for the independence of Ireland, “not as a matter of sympathy with Ireland but as a demand made in the interests of the English proletariat.” Similarly, in a December 10, 1869 letter to Engels, Marx wrote that, while support for “‘international’ and ‘humane’ justice for Ireland” should be “taken for granted,” there was an additional reason that Irish independence was important: “it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland” (emphases in original). Three weeks later (on January 1, 1870) a “confidential communication” from the IWMA’s General Council to its section in “French Switzerland,” written by Marx, stated that quite apart from the demands of international justice, it is an essential precondition for the emancipation of the English working class to transform the present enforced union [the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland] (in other words, the enslavement of Ireland) into a free and equal confederation, if possible, and into a total separation, if necessary.37 And on April 9, 1870, Marx wrote to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt that it was the “special task” of the IWMA’s General Council to “make the English workers realise that for them the

After three Fenians were executed, Engels remarked, “To my knowledge, the only time that anybody has been executed for a similar matter in a civilised country was the case of [martyred American abolitionist] John Brown at Harpers Ferry,” but he added that the action of the English government was even less civilized, since “[t]he Southerners had at least the decency to treat J. Brown as a rebel, whereas here everything is being done to transform a political attempt into a common crime” (Nov. 24, 1867 letter to Marx; emphasis in original). 37 The confidential communication’s discussion of Ireland was repeated, almost verbatim, in a letter of March 28, 1870 that Marx sent to Kugelmann, for distribution to leaders of the German Social-Democratic Worker’s Party. 36

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national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation” (emphases in original). This position raises a couple of questions. First, if Marx and the IWMA were so internationalist, then why were they so concerned with the working class of one single country, England? The answer is that, in Marx’s view, the English working class was crucial because revolution in England was the lynchpin of world revolution. He argued in the January 1, 1870 “confidential communication” that England was not “simply … a country along with other countries[, but] the metropolis of capital.” A “revolution in economic matters” there “must immediately affect the whole world.” Moreover, class antagonisms had become much more simplified in England (into a head-to-head antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) than they were elsewhere, and it was the only country in which working-class struggle and organization had acquired “a certain degree of maturity and universality.” Thus, “England alone can serve as a lever for a serious economic revolution” (even though “revolutionary initiative will probably come from France”).38 This perspective has relevance today, when the US is the “metropolis of capital.” An economic revolution in the US would have even more of an immediate effect on the whole world than a revolution in England would have had in Marx’s day. Thus, while we certainly cannot pander to white-nationalist sentiment within the so-called “white working class,” we must be concerned especially––but not exclusively––with the emancipatory self-development of the US working class (which is multi-racial, -ethnic, and –national), inasmuch as it is critical to world revolution.

Irish immigration and xenophobia Second, how could Marx argue that Irish independence was in the “absolute interest” of the English working class? He was keenly aware of facts that seemed to suggest otherwise, facts rooted in Irish immigration to England. In a passage of his letter to Meyer and Vogt that is particularly salient in light of today’s struggles over immigration, Marx noted that, because Irish peasants were being steadily evicted from the land and “forced” to emigrate, “Ireland constantly sends her own surplus [population] to the English labour market.” And he argued that the consequent over-supply of labor in England “forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class.” As a result, “[t]he ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.” But this hatred was not merely economic. It was shot through-and-though with prejudice, supremacist attitudes, and nationalistic identification with the English ruling classes: In relation to the Irish worker[, the ordinary English worker] regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. 38

Emphases in original. See also Marx’s April 9, 1870 letter to Meyer and Vogt. 49

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Furthermore, the Irish masses returned the hatred. In both England and the U.S. (where Fenianism was especially strong among Irish immigrants) “[t]he Irishman … sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.” Thus, “[e]very industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians.”39 Faced with somewhat similar facts today, prominent voices in the anti-neoliberal “left” want to “meet people where they are at.” For example, the leader of the alleged left-wing of Germany’s Die Linke party, Sahra Wagenknecht, “is trying to win over large chunks of working- and middle-class supporters of the AfD [Alternative für Deutschland],” a racist, xenophobic, far-right party. She favors limits on immigration into Germany and deportation of at least some immigrants convicted of crimes. And Gindin, in his quest to “build a mass socialist party,” wants to win people over to a “regulated border policy,” on the grounds that support for “fully open borders in the present context of economic insecurity cannot help but elicit a backlash …. Workers who have seen their own standards undermined over time … are not going to prioritize open borders.” Freeing English workers from the “leading-strings” of the ruling classes Marx’s attitude was the exact opposite. He did not compromise with xenophobia or antiimmigrant sentiment. Because his goal was the emancipatory self-development of the working class, not winning over a “constituency” to his party or program, he focused unwaveringly on the actual—world-historic—interests of the working class. He did not pander to the perceived All quotes in this and the preceding two paragraphs are from Marx’s April 9, 1870 letter to Meyer and Vogt. Emphases are Marx’s. The January 1, 1870 confidential communication from the IWMA’s General Council contains a very similar analysis of the causes and effects of Irish immigration to England: 39

In the second place, in dragging down the working class in England still further by the forced immigration of poor Irish people, the English bourgeoisie has not merely exploited Irish poverty. It has also divided the proletariat into two hostile camps. The fiery rebelliousness of the Celtic worker does not mingle well with the steady slow nature of the Anglo-Saxon; in fact in all the major industrial centres of England there is a profound antagonism between the Irish and the English proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who brings down his wages and standard of living. He also feels national and religious antipathies for him; it is rather the same attitude that the poor whites of the Southern states of North America had for the Negro slaves. This antagonism between the two groups of proletarians within England itself is artificially kept in being and fostered by the bourgeoisie, who know well that this split is the real secret of preserving their own power. This antagonism is reproduced once again on the other side of the Atlantic. The Irish, driven from their native soil by cattle and sheep, have landed in North America where they form a considerable, and increasing, proportion of the population. Their sole thought, their sole passion, is their hatred for England. [emphasis in original] 50

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interests, or the interests-within-capitalism, of those elements of the working class whose existing opinions impeded the struggle for the freedom of every individual. In Marx’s view, the nationalism and anti-Irish sentiment of much of the English working class were crucial impediments to that struggle. To overcome these impediments, English rule over Ireland needed to be ended. As long as the United Kingdom remained in existence, “the English people will remain tied to the leading-strings of the ruling classes, because it will have to join with them in a common front against Ireland. Every one of its movements in England itself is crippled by the strife with the Irish …” (letter to Kugelmann, November 29, 1869). The metaphor of leading-strings—strips of fabric attached to children’s clothes, which adults held and used to restrain the children or help them walk—suggests that the nationalism of much of the English working class allowed the ruling classes to restrain and control them. Marx argued, further, that the English bourgeoisie consciously exploited and fomented nationalism and anti-Irish sentiment in order to stay in power. The January 1, 1870 confidential IWMA communication stated that “[t]his antagonism between the two groups of proletarians [English and Irish] within England itself is artificially kept in being and fostered by the bourgeoisie, who know well that this split is the real secret of preserving their own power.” And in his April 9, 1870 letter to Meyer and Vogt, Marx wrote, This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this. [emphases in original] Marx’s account identified two distinct sources of anti-Irish sentiment within the English working class. One was that competition from Irish immigrant workers was driving down their wages. The other was that native-English workers tended to look down upon Irish immigrants. As we have seen, Marx compared their typical attitude to the attitude of “the ‘poor whites’ to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.”40 Engels reiterated this analogy in the May 14, 1872 meeting (that Marx did not attend) of the IWMA General Council, in a statement opposing a proposal to subsume Irish sections of the IWMA under the British Federal Council. He denounced it as analogous to “members of a conquering nation call[ing] upon the nation they had conquered and continued to hold down to forget their specific nationality and position, to ‘sink national differences’ and so forth.” That is not Internationalism[; … it is] attempting to justify and to perpetuate the dominion of the conqueror under the cloak of Internationalism[, … and] sanctioning the belief, only too 40

As in the US case, though to a lesser degree, the feeling of superiority had a material basis. Irish immigrants in England suffered from economic and social disadvantages (and, possibly, residential segregation). They disproportionately lived in slums racked with disease, violence, and alcohol abuse, and they tended to take the dirtiest, most dangerous, and lowest-paid jobs. A ballad of the time stated that “When work grew scarce, and bread was dear / And wages lessened too / The Irish hordes were bidders here / Our half paid work to do.” 51

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common among the English working men, that they were superior beings compared to the Irish, and as much an aristocracy as the mean whites of the Slave States considered themselves to be with regard to the Negroes. The coincidence of these two sources of anti-Irish sentiment—job-market competition and supremacist attitudes—is important. In the absence of supremacist thinking, Marx might conceivably have favored dealing with the job-competition problem with a “unite and fight” working-class strategy that overlooked national differences.41 For instance, native-English and immigrant-Irish workers might have been able to join together to form unions in order to reduce competition between them and thereby relieve downward pressure on the wages of both groups. Accelerating the “catastrophe of official England” In fact, Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman actually had the audacity to tell us that this is what Marx recommended.42 But not only does Marx’s text say nothing about the Irish “unit[ing] with the English workers in England”; what it does say makes clear that it would have been ludicrous to try to implement the class-reductionist and economistic perspective favored by Ackerman. Owing to anti-Irish prejudice within the English working class, and the consequent antagonism between English and Irish workers, any “sink national differences; unite and fight” strategy was simply untenable. In her response to Ackerman, Jennifer Roesch, a member of the International Socialist Organization (US), recognized that he “miss[ed] the entire thrust of Marx’s argument.” But she missed it as well, writing that Marx was “call[ing] for the English worker to overcome his ‘artificial antagonism’ in order to make a united working class movement possible.” This reading is almost as unrooted in the texts as Ackerman’s is. Marx had come to the conclusion that, as long as English rule over Ireland persisted, appeals for unity (such as the one that Roesch put into his mouth) were abstract and futile. As he wrote to Engels on December 11, 1869, 41

Given Marx’s unwavering internationalism and his desire to free English workers from the “leading-strings” of their ruling classes, support for immigration controls would still have been out of the question. His 1869–70 letters and confidential IWMA communications on Ireland implicitly put forward a quite different—revolutionary—solution to the job-competition problem: Irish independence would break the power of the absentee English landlords whose evictions of Irish peasants from the land were a key cause of their migration to England and elsewhere. Earlier, Marx had opined that “the characteristic features of Fenianism are socialistic tendencies (in a negative sense, directed against the appropriation of the soil) and the fact that it is a movement of the lower orders” (letter to Engels, November 30, 1867). 42 After quoting the relevant section of Marx’s letter to Meyer and Vogt, Ackerman sarcastically commented: “As a social theorist, Marx unfortunately lacked the subtlety of, say, a Hillary Clinton [who said that ‘racial inequality is not merely a symptom of economic inequality’]. His ‘reductionist’ solution was for the Irish to free themselves from their English landlords in Ireland—and unite with the English workers in England.” 52

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For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. … Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland.43 This letter does not explain how Marx came to this conclusion. However, he wrote to Kugelmann twelve days earlier that, unless and until Ireland was freed from English rule, “the English people … will have to join with [their ruling classes] in a common front against Ireland” (emphasis added), and they will therefore “remain tied to the leading-strings of the ruling classes.”44 Marx therefore eschewed empty appeals to English workers to overcome their anti-Irish prejudice that failed to confront the objective conditions that engendered the prejudice. What he actually called for—to change the objective situation––was the defeat of England in its struggle with Ireland: It is … the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association to hasten the social revolution in England. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. [April 9, 1970 letter to Meyer and Vogt, emphases added] To accelerate the social development in Europe, you must push on [beschleunigen, accelerate] the catastrophe of official England. To do so, you must attack her in Ireland. That’s her weakest point. Ireland lost, the British “Empire” is gone, and the class war in England, till now somnolent and chronic, will assume acute forms. [March 5, 1870 letter to Paul and Laura Lafargue, emphasis added] Thus, in Marx’s view, it was futile to appeal to English workers to overcome their hostility to their Irish counterparts unless that appeal was tied tightly to the defeat of England.45 Only England’s defeat would deflate their supremacist pretensions, free them from identifying their interests with those of the English ruling classes, and put them on an independent, internationalist, and emancipatory path. 43

Emphasis in original. Marx’s November 29, 1869 letter to Kugelmann similarly argued that “the English working class …can never do anything decisive here in England” as long as England continued to rule over Ireland. 44 Extant texts seem to contain no direct explanation for why Marx thought that English workers would be compelled to take to the side of their ruling classes, but the most likely explanation is that job-market competition objectively pitted English workers against Irish immigrants. 45 When the two things were tied tightly together, Marx did of course favor and participate in activity to lessen anti-Irish prejudices. In October 1869, the IWMA General Council helped to organize a mass “Justice for Ireland!” demonstration in London that called for amnesty for Irish political prisoners. According to General Council minutes of October 26, Marx said that the “main feature” of the demonstration was that “at least part of the English working class ha[s] lost their prejudice against the Irish.” 53

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With the rise of far-right xenophobic nationalism, we face a somewhat similar situation today. While much of the anti-neoliberal “left” was muting its opposition to Trump, if not indeed enabling his victory, on the grounds that he enjoyed strong support from some of the “white working class,” MHI warned that there is no greater obstacle to emancipatory self-activity from below than politicians like Trump, who pit working people against one another, in order to divide and conquer them, and strive to make them his followers. Only the defeat of Trumpism can deflate the supremacist pretensions of Trump’s white-nationalist base, free it from his leading-strings, and re-orient it toward genuinely independent—i.e., anti-racist, internationalist, emancipatory—self-activity.

The Impact of the US Civil War on Emancipatory Working-Class Self-Activity Marx, as well as Engels, closely followed and wrote extensively about the US Civil War. Their writings on the war consist largely of battle reports, discussions of military strategy and tactics, and analyses of changes in the political situation in the North. But various other topics were also taken up. Raya Dunayevskaya’s commentary in Marxism and Freedom remains important for highlighting Marx’s support for and engagement with the Abolitionist movement and the changes that he made to his book Capital under the impact of the Civil War. Here, where we will focus on what can be learned from these writings about white nationalism and how to combat it, we can be fairly brief. Marx supported the North in the Civil War, not only in his writings but in organizational activity as well. He helped to organize a March 1863 meeting, sponsored by the London Trade-Unions council, and attended by as many as 3000 people, that successfully opposed Britain’s entrance into the war on behalf of the South. (The English union leaders involved in organizing that meeting went on to join with Marx in founding the IWMA eighteen months later.) His support for the North was unwavering, even though he was well aware that it was by no means “pure.” In an October 11, 1861 article in the New York Daily Tribune, Marx discussed bourgeois London publications that took the opposite tack: they “affect[ed] an utter horror of Slavery” but took a “hostile tone against the North, and [harbored] ill-concealed sympathies with the South.” For example, he quoted complaints in The Economist that Abolitionists had been mistreated in the North, and that the US government had impeded efforts to end the international slave trade, which was mainly financed and operated by Northerners. Marx did not dispute these facts. Instead, he exposed what would today be called the whataboutism of The Economist: “The necessity of justifying its attitude by such pettifogging Old Bailey pleas proves more than anything else that the anti-Northern part of the English press is instigated by hidden motives, too mean and dastardly to be openly avowed.” (There is an unmistakable parallel to this today, when the anti-neoliberal “left” spends its time railing endlessly against the impurity of Hillary Clinton, “centrists,” and liberals, while letting Trump and Trumpism off the hook by dismissing them as a “distraction.” Does this whataboutism hide motives that they choose not to avow openly?)

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Marx’s overriding reason for supporting the North, despite its checkered past, is that he was convinced that its victory would put an end to slavery in the US. That fact, which is obvious now, was not so obvious then. The North’s original aim in the war was not to free the slaves, but to preserve the Union, and Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves in the South until the middle of the war. However, Marx anticipated that the war would result in the abolition of slavery, in part because the North would probably have to free the slaves in order to defeat the South. In a May 6, 1861 letter to Lion Philips, he predicted the ultimate victory of the North, “since, if the need arises, it has a last card up its sleeve in the shape of a slave revolution.” In an August 7, 1862 letter of Engels, Marx attributed the North’s early difficulties in the war to the fact that that it was focused on preserving the Union, not ending slavery: “wars of this kind ought to be conducted along revolutionary lines, and the Yankees have so far been trying to conduct it along constitutional ones.” But he predicted that “[t]he North will, at last, wage the war in earnest, have recourse to revolutionary methods and overthrow the supremacy of the border slave statesmen. One single n[____] regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves.”46 On September 22, Lincoln announced his intention to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In an article published by Die Presse on October 12, Marx wrote that this “proclamation … is the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing tip of the old American Constitution.” Grounds of Marx’s anti-slavery activity Why was the abolition of slavery so important to Marx? He was, of course, staunchly opposed to it on “humanitarian” grounds. He wrote in Capital that a world market for Southern cotton had led to “the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system” in which “the civilised horrors of overwork [were] grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery ….” However, just as in the case of Irish independence, Marx’s concern was not solely “humanitarian.” He was also doing what he could to accelerate the “independent movement of the workers”––white as well as Black, and internationally as well as in the US. He considered the abolition of slavery, and thus victory for the North, to be in the interest of the whole working class. For instance, when Lincoln was re-elected president in 1864, Marx wrote a congratulatory “address” to him, on behalf of the IWMA, which stated, “The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.” In the same address, Marx wrote: While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, 46

After the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, the North did begin to recruit Blacks to the military, and in May 1863 it established the Bureau of Colored Troops. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 Blacks served in the Northern army and navy.

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they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war. A lot of ideas are packed into this sentence. Marx criticizes white workers for allowing slavery to “defile their own republic” and for prizing their privileged status vis-à-vis Black slaves. He also criticizes them for their lack of solidarity with European workers. He characterizes their attitude to the slaves and slavery as a “barrier to progress”—not only to the progress of the slaves, but to their own progress as well, since their attitude prevented them from “attain[ing] the true freedom of labor” (an apparent euphemism for a classless socialist society). And finally, he hails the actions of the North in the Civil War for having swept away this barrier to progress. Here again, then, Marx focused on the actual—world-historic—interests of the working class. He did not take his cue from the perceived interests of elements of the working class whose existing opinions were barriers to their own progress. And just as he would soon champion the Irish struggle for independence because of its potential to deal a blow against the supremacist attitudes of English workers that diverted them from the revolutionary, internationalist path, he here championed the North’s war against slavery for its potential to deal a blow against the supremacist attitudes that diverted the “white working class” of the US. A few years later, Marx reiterated the same idea in a famous passage in Capital: “In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Taken by itself, this latter statement is somewhat vague. Marx does not spell out why “labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” When read together with the address to Lincoln, however, it becomes clear that Marx is suggesting that supremacist thinking and acceptance of slavery among elements of the “white working class” of the U.S. caused them to “forge their own chains.” (The January 1, 1870 confidential communication from the IWMA’s General Council would later express a similar thought, regarding the attitudes of the English masses to the Irish: “What ancient Rome demonstrated on a gigantic scale can be seen—in the England of today. A people which subjugates another people forges its own chains.”) But when Marx made the statement about labor in the white and black skins, the slaves were already free and the North had won the Civil War. He noted with approval that these events had begun to undo the “paralysis” of the working-class movement: “But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation [i.e., agitation for the workday to be legally limited to eight hours], that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.” A May 12, 1869 address of the IWMA to the National Labor Union in the US, written by Marx, reiterated this point as follows:

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the victorious termination of the antislavery war has opened a new epoch in the annals of the working class. In the States themselves, an independent working-class movement, looked upon with an evil eye by your old parties and their professional politicians, has since that date sprung into life. … On you, then, depends the glorious task to prove to the world that now at last the working classes are bestriding the scene of history no longer as servile retainers but as independent actors, conscious of their own responsibility, and able to command peace where their would-be masters shout war.47

Conclusion Compromises with white nationalism, disregard for its dangers, and abstract rhetoric about interracial and inter-national unity are not solutions; they have contributed to the crisis we now face. The time is now to reclaim the revolutionary humanism of Marx’s struggle against white nationalism. We must decisively defeat Trumpism and other manifestations of far-right xenophobia and racism––and soon. Their defeat is in the interest of all humanity. Not least, it is in the interest of the white-nationalist base that Trump has in his grip. Only the defeat of Trumpism can free it from his grip and help redirect it away from white nationalism, and onto the path of independent emancipatory self-activity.

47

The comment about war and peace is part of the address’s call on the National Labor Union to try to help prevent a war between the US and the United Kingdom. 57

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Part I TRUMPISM IN POWER, AIDED BY THE SOFT-ON-TRUMP LEFT, THREATENS LIFE AND LIBERTY

It may not be possible to stop US president Donald Trump before he launches the country and the world into a monstrous war, even a nuclear war, with North Korea or Iran. Similarly, the real threat Trump poses to Americans’ civil rights and liberties could be just as fatal to revolutionaries and progressives. The unthinkable must be acknowledged and our support for the Resistance to Trumpism must be intensified. A crucial aspect of this process is to fight the continuing attempts to “normalize” Trumpism. In September, erstwhile critics of Trump suddenly described him as bipartisan, reasonable, and a new man, merely because he said that he loves the DREAMers (undocumented immigrant youth) and seemingly cut a deal with Democrats regarding their legal status. Nothing became of the alleged deal. Around the same time, even supposedly liberal Hollywood compromised its opposition to Trumpism. At the Emmys (an American TV awards ceremony), former White House spokesman Sean Spicer was recruited to perform a surprise comedic bit, playing himself. The audience roared. It was as if his months of lying to the public and attempting to intimidate the news media were all just theater, instead of actions for which he should be denounced and punished. It is wearying, but necessary, to keep saying “this is not normal.” Otherwise, we may come to accept the unacceptable. Another crucial aspect of the fight against Trumpism is to combat and root out the idea that the left can somehow win over Trump’s base and turn white nationalists towards revolutionary socialism.1 As we discuss in a later section of these Perspectives, that is a pipe dream of a segment of the “left” that wants power for itself, and which acted in ways that helped Trump win the 2016 US election. Marxist-Humanist Initiative (MHI) redoubles its commitment to fight such accommodation. Trump must be removed and Trumpism must be rooted out. What Trump Has Already Accomplished Trump’s history in office is a nine-month long push to resurrect and legitimize racist, white supremacist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, anti-labor, anti-immigrant, and anti-poor sentiment and We use the term white nationalist to refer to the ideology of people like Trump, Steve Bannon, and Pat Buchanan, and not only neo-Nazis and members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan. In an important recent essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Trump “the first white president” and writes that “his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.” 1

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action––and to help the rich, including through policies and laws that exploit and destroy the earth. It is true that he has not succeeded in getting a single major piece of legislation through Congress. And the Resistance, as well as pushback from some federal judges and ethical civil servants, have blocked some of his intended actions and have forced him to moderate others. Nonetheless, the scope of Trump’s power and the harm it has already done are shocking. The following is a partial list of what he has accomplished: 1. Taken the US to the brink of nuclear war with North Korea, and kept us on that brink 2. Encouraged violence against African-Americans, immigrants, Jews, the left, and the press 3. Encouraged and legitimated racism, Nazism, and white supremacy (see our editorial on Charlottesville) 4. Increased deportation of immigrants and instituted a phase-out of the DACA program 5. Imposed three “Muslim ban” travel restrictions, yet to be finally adjudicated illegal 6. Reduced the quota for refugees to be admitted to US in 2018 to a paltry 45,000 (out of 22.5 million refugees world-wide) 7. Failed to send vital aid to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after the hurricanes that hit them (he has also been lax since then on providing aid to these islands as well as Texas and Florida) 8. Reduced and reversed enforcement of criminal and civil anti-racism laws 9. Reduced and reversed enforcement of LGBT rights 10. Banned transsexuals from serving in the military, even though many are serving, and no one was bothered by it 11. Cheered on Congress’ multiple attempts to redistribute tax money from the poor to the rich by reducing health-insurance requirements and subsidies, including Medicaid, and backed congressional “repeal and replace” bills that would end health insurance for 21– 30 million people 12. Issued executive orders to weaken the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) by reducing the number of conditions and people it covers, and by making it harder to sign up for, which threatens to cause it to collapse 13. Taken administrative actions to harm women’s health, including by permitting employers to exclude contraception from health insurance coverage; he also backs legislation to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks and to defund Planned Parenthood 14. Re-instated the “gag rule” that bars any foreign aid that includes funds for abortion or even for information about abortion 15. Pushed Congress for tax cuts that will benefit only the very rich, but hurt the poor and middle class 16. Proposed a budget and tax “reform” that would create a massive budget deficit that would ultimately have to be contained by slashing funds for education, transportation, infrastructure, and health programs for the elderly, poor and disabled

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17. Rescinded administrative policies meant to reduce risks, created by Wall Street, to individuals and to the stability of the financial structure of the country and the world, increasing the likelihood of future financial crises 18. Rescinded, through decree or decimation of enforcement agencies, consumer protection polices intended to curb abuses by drug companies, manufacturers, and agribusiness 19. Rescinded, through decree or decimation of enforcement agencies, protections of workers’ rights, health and safety 20. Taken the US out of the Paris Climate Accords and encouraged climate-change denial 21. Deregulated federal lands and waters causing dangerous environmental exploitation and pollution 22. Encouraged opposition to scientific knowledge and supported faith-based ideology instead 23. Appointed a right-wing ideologue to the Supreme Court, increasing the chance that it will soon tilt all the way to the right 24. Made a shambles of the Departments of State, Environmental Protection, Education, Health, and others; many nonpartisan experts are gone and Trumpite ideologues are making policy 25. Increased US participation in the wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all over the Middle East and the world 26. Failed to do anything about ageing infrastructure 27. Cut funds for health, education, and scientific research 28. Pardoned former sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to cease extreme racial profiling and harsh detention of immigrants2 29. Reversed a requirement for pay transparency that would have helped address the pay gap between white men and almost everyone else 30. Reversed the decision to put the first woman––the great Black Abolitionist, Harriet Tubman––on US paper currency 31. Engaged in rampant, illegal self-dealing to enrich himself, his family, and business friends, establishing a kleptocracy beyond anything ever before seen in the US 32. Continued his public insults of and attempts to intimidate women, people of color, and anyone who disagrees with him––even judges, Congresspeople, and “gold star” military family members (who have lost a loved one during military action) 33. Threatened to cut US payments to the United Nations, which would force it to cut programs that aid the poor

This pardon also signaled to Trump’s appointees and cronies that they need not rat on him in an attempt to save themselves from prosecution in the ongoing investigations of his campaign’s cooperation with the Russian government as it interfered in the US election, because he will pardon anyone involved who is convicted of a crime. 2

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34. Turned a blind eye as Myanmar’s security forces have launched a campaign of murder, rape, and arson against the majority-Muslim Rohingya population of the country’s Rakhine state, causing more than 500,000 people to flee into neighboring Bangladesh

“F–––ing Moron,” “Heading Towards World War III” As Trump continues to threaten North Korea with obliteration, and that country’s government responds in kind, US diplomatic, military, and security-establishment leaders are warning that he is undermining diplomatic efforts and very possibly goading Kim Jong-un, head of North Korea, into starting a war with the US. An alternative scenario is that a trigger-happy Trump could cause a war accidentally. The fact that he stayed “on script” when he spoke to the South Korean National Assembly on November 7—when he was just 35 miles from the North Korean border— does not mean that he will not revert to “fire and fury” rhetoric when he leaves the area. Although the literal words of his speech did not descend to that level, it was so insulting and bellicose that he sounded as if he were a hair’s breadth away from launching nukes. Trump recently told a meeting of top US military and civilian leaders that he wants to increase the US nuclear arsenal ten-fold, even though it is already able to kill everyone in the world many times over. This impelled his own Secretary of State to refer to him privately as a “f–––ing moron.” Stuart Rollo, an international-security researcher, warned in the New York Times that a US nuclear buildup would be profoundly destabilizing: “American nuclear advances threaten to start a new arms race and change the logic of mutually assured destruction, which has undergirded nuclear stability since the 1950s.” World leaders are holding their breath to see what may develop. Many are simply shunning Trump. Yet he himself takes the Korean threat of nuclear conflagration so unseriously that he continuously insults Kim Jong-un and calls him “Little Rocket Man.” And according to an October 12 Quinnipiac University poll (question 48), a frightening 46% of Republicans approve of the possibility of a preemptive strike against North Korea that Trump has been threatening. Military analysts are scared, because a “second Korean war” would likely cause one million casualties on the first day alone, including hundreds of thousands of US citizens in the area. Top officials in Trump’s own government have recently warned Congress of the danger. But no one believes that Trump will refrain from tweeting provocations against Kim Jong-un for very long. His provocations motivated Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee to warn in October that “we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.” (Corker also announced that he would not run for another term in Congress, which frees him to criticize Trump publicly and to act on principle.)

Blatantly Racist, Deliberate Neglect of Puerto Rico Trump’s treatment of Puerto Rico––whose residents are US citizens––is particularly shocking. As of November 5, 46 days after Hurricane Maria struck the island, 60% of its population still 4

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lacked a power source to provide electricity and cell phone towers. Thousands still have no access to clean drinking water or sufficient food. The death toll is increasing due to the spread of disease, especially diseases transmitted through unclean water. Nothing like that dire emergency exists in Houston or Florida, which were hit by hurricanes about the same time. This disparate federal standard of aid reflects naked racism. Trump has not hidden his disdain for Puerto Ricans or his belief that they are unworthy of substantial US government aid (see this article, written ten days after the hurricane; conditions have improved little since then). Puerto Rico’s economy had already been in a severe crisis, with a power grid on the verge of collapse and a power company that was bankrupt. It has an enormous debt to bondholders that is impossible to pay. A half million people had already moved to the mainland since the Great Recession set off a permanent local recession. Now, thousands more are leaving because of the hurricane. Families are being torn apart as parents send their children to the mainland US because their schools are closed. The ageing and de-skilling of the population accelerates. The dangers exacerbated by Trump’s deliberate neglect may destroy the island’s future. But to Trump and his white nationalist-stacked government, this is fine, just as it is fine for him to continue to insist that there were “good people” among the white supremacists who marched and murdered in Charlottesville. His attempts make racism legitimate are indeed frightening.

The Republican Party Will Not Stop Trump As terrifying and morally repugnant as Trump is, there is little reason to hope that the Republican-controlled Congress will try to stop him. It is true that Corker, as well as two other Republican Senators––Jeff Flake and John McCain––have called his actions a “danger to democracy” and a “debasing of the nation.” And most other Republican congresspeople are reported to agree with them. Yet almost none of them will say so publicly. As a number of pundits have pointed out, this is reminiscent of McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy scared the whole government into going along with him for many years, as he conducted an antiCommunist witch hunt and ruined the lives of thousands of people. Trump is by no means popular among Americans. His approval rating is at a historic low among US presidents of the last 72 years. The elections for state officials in several states on November 7 resulted in a big sweep for the Democratic candidates. The winners included many women and people of color, as well as a transgender woman, Danica Roem. She won a seat in the Virginia legislature, ousting a 13-term conservative Republican who had boasted that he was Virginia’s “chief homophobe.” The voter turnout was high and a major issue was healthcare—people don’t want to lose it. The latest election was widely seen as a referendum on Trump, and he lost decisively. So why does the Republican Party continue to stick by him? The answer is that Trump’s support among the “base” that brought him to power remains unshakeable. This base does not constitute a majority of Americans; it may not even constitute a 5

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majority of Republican voters. But it is particularly rabid, and it disproportionately turns out to vote in Republican primary elections, so it wields outsized power over the careers of Republican politicians. And candidates selected by this narrow base can and do win general elections as long as enough mainstream-Republican and independent voters continue to regard such candidates as lesser evils than their Democratic opponents. Thus, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress are cowed by, and do the bidding of, the base ––and the moneyed interests that underwrite this base, such as the Mercer family that funds Breitbart. And thus, Trump continues to “play to the base” instead of pursuing policies and behaving in ways that the majority of the country wants. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Trump’s business ties to Russians connected to the regime of Vladimir Putin, that country’s president. He is also investigating the Trump campaign’s collusion with that regime to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election and obstruction of justice by Trump and his underlings. Mueller has begun to indict people from the election campaign for various crimes. It appears as if enough evidence has emerged to prove that Trump committed “high crimes and misdemeanors”––the requirement for impeachment––but the investigation process is not moving fast enough to prevent more devastation by Trump right now. Even were it proceeding more rapidly, it is very unlikely that Trump will be removed from office via the impeachment process as long as Republicans control Congress. A majority of the House would have to vote to impeach him, and two-thirds of the Senate would have to vote to remove him. Given that support for Trump among his base is unyielding, and given the power that this base exercises over Republican politicians, this is almost inconceivable unless and until the Republicans suffer a landslide electoral defeat—hopefully, next year, when the whole House of Representatives and a third of the Senate is up for election. And for the same reason, it is unlikely that Trump’s Cabinet will remove him via the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. The best hope for Americans and people throughout the world (whose disapproval of Trump is even stronger than it is at home) is instead popular mobilization from below––i.e., the Resistance, which we discuss in detail later in these Perspectives. On September 15, a group of political scientists disclosed polling results which indicated that 61% of Americans opposed to Trump “would join a general strike to help end the Trump presidency.” This of course does not mean that we would be making Mike Pence the president. A general strike that brings down Trump could surely bring down Pence and the rest of the Trump regime as well. Trump’s Threat to Liberal Democracy The more Trump is forced into a corner by the Mueller investigation and the Resistance, the more likely it becomes that he will respond with repressive measures against leftists and liberals ––banning our organizations, jailing those of us in the US, inciting violence, etc. It also becomes more likely that he will try to suspend civil liberties such as voting rights, freedom of speech, and rights of those charged with crimes. He may even take extraordinary measures to protect himself, and his family and friends, from prosecution and impeachment, such as trying to

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suspend parts of the Constitution and trying to put himself above the law by pardoning himself in advance of criminal charges. Trump frequently rails against the news media, for exposing his lies, and rails against the judicial system, for thwarting his policies. He could easily provoke a Constitutional crisis by jailing journalists or defying the courts. In our August 2016 editorial that warned against the extraordinary dangers of Trump and Trumpism, we wrote: [T]he upcoming election is fundamentally a referendum on civil liberties, freedom of the press, and separation of powers in the U.S. government. A Trump victory would be a decisive victory for those who regard these rights as expendable; and they will be expendable. The fact that the authoritarian strongman who rules over us came to power “democratically,” and the fact that a majority of voters effectively endorsed his plans, would be used to legitimize the abrogation of more than two centuries of bourgeois democratic rights. This remains all too true–except that Trump was elected by a minority whose votes counted for more than the votes of the majority in the Electoral College. His Justice Department is throwing the book at “violent” anti-Trump protesters, such as “antifas” who tossed garbage cans at a protest during his inauguration. Some of them have been indicted for felonies, as has one anti-racist Charlottesville demonstrator. And Trump continues to use rallies to incite his base to attack protesters and the media. His administration is surely gearing up for the possibility of jailing potential troublemakers, as evidenced by such measures as forcing DreamHost, a web-hosting company, to turn over data from a protest website; demanding that states turn over voters’ personal information to the federal government; and giving military weapons to urban police departments. The latter two actions are primarily aimed at suppressing the Black and Latino vote and any uprisings, but the measures are also part of unprecedented federal data-gathering and militarization of the police that may enable Trump to pre-empt nascent rebellions from the left and help those on the right. At an August 22 “campaign rally”—three years before the next presidential campaign––Trump launched into another virulent denunciation of the “lying press” (a literal translation of the German Nazi epithet Lügenpresse). The purpose of Trump's continual attacks on the media is not only to discredit the now daily exposés of his lies and illegal actions. These attacks are also a dangerous assault on the freedom of the press. Furthermore, if Mueller issues an indictment of Trump, or even a report detailing his criminal, possibly treasonous, activity, these attacks will have conditioned Trump's supporters to reject Mueller's findings, to embrace Trump's “alternative facts” instead, and to rise up to protect him. Yet, despite everything that has already taken place during Trump’s presidency, it may still seem to some that we are caught up in, or whipping up, “hysteria.” It is true that there has not been a sweeping crackdown against leftists––yet. This can give rise to the illusion that the left is safe

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under this presidency (even if the undocumented, people of color, and other minorities are not). However, in light of the many warning signs that scream out at us, the relative absence of repression to date actually means only that the contradictions have not yet reached the point where Trump feels threatened enough, or, conversely, thinks his hold on power is secure enough, to mount a full-scale strike against civil rights and liberties. We note that a great many Jews in Nazi Germany initially pooh-poohed warnings about the dangers of Hitler’s regime. Those who have criticized MHI for our critical defense of liberal democracy do so from a privileged position. They are not the Black people being shot by cops, the immigrants being deported, or other “collateral damage” that this so-called “left” considers an acceptable price to pay for Trumpism’s challenge to the “neoliberal” status quo. Varieties of “Leftist” Accommodation to Trumpism, and the Marxist-Humanist Alternative A great many factors combined to hand Trump the presidency. A relatively small one, but one that may have been decisive in the election and may be decisive in the future, was accommodation to Trumpism among parts of the “left.” One variant of soft-on-Trump “leftism” stems from the attitude that one should practice politics that make one feel good, without regard to its effect. Such people “righteously” refused to vote in a way that would have maximized the likelihood of Trump’s defeat, even in swing states that can—and did—decide the presidency. The number of votes cast for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in each of the three states that proved to be pivotal to Trump’s ElectoralCollege victory (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) exceeded his margin of victory. In addition, an unknown number of people chose not to vote at all, taking to heart the message–– emanating from Stein and many supporters of Bernie Sanders––that Hillary Clinton was as bad as or worse than Trump. We are just now beginning to learn the extent to which the Putin regime fomented such sentiments through exploitation of social media. Other destructive politics arose from a single-minded, narrow anti-neoliberal “leftism” which insisted that neoliberalism is a greater threat to humanity than proto-fascism.3 In an interview with WGBH during the election season, Stein went so far as to declare that “[t]he answer to neofascism is stopping neoliberalism. Putting another Clinton in the White House will fan the flames of this right-wing extremism.” As one commentator shrewdly noted, her plan was to stop Trump by electing him president! Yet, despite the horrors of Trumpism we have experienced thus far, not to mention those that lie in wait, the notion that neoliberalism is a greater danger than Trumpism doggedly hangs on. Glen Ford, editor of Black Agenda Report, as well as other “deep state” and conspiracy theorists, touted this line in June of this year, at the Left Forum in

By anti-neoliberal “leftism,” we do not mean opposition to neoliberalism—which no one on the left supports—but tendencies that oppose neoliberalism while shirking from opposition to capitalism in all of its forms, especially tendencies that seek to make common cause with the far right, celebrate the rising popularity of reactionary alternatives to neoliberalism as a progressive blow struck by the working class, and/or regard neoliberalism as the main enemy. 3

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New York City. (An MHI-sponsored Left Forum panel, Confronting “Anti-Neoliberal Left” Collaboration with Trumpism and the Far Right, put forward a diametrically opposed position.) Another attitude that contributed to soft-on-Trump “leftism” was the “after Trump, our turn” view. Actress and left activist Susan Sarandon, a Sanders supporter who later endorsed Stein, expressed this attitude as follows. “Some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately. If he gets in, then things will really explode.” Of course, the “after Trump, our turn” attitude is only an update of the “after Hitler, our turn” thinking of the German Communist Party of the 1930s (see note 9 below). It seems that those who will not learn from history are dooming the rest of us to repeat it. And there were other destructive attitudes that fueled softness toward Trump within the “left.” There were Putinites, and the barely-distinguishable “anti-imperialists” who preferred Trump in order to enhance Putin’s power and thereby weaken the power of the US. There were those who wanted nothing more than to punish the Democratic Party––irrespective of the consequences for the people of the US and the rest of the world––after their effort to take over the party failed. Finally, there were some nihilists who just wanted to “burn it all down.” What all of these currents have in common is that they either downplayed the enormity of the threat that Trumpism poses or did not care enough about that threat. They therefore did not feel the need to act in a principled and effective way in a bourgeois election. Instead, they engaged in play-acting at revolution, casting pointless and self-indulgent votes at the ballot box that benefited the forces of reaction. We are proud that we bought into none of this. MHI warned against “The Extraordinary Dangers of Trump and Trumpism” before the election, in our August 2016 editorial. We were mocked and denounced for that editorial and for our statements that followed. Yet nearly everything we warned about has already come to pass. We are not trying to score points against our soft-on-Trump critics by telling them “we told you so.” The point is that those who helped enable Trump’s victory can still change their ways, and acknowledgment of wrongdoing is a precondition for real change. Otherwise, the best we will see from them is a change in their line, not the needed re-evaluation of everything––all of their political positions and political aims––that would allow them to identify the underlying reasons why they were so disastrously wrong. And, in the meantime, publicly holding them accountable for the consequences of their actions helps to prevent others from coming under their influence. But the crucial point is not the mere fact that they were wrong while we were right. To put it bluntly, it did not take great insight to “predict” that Trump would do the things he said he would do! The crucial point is to understand why we were able to “predict” this when they were not. It did not take great skill on our part to reject the many rationalizations for “waiting and seeing” what Trump might do, or for giving him “the benefit of the doubt.” MHI was able to see what was coming because “[w]e have no interests separate and apart from” the interests of “working people and freedom movements of African-Americans and other minorities, women, youth, and all those around the world who are struggling for self-determination.” Consequently, we were not burdened by a desire to spin events with the aim of capitalizing on them to advance the

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special interests of our organization or our program for action. We saw what was coming because we analyze trends and take action on the basis of principles derived from Marx’s philosophy of revolution. This philosophy looks to the independent, emancipatory self-activity of the masses and a philosophy of human liberation as the motive forces for social change. It does not regard any party, movement, or program that allegedly “represents” the masses as the motive force for social change. It rejects, as substitutionist, all notions that the interests of a particular party, movement, or program are tantamount to the interests of humanity. When such self-serving elitism is not allowed to cloud one’s understanding of Trump and Trumpism, their retrogressive trajectory has been palpably clear from the start. Of course, saying “we told you so” is not a sufficient response to the enormity of the threat that Trumpism poses. In subsequent sections of these Perspectives, we therefore discuss the Resistance and how to combat white nationalism in the tradition of Marx, as well as left populism and “post-truth” politics.

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Part II THE RESISTANCE: A PERMANENT STATE OF REVOLT AGAINST TRUMPISM

The Resistance––the groundswell of grassroots activism in opposition to the presidential candidacy and subsequent election of Trump––has been phenomenal. MHI has reported on some of the many protests on our website. The protests have dealt with a huge range of subjects. Even Trump’s very presence at home and abroad incites oppositional demonstrations. This opposition, expressed by millions of people across the US, is the principal reason why Trump has not yet done even more harm than he has done to date, and the principal reason why his grip on power appears to be weakening. The Resistance has stayed Trump and Congress’ hands through its massive, interracial, intergenerational, multi-gender protests, which have taken many forms.4 The protests have been continuous. This permanent state of revolt across the US underlines the Resistance movement’s firm and indefatigable commitment to get rid of Trump, not to reform him. This was already becoming clear on Day 1 of his presidency. Mass resistance to Trump and Trumpism erupted the day after his inauguration, in the form of Women’s Marches that were the largest single-day protest in US history. As we said at the time, they represented a clarion cry “[t]hroughout the country and around the world …. [B]etween three-and-a-half and five million people served notice to [Trump] and his government that we will not sit idly by as he tries to take away our rights, freedoms, and well-being.” The most noteworthy feature of the Women’s Marches was that they “opposed not just one facet of Trumpism; they opposed it in its totality. … [They] took the unprecedented action of rising up spontaneously against this President, this

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A partial list of the subjects of protests includes immigration; racial justice and white supremacy; gender discrimination; healthcare reform; US warmongering on the Korean peninsula; climate change, science, and truth; collusion with Russia; Trump’s support for Turkey’s Erdogan; and freedom of the press. The protesters have come from wide-ranging sections of society, including women; African-Americans, Latinos, and other people of color; LGBTQ people; workers; youth; children and their families; the elderly; those with additional support needs; and immigrants. The forms of protest include demonstrations; sit-ins in Congress, meetings, and airports; emails and letters; phone calls; consumer boycotts; football players “taking a knee”; crowds massing and shouting to prevent “alt-right” speakers on campuses; and more. There have been public “die-ins,” slo-mo People’s Motorcades, and ironic “sponsor a Nazi” marches. Protesters have dressed up as Margaret Atwood’s ‘Handmaids’ and environmentalists have lit up public buildings in green. Graffiti and wall projections have satirized Trump, “RESIST” has been spelled out on the ground for aerial impact, and a giant “Trump Chicken” was inflated within sight of the White House. 11

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government, on its very first day, in opposition not just to some specific policy or action, but to Trump and Trumpism themselves.” Although the Resistance is naturally centered in and largest in the US, the people of America are also receiving a good deal of solidarity from abroad. To this day, Trump is not prepared to visit the UK, a supposed special ally, for fear of facing humiliating public protests. His visits to other countries are consistently met with public opposition, and the masses in many countries continue to petition their politicians to stand up to Trump’s sexist, racist, xenophobic agenda, whether or not they are facing an imminent visit from him. “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA” is being chanted across Europe, and in South Korea during his visit there. Resistance to this American president is global.

Leading Edge of the Resistance Also Challenges the Democratic Party The soft-on-Trump “left” has persistently tried to dismiss the Resistance, and criticize support for it and our recognition of its importance, by claiming that it is nothing but a tool or project of the Democratic Party. We dare such critics to explain the challenge to the Democrats that has emerged within the Resistance. Consider, for example, what took place after Trump’s September announcement that he was terminating the DACA program, which defers the deportation of 800,000 young people (“Dreamers”), mostly Mexicans and Central Americans, who were brought into the US illegally as children. Reaction to Trump’s termination of the program was swift. Marches, hunger-strikes, pickets, and one-day general strikes were surprisingly successful in building support for the Dreamers’ cause. This impelled the Democrats in Congress to intervene. They negotiated with Trump in an attempt to save DACA in return for granting him greatly increased border security. But the DACA youth made it clear that they will not permit the Democratic Party to control or compromise their demands. On September 18, Dreamers shut down a news conference called by Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi to announce her proposed DACA replacement bill. The Dreamers protested because the proposed bill protected only them, not undocumented immigrants who came to the US as adults. During Pelosi’s nationally-televised news conference, they shouted her down: “Democrats are not the Resistance [to] Trump. We are.” ‘We are not your bargaining chip.” "Fight for all 11 million." “All of us or none of us.” This protest is proof-positive that the Resistance is not a tool or project of the Democratic Party. (The Resistance certainly does include a great many people who vote for Democrats––given the current state of US politics, a progressive mass movement without Democratic voters is an impossibility––as well as some people with roles in party institutions, but that is another matter.) The protesters understood that the deal congressional Democrats were trying to strike with 12

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Trump was meant to serve the interests of politicos, not ordinary people, and that it was using them as bargaining chips. Nonetheless, and in marked contrast to the soft-on-Trump “left,” they identified themselves with the Resistance. In this way, they struck an important blow to maintain the independence of the Resistance from bourgeois politicians.

Saving Health Care Four times over the summer and fall, the Resistance stopped the abolition of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress tried to ram through Congress. Through continuous protests, both in the halls and offices of Congress and in the politicians’ home districts, women, the elderly, and the sick and disabled forced some of their representatives to back down from their reactionary promises to “repeal and replace Obamacare” and thereby eliminate the healthcare insurance of 20 million or more people. It has been remarkable to watch groups of ordinary people jamming “town hall” meetings, and chasing their Congresspeople down the block after they have cancelled such meetings or refused to respond to questions that were asked during them. It has been heart-breaking to hear the testimonials of people who will literally die if they lose their health insurance, and to see the police grabbing disabled sitters-in, yanking them out of their wheelchairs, and forcibly removing them from the US Capitol. From the moment when Trump took his first steps to repeal the ACA, people across the US began creatively and angrily protesting. Numerous different communities and grassroots groups came together to demand that their voices be heard, and that their interests be represented and acted upon. They knew the devastating impact the proposed repeal would have had, and they articulated their opposition to it in no uncertain terms. Ordinary people took charge of coordinating campaigns and they successfully flooded phone lines and offices of elected representatives to demand that they represent their constituents and vote against repeal. People lined the streets––from Brooklyn to San Diego––in public “Die-Ins,” holding tombstone props listing causes of death, contrasting the horrific reality of having to choose between paying rent or medical bills, and stating that “repeal and replace” was meant to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Zombie protests in Houston mocked Trump’s refusal to kill the bill, while highlighting the life-and-death nature of this issue. When this organic and creative campaign was countered by deplorable instances of police officers manhandling disabled peaceful protesters, those viewing the news reports at home were shocked. All this ultimately forced the hands of a few Republican senators who, on multiple occasions, cast decisive votes against repealing and replacing the ACA. The various forms of protest showed the determination of ordinary people to defy Trump’s agenda. They also showed that tens of millions of Americans are reaching for a different society, a society in which the interests of ordinary people come before the interests of those who dare to rule us, a society in which healthcare for all is a right.

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The Struggle Against Racism and White Supremacy A further feature of the Resistance is widespread recognition of the white-supremacist agenda behind Trump’s presidency, and a unanimous commitment to fight this. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) campaign that began four years ago, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, was the first to call out President Trump for being a white supremacist. Since then, there has been some discussion about changes in the tactics and focus of the BLM movement, but what is indisputable is that its anti-racist agenda has converged with that of the Resistance movement, with both finding common ground in opposition to Trump. As we noted in our August 2017 editorial, awareness of white supremacism has increased and has brought an added dimension to the Resistance. Every new initiative of Trump’s in this area–– his appointment of Breitbart’s Steve Bannon as his Chief Strategist, his attempted imposition of the infamous “Muslim ban” a week after taking office, his never-ending “promises” to build a wall along the US- Mexico border, his attacks against the BLM and even against football players who “take a knee” to protest racial injustice, his defense of the armed white supremacists who terrorized Charlottesville, his intentional neglect of the humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico–– each one of these moves brings forth greater recognition of his white-supremacist agenda and greater opposition to it. When Trump responded to the murder in Charlottesville of anti-fascist protestor Heather Heyer by suggesting that Neo-Nazis and anti-fascist protestors were equally bad, about 700 solidarity events were held in protest during the weeks that followed. There were protests against police murders and harassment of Black men and women, against judicial systems that never convict white cops for killing Black people, against monuments to the Confederacy and to racists and misogynists, against lack of representation on the local level, as well as against voter suppression by the states. All of these things are now under fire daily; and people are marching, marching, marching. Since the Charlottesville massacre, white supremacists have been emboldened by the publicity they received, Trump’s indirect support, and the growth of their organizations. They have expanded their rallies and speeches around the country. But everywhere they go, they have been met by protesters who invariably outnumber them. There are marches of antifa, and Jews, and mothers with babies in hand. Anti-racists are also engaged in identifying and outing white supremacists, causing some to lose their jobs or to be rejected by their families. They have also had some successes in their efforts to shut down white-supremacist websites and publications. Marches against police murders of Black youth continue unabated all over the country. St. Louis has experienced nightly marches against police violence for the past two months, ever since the acquittal of a white former policeman who fatally shot an African-American man. The protesters aim to disrupt the city’s economy in order to bring attention to its institutional racism. They have paralyzed the city at night for weeks, and have suffered hundreds of arrests. Women’s Movements in the Forefront One notable feature of the Resistance is that women, and especially women of color, dominate the field in intensive, continual, and creative protesting. They know that Trumpism is a threat to 14

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women’s lives and women’s bodies in particular. During the 2016 US election campaign, momentum was already gathering against “Trump the misogynist.” Women’s organizations have continued to be in the forefront of the Resistance, and women have been among the leadership of every kind of anti-Trump action.5 Women of color have been leaders in all the protest movements against Trump, from BLM to women’s health issues. Issues of unequal pay and advancement were raised by women at the March 8 (International Women’s Day) march in midtown Manhattan, as well as at the union and immigrant-dominated march downtown later in the day. And Trump’s misogyny has enraged women, bringing many who had never protested before out into the streets, carrying signs saying “Pussy Grabs Back,” in most every kind of protest. The National Organization for Women (NOW) has been consistently speaking out and marching for every particular demand of the Resistance. Recently, it has sponsored fascinating discussions investigating the close relationship between white nationalism and misogyny. After more than nine months of street protests, a Women’s Convention, organized by the multiracial leaders of the January 21 Women’s Marches, was held in Detroit at the end of October. Four thousand women attended to discuss defeating Trumpites at the ballot box in 2018, running for political office, fighting sexual harassment and rape, and many other subjects. Despite a $295 entrance fee, one apparent aim of the organizers was to appeal to minority and poor women in particular, in order to help overcome the perception that feminism is “bourgeois” and to foster unity among all the anti-Trump movements. Tamika Mallory, one of the organizers of the Convention, implored participants to practice a feminism that unites women across issues of ethnicity, religion, race, gender, and economic status, and to bring change to their local communities. She said, “If your feminism is the difference between Bernie and Hillary [Clinton], it does not represent me. ... I want to know what you are doing on the ground in your community. Who have you saved? Who have you lifted?” Congresswoman Maxine Waters was another featured speaker. She concluded her talk “by leading a spirited chant of ‘Impeach 45’ aimed at Trump.”

New and Old Organizations Flourish Hundreds of new organizations have sprung up as part of the Resistance. Taking its name from the US Pledge of Allegiance, “Indivisible” was established by former Democratic congressional staff members. Its mission is to “resist the Trump Agenda.” It produces informational material and offers advice––drawing on lessons learned from the “Tea Party” (a recent right-wing predecessor of Trumpism)––on how to stop Trump from implementing his agenda by targeting the members of Congress in one's local area. It also functions as a clearinghouse to publicize affiliated local groups and their activities, and to facilitate their communication with one another. See our editorial on the Women’s Marches and many other articles in our web journal, With Sober Senses. 5

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But Indivisible does not set an agenda for these affiliated groups, much less for the Resistance as a whole. Already well-established civil-rights and civil-liberties groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center, have attracted millions of dollars in contributions since Trump was elected and are actively engaged in opposing unlawful aspects of his agenda.

New Developments Rapid development in the level and scope of Resistance activities goes hand in hand with a development in the spirit and substance of its activities themselves. Encouraged by successes, such as halting the repeal of the ACA, people are developing a keen awareness of the power of collective action. The understanding that people need to speak for themselves is an emerging theme that feeds the independence of the movement. Every time someone picked up a phone to call their senator, they were saying that their voice can make a difference. As this collective swell of voices began articulating ideas about what repeal of the ACA meant to them, we witnessed a development of the ideas within, and the creativity of, the Resistance movement. The shutting down of Pelosi’s news conference by undocumented youth that we discussed above was another expression of the power of people speaking for themselves. These grassroots activists succeeded in articulating an inclusive humanist agenda for migrants’ rights to a nationwide audience. There is indisputable evidence of the intermerging of issues within the Resistance movement. We saw this first on the Women’s Marches back in January, as men, transgendered people, and people of color marched hand in hand, and we see it repeatedly in the cross-section of protesters fighting the repeal of the ACA, protesting immigration practices, and confronting neo-Nazi marches on campuses across the US. The most significant new intermerging is the convergence of anti-racist and Resistance movements that we discussed above. This is a new and all-too-rare blow to the racism that remains the critical obstacle to the unification and forward movement of the country’s forces for freedom.

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Part III ECONOMIC MYTHOLOGY OF THE LEFT-POPULIST ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM

The ideological crisis that began at the start of the Great Recession continues to unfold. The crisis laid bare the inability of mainstream political thinkers and parties to solve or even explain the crisis. In the US, both Democratic and Republican parties are in open crisis, challenged by the emergence of populist factions that reject the ideas and tactics that their parties have pursued for decades. Trump and his white-nationalist base represent a creeping fascism which seeks to destroy democracy and is blatantly anti-humanist in its attacks on science, equality, reason, and freedom. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders’ “Our Revolution” sees an opening for the reconstitution of a left economic populism that harkens back to the social democracies of yesteryear. In Europe, similar movements are afoot, spurred on, in part, by the ideological fallout from the Great Recession. Radical-right populists have made significant electoral gains all across the European continent, advancing an anti-immigrant and anti-European-Union (EU) politics that rails against “establishment elites.” Many of these parties have ties to fascist movements. Meanwhile, figures on the left like Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK have advanced a left-populist counterattack with many similarities to the economic populism of the US. Corbyn in particular has had notable success. He not only succeeded in taking control of the Labour Party and shepherding it to a defeat in the 2017 elections that was considerably narrower than had been expected. He has also succeeded in drawing much of the British left and many youth into the party and rekindling enthusiasm within it. The new-found support for Labour within much of the left has taken place despite the fact that there are serious splits in the party over the country’s impending exit from the EU and despite the narrow nationalism of its current Manifesto (“a Labour government will put the national interest first”). The thirst on the left for electoral success and a left-populist alternative to neoliberalism has largely crowded out concern for the effects of Brexit on workers’ rights, human rights, and divisions between native and immigrant workers. While the analysis in this part of our Perspectives focuses on the US case, many of its arguments should shed light on developments across the pond. The developments sketched above should be understood within the context of a global economy that has never rebounded strongly from the Great Recession. Although the US unemployment rate has fallen from its high of 10% in 2009 to 4.3% in 2017, it would be a mistake to take this as an indicator of a thorough recovery, because the unemployment rate fails to count as unemployed those who have stopped looking for work. The US labor-force participation rate––

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the percentage of the adult population that is either working or actively looking for work––has not recovered at all, falling from 66% in 2007 to 62%, where it has hovered for the past 3 years. The employment-population ratio––the percentage of the adult population that is working––has had an anemic recovery.6 These figures suggest that high unemployment remains a significant problem for the US economy. Furthermore, the share of workers who hold precarious jobs (the “precariat”) has risen as self-employment and the “gig-economy” have expanded, and a large percentage of new job growth is in low-wage sectors. These trends suggest that the low unemployment rate disguises an underlying malaise that continues to afflict many parts of the working class. The ideological crisis of capitalism, combined with continued economic precariousness, opens the door for economic-populist programs, which harken back to the postwar economic boom of the 1940s and 1950s, and promise that proper state intervention into the economy can bring about a return to boom conditions. In addition, some on the left believe that economic populism is the only way to fight Trumpism. They argue not only that a left alternative to Trumpism must stand for something, but also that the something it stands for should be an economic-populist program that can appeal to parts of Trump’s base by addressing its “economic distress” (an alleged fact that will be discussed later in these Perspectives). A significant number of the “Sandernistas” (Bernie Sanders supporters) are downwardly mobile, college-educated young people who have emerged from college saddled with debt only to face a job market significantly bleaker than their parents faced a generation earlier. This has made for a new generation of young “radicalized” people who are attracted to the Sanders narrative, especially as populist leaders have taken on the cause of student debt. This part of the leftpopulist base is complex in the sense that it combines the unfulfilled expectations of a highlyeducated and, on the whole, relatively well-off segment of society with a desire for some sort of systematic social change and a break with the status quo. The demographics of this base help to account for certain aspects of the Sandernista ideology, such as the focus on student debt and health care––issues which are of a material interest to its base––and the desire for redistributionist politics that do not threaten the capitalist mode of production. The packaging of old, reformist ideas as “revolutionary” is a particularly cynical aspect of the populist marketing campaign that has made the Sanders brand so attractive to young people looking for a political identity. Left and right populists share a conviction that the status quo must be overthrown, and a deep suspicion of elites and establishment politicians. Right populists tap into a long US tradition of white nationalism and authoritarianism. It is a political current that is anti-democratic and antihumanist. As we discuss in a later part of these Perspectives, while Trump’s election campaign contained some economic ideas (protectionism, lowering taxes, repealing the Affordable Care Act, etc.), it was his naked racism and authoritarianism that galvanized his base. This dynamic has continued into the present as his base continues to maintain its loyalty to Trump despite the fact that he has failed to follow through on any of his economic promises. Instead, loyalty is maintained through Trump’s attacks on internal and external enemies, much in the same way that Nazism maintained its loyal base. 6

The data are from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 18

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Left populists are vying for space within the larger anti-Trump Resistance. Left economic populism, which seeks to give the Resistance a cohesion by prioritizing social-democratic economic reforms, does not necessarily appear in a pure form. Populist organizations, like Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, often combine populist economic proposals with other issues, like criminal justice reform or LGBTQ rights. Nevertheless, economic populists contend that it is economic populism alone that can create a broad electoral base by appealing to economic interests across the political divide. This creates a conflict when economic appeals to so-called “white working class”7 Trump voters require left populists to downplay or ignore anti-racist, anti-sexist, and pro-immigrant politics. For instance, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said of Trump’s position on immigration that he was “actually pleasantly surprised to hear him say that the system is broken and [the problem is] legal immigration as well as undocumented people. … This is the first time you heard the president talk about legal immigration being used to drive down wages. We’ve been saying that for a long time.” The AFL-CIO’s stance seems to be to resist Trump on specific issues that affect union organization but not to offer blanket resistance or speak out against racism within the union membership. Meanwhile, the Working Families Party, part of a coalition of union-based organizations that attempt to resist Trump while also advocating a leftward turn in AFL-CIO politics, goes door to door with flyers that only advertise economic policies like universal health care, even though its platform actually includes support for immigrants and BLM. The fact is that there are a great many Trump voters within the AFL-CIO, especially in the building trades. Leftists in the union movement do not know how to go about confronting the racism and the proto-fascist element within their own organizations, and so they hope that pure economism will create the social cohesion they need to advance a pro-worker agenda. By taking such a tactical stand, they are playing a dangerous game. As we discussed in Part II of these Perspectives, racism and sexism have done more to divide the US working class than anything else. By not prioritizing anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-fascism, unions stand on the slippery slope of appealing to nativist, nationalist, and racist ideas in an attempt to hold onto a broad constituency. Another reason to reject left economic populism is that it is based on ideas that are incoherent and incorrect. On close examination, it exists in a sort of mythological space. 7

Because the US working class is multiracial, multiethnic, and multinational––40% of it consists of Latinos, Blacks, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans—the term “white working class,” which suggests that the working class is white, is misleading at best. And use of this term in current political discourse is divisive and racist; it takes for granted that the interests of white workers differ from those of other workers. That assumption is antithetical to the causes of proletarian internationalism, national liberation, and the freedom of every individual. In addition, the term “white working class” is typically applied to whites without college degrees. This is a misuse of the concept of working class, since businesspeople and other nonworkers without college degrees get included in the working class, while millions of proletarians who have at least four-year college degrees are excluded. For example, 11.4 million of the 52.4 million US employees with at least four-year college degrees––more than one-fifth of the total–– are teachers (other than administrators) or healthcare workers (other than doctors and dentists). Another 9.2 million are sales or office workers (other than supervisors). 19

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The Mythology of the Populist Left

Neoliberalism as a Political Project For some time now, left thinking has characterized our age as a neoliberal age, blaming all of the economic ills of our time, from rising inequality to the Great Recession, on neoliberal policies. This characterization is based on an assumption that the development of capitalism is shaped by political will and by the ideas behind this political will. It is reinforced by a further myth, that the New Deal was responsible for the US economy’s recovery from the Great Depression. Yet the economic trends associated with neoliberalism (sluggish growth, global financial instability, rising debt burdens, decline in compensation growth, rising inequality, and decline in infrastructure spending) all began prior to the ascension of Reagan, Thatcher, and other neoliberals, while Keynesians were running the show. It is more plausible to understand these trends as an expression of the economic crisis of the 1970s and the failure of global capitalism to fully recover from that crisis. And it was the massive destruction of capital that occurred during the Great Depression that set the stage for recovery, not the New Deal.8 To blame individuals or neoliberal philosophy for the secular tendencies of global capitalism over the last 40 years is to ascribe superhuman powers to individuals––the power to impose their will on a mode of production that has its own autonomous laws that operate behind the backs of producers and politicians. Such voluntarism stands in opposition to Marx’s method of treating economic actors as personifications of economic categories. Today, capitalism seems to limp along uncertainly after the Great Recession. It is not clear that any massive economic expansion on the scale of the postwar boom is in sight. This means that it is unlikely that the massive social spending proposed by left populists can be achieved without harming capital and thus the economy. In addition, the capitalist class is not faced with a militant, organized labor movement that is forcing it to offer the carrot of social democracy as a concession. Ford’s $5 Day An iconic tidbit of left mythology is the story of Henry Ford who, it is said, brilliantly discovered that by paying his workers higher wages, $5 a day, they could buy more Ford automobiles, thus boosting the economic fortunes of the Ford Motor Company. This legend is used to advocate the theory that raising wages is good for the capitalist economy because it boosts consumer demand and therefore profits. However, Ford actually raised wages to attract a stable workforce, not to sell more cars. Indeed, it is impossible to boost profits by paying your workers more. Raising

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Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession. London: Pluto Press, 2012, pp. 23–24, 48–73, 76–77. 20

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wages cuts into profits, even if those workers go out and buy back their own product with their wages.9 The logic behind the Ford parable is one of class compromise. The parable furthers the false notion that what is good for workers is good for capitalism. It fits perfectly into the antineoliberal world view that sees contemporary problems as the result of badly managed capitalism rather than capitalism per se.

Ideal Deal The calls for a new left populism often display an overly romantic and optimistic picture of postwar America. They harken back to the “glory days” of American prosperity in the postwar boom of the mid-20th century, when the US had a relatively robust welfare state, wages rose, policy makers saw a big role for the state in the maintenance of capitalist growth and regulation of class conflict, the state invested in big infrastructure projects, and the US had a strong manufacturing base that employed many people. The commonly repeated tale of prosperity and upward mobility is primarily a tale of prosperity for unionized male workers in certain industries, not for the working class as a whole. Further, this subset of workers paid for their rising fortunes by sacrificing their political power as the union movement ossified into a bureaucratic adjunct to the Democratic Party. Left populists also seem to conveniently forget that the macroeconomic philosophy of the postwar boom––the Keynesian trade-off between employment and inflation––came into contradiction with reality in the 1970s, when the economy experienced rising unemployment and rising inflation simultaneously. This serious failure of both theory and policy is often ignored and unaccounted for in the contemporary left enthusiasm for the miraculous, stabilizing power of state intervention in the economy.

Off-shoring as the Big Job Killer Bernie Sanders’ and others’ plan to reverse free-trade agreements in order to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. Trump promised this too. However, while jobs certainly have left the US as companies have sought out cheaper labor overseas, automation has been the

If Ford workers receive $1 million more, the company’s profit is reduced by $1 million unless the workers go out and buy more Fords. If they spend all of their wage increase on extra Fords, it might seem that the company fully recoups the profit it has lost. However, to produce the extra cars, Ford has to buy extra non-labor inputs, so its net reduction in profit will be equal to the cost of these extra inputs. If only some of the extra wages are spent on extra Fords, the net reduction in its profit will be equal to the cost of the extra non-labor inputs needed to produce the extra Fords plus the portion of the wage increase that its workers don’t spend on extra Fords. Thus the company suffers a drop in profit in all possible cases. 9

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biggest job killer over the long run. Many of the jobs that left for overseas would have eventually been replaced by robots anyway. The left-populist instinct to blame neoliberal free-trade policy contains many dangers. For one, it potentially divides the international working class, as workers of different countries compete to be exploited by capital, all the while ignoring the struggle between labor and capital (in the form of machines) in the workplace. It relies on nationalism and xenophobia, rather than workingclass solidarity, to mobilize a mass base. Finally, this anti-free-trade politics raises the question of whether the manufacturing jobs that came back to the US would really be jobs we want, and how long they would last before being taken over by robots.

Social Democracy is Left Politics Many hold the assumption that social-democratic politics are inherently leftist politics. Even those who criticize Sanders for being too reformist still often share the assumption that there is something essentially leftist about the social-democratic project he represents. Venture capitalist and self-described plutocrat Nick Hanauer gave a much better characterization of social democracy in a recent memo to his “Fellow Zillionaires”: if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. There we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: social democracy is there to save capitalism, not to fight it.

Political Implications We need to think critically about how to engage in the Resistance against Trumpism while also critically engaging with left populism. MHI is not a political party and it is not our role to take positions on every issue and platform. Rather, our role is to help in the development of thought that lays the ground for revolution. In this regard, there are some theoretical distinctions that we can make that can be helpful in framing how the Resistance relates to calls for a left economic populism. Fighting for Concessions vs. Claiming to Solve Capital’s Contradictions There is a difference between fighting for concessions from the capitalist class on the one hand, and campaigning to run the capitalist state better than the capitalists on the other. Leftists should not be involved in the impossible task of saving capitalism from its internal contradictions. This will only end badly––as was illustrated by Syriza’s humiliating capitulation to the EU, after having persuaded the Greek anti-austerity movement to leave the streets and channel its energy into electoral politics. The left should support workers’ struggles for concessions from the

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capitalist class, especially ones that make the working class stronger politically and contribute to its self-development. But it should never defend these struggles by invoking the false narrative that what is good for the working class is good for capitalism. Whether or not a particular concession, say state spending for health care, should be fought for at a particular place and time is not something that can be answered in the abstract. But what should be said is that it is wrong for the left to project the false idea that concessions which help the working class will be good for capitalism.

Voting vs. Supporting The anti-neoliberal aesthetic, especially among young Sandernistas, is such that many would rather allow Trump to be elected than to dirty their hands voting for a centrist neoliberal like Clinton. As the 2018 midterm elections approach in the US, we are bound to encounter the same discussions we encountered in 2016 when we wrote that the extraordinary dangers of Trump and Trumpism make it important for people to understand the difference between voting against Trump and supporting Clinton. “Supporting” constitutes a wider sphere of thinking and action than “voting” does. One can vote against Trumpism, even if that means voting for a centrist, without being in support of centrism.

Fighting Neoliberalism vs. Fighting Capitalism––including Proto- and Neo-Fascism Once one takes into consideration the foolhardy and dangerous nature of the left economicpopulist project, it becomes apparent how meaningless a gesture was made by those who abstained from voting for Clinton in order to purify themselves for the Bernie revolution. Convinced that building a left-populist political movement is more important than defeating fascism, many left populists now play a dangerous game. Some even seek common cause with Trump to the extent that he represents an attack on the neoliberal order. The possibility now exists that such sentiment may assist the rise of fascism. It has now become common even to see defenses of Trump coming from within the left, such as Chris Cutrone’s comment that “Anti-Trump-ism is the problem and obstacle, not Trump.” In last year’s US election and this year’s presidential election in France, strikingly large sections of the left refused to vote for the centrist, preferring to “go down with the boat.” Left intellectual Slavoj Žižek advised French voters to abstain from voting in that country’s second-round presidential election, arguing that “there is no real choice between [Emmanuel] Macron and [Marine] Le Pen,” i.e., between a neoliberal centrist and a neo-fascist. This thinking comes from those who view neoliberalism, rather than capitalism, as the enemy and who therefore prioritize fighting against neoliberalism over developing real anti-capitalist ideas.10 When ideas become tangled like this, when the line between right and left starts to blur, Like Jill Stein, whom we quoted above, and many others, Žižek argues that neoliberalism leads to fascism and that therefore Macron and Le Pen are essentially the same. Such an argument exactly mirrors the Comintern theory of “social fascism” prior to WWII, which argued 10

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it means that fascism is creeping into the political sphere. It is crucial to make distinctions that can help untangle this mess of ideas. One such distinction that we must project is that the critique of neoliberalism is a misplaced critique; it blames ideology and politics for the contradictions of capitalism. We also must make it clear that replacing neoliberalism with social democracy will not resolve these contradictions. And finally, we must make clear the extreme danger that fascist movements around the globe present. At the same time, we must reject the vulgar philosophizing of those who claim a false equivalence between all political forms of capitalist rule, whereupon neoliberalism or social democracy are regarded as just fascism in disguise, or as leading inevitably to fascism in accordance with some vulgar teleology. Capitalist states have taken many forms at different times in history and none of this history is pre-determined by the mode of production. There is nothing inevitable about the rise of fascism. It can be fought, and it must be fought.

Economic Populism is Not the Only Form of Left Politics There is an unchallenged preconception among some on the left: that every social issue can be reduced to an economic struggle and therefore that all left politics must begin with an economic platform. This is not the case. There are plenty of forms of political resistance to fascism that do not require an immediate economic platform. If we resist the call for economic populism, this does not mean that we undercut the ability of the left to engage in resistance in the here and now, holding out for the abolition of the capitalist mode of production in some distant future when conditions happen to be ripe. The Resistance is actively fighting for the rights of immigrants, fighting racism, and fighting against assaults on democracy. None of these fights requires a platform of economic reforms. In fact, the elevation of economic populism to the central position, as the key demand and focus of politics, is a potential threat to the fight against racism, sexism, and xenophobia in that it seeks to attract a proto-fascist base through an appeal to immediate self-interest rather than tackling the ideology of Trumpism head-on.

Ideas are Important At the center of the left-populist political vision is a popular leader who will seize the reins of the capitalist state on behalf of the masses. This reproduces the capitalist division between mental and manual labor in that the masses function only as bodies, only as numbers.

that social democracy led to fascism and that communist parties, like the Communist Party of Germany (CPG), should fight social democracy rather than fascism. The CPG followed this strategy until 1933 when Hitler came to power. Its entire membership was either killed or sent to the first Nazi concentration camps. 24

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Accordingly, as we will discuss further in the next part of these Perspectives, proponents of the new left populism seek to win adherents by appealing to popular superstitions and myths, and by offering easy answers in response to popular discontent. Left populism does not worry about the difficulty of delivering on its promises as long as they win new adherents with these promises. Above all else, this is what makes it populism. It is also the trait it has most in common with Trumpism. Bernie Sanders did not arrive at his platform and rhetoric through careful study of the history of 20th-century social democracy. Rather, he rose to popularity with a handful of soundbites that found an easy resonance among people. Although many economists argue that his economic plans are unrealistic and contain egregious mathematical errors, this does not phase his base. His base was already convinced, prior to examining the arguments, that he is correct. Yet, if left economic populists win elections but fail to deliver on their promises, right-wing populists will be in the wings, waiting to take over. This opportunistic relationship to ideas is everywhere in our culture, but it cannot form the basis for a real left project that aims to confront the central contradictions of our era and to posit a way out of them. Such a project requires the self-development of people, which in turn requires that they take ideas seriously and learn to think for themselves.

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Part IV COMBATTING “POST-TRUTH POLITICS,” IN PRACTICE AND IN THEORY

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth”––defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”––as their word of the year. The contemporary retreat from reason, objectivity, and truth is by no means a phenomenon limited to reactionary forces like Trump, the Putin regime, or the alt-right. Quite disturbingly, it extends to many on the left as well. Consider, for example, a piece by Chantal Mouffe supporting the “progressive left populism” of the French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Mouffe, who has had some influence on Spain’s Podemos party and is best known for her Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, written with the late Ernesto Laclau, contends that in order to “devise a left populism” it is necessary to “discard the dominant rationalist perspective in liberal-democratic political thinking and recognize the importance of common affects (what I call ‘passions’) in the formation of collective identities.” Moreover, she continues, “it is through … a collective will that results from the mobilization of the passions in defense of equality and social justice … that it will be possible to combat the xenophobic policies promoted by right-wing populism.” While Mouffe endeavors to substitute passion for reason, other leftist thinkers endeavor to substitute myth for reality in the struggle for social justice. A recent piece in Jacobin magazine, a publication with a growing influence within the US left, argues that “myths play a central role in people’s moral orientation” and that, as a corollary, “fact-checking,” deemed a hopelessly liberal enterprise, “does nothing to disabuse people of the myths that structure their worldviews.” Further, “liberal myths,” which are “weak” and face “crisis,” “cannot lead the struggle against Trump.” As such, the authors contend that “to fight this reactionary wave, we must construct our own reality, based on ideals and practices of solidarity and economic justice.”11 Fifteen years ago, a “senior adviser” to US President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl Rove) celebrated the exact same notion of constructing reality and contrasted it to what he disparagingly called “the reality-based community.” The embrace of unreason on the left must be fought head-on. Post-truth trends on the left present a danger to both the self-development and the self-activity of the working class and other forces of revolution. In another piece in Jacobin, “The Fallacy of Post-Truth,” the same authors maintain: “The people mourning the age of political truth belong to the extreme center. They are the technocrats and administrators who mistrust the experiences and suffering of regular people with as much fervor as the right-wing fringe.” 11

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The importance of battling post-truth politics becomes clear once we take seriously Marx’s understanding that only the working class can liberate the working class and MarxistHumanism’s stress on the fact that this requires that working people become fully-developed social individuals able to exercise the full “scope [of their] natural and acquired powers.” Posttruth politics is a direct impediment to the development of a clear understanding of our world and what is required to change it. Furthermore, while the emotional appeals and the like may prove useful to the left itself (for winning new followers or winning elections), such opportunism reproduces the familiar divisions in class society between mental and manual labor and between leaders and the led. For these reasons, post-truth thinking represents a real barrier to the selfdevelopment of the working class as an independent force for human liberation, and we need to wage an uncompromising battle against left populism that embraces post-truth politics.

The Vital Importance of the Fight for Truth and Reason We do not deny the importance of passions and emotions to human thought and action. No one ––not even the most fervent proponents of reason such as Plato and Hegel––denies this. We also recognize that it is typically easier to gain a hearing by means of emotional appeals than by means of evidence and reasoning. This is a deeply rooted fact; it is a product of human evolution. But this does not mean that we need to acquiesce in the face of post-truth politics: biology is not destiny, as the women’s liberation movement taught us. Indeed, in a world confronting imminent climate change and an upsurge of demagogic forms of populism, the destiny of the human race depends on our waging a fight against post-truth politics, and emerging victorious. In brief, the evolutionary basis of demagogy and other forms of unreason is that human brains (just like the brains of other animals) have evolved in a way that prioritizes the use of various mental “shortcuts” to make decisions and take action. As a result of subsequent evolution, we can instead base decisions and actions on complex reasoning processes, but we generally employ the mental shortcuts first and most frequently. Individuals with such brains had an evolutionary advantage, since reasoning takes a good deal of time and uses considerable mental resources, while reliance on these shortcuts enabled such individuals to draw conclusions, and take action, quickly and efficiently. These shortcuts were generally adequate to the circumstances within which our species evolved, which were neither socially nor technologically complex. Above all, our reliance on them enabled the human species to avoid extinction. For example, the individuals who survived long enough to reproduce were disproportionately those able to quickly run away from approaching predators, not those who began by mentally processing whether they had sufficient evidence to conclude that a predator was indeed approaching. We now live in societies that are vastly more socially and technologically complex. Yet the brain’s decision-making mechanisms that have emerged through evolution have not adapted to the changed circumstances. We are certainly able to employ reasoning processes, but the mental shortcuts continue to be the “defaults” we rely on to process information.

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However, these shortcuts are no longer adequate to protect us against the new threats to our survival that socially and technologically complex (i.e., capitalist) societies have created. Indeed, reliance on these shortcuts has itself become a major threat to the survival of the human species, as the millions of climate-change “sceptics” and followers of dangerous demagogues should make clear. We must fight post-truth politics as if our lives depend on it, because they do. We are at last compelled to face, with sober senses, our real conditions of life and our relations with our kind––not least, the real condition that truth and reason must play a crucially important role if we are to solve the pressing social and political problems of the modern age. MHI’s commitment to defending truth-telling and truth-seeking against “post-truth politics” is squarely in the tradition of Marx. In Capital, Marx praised economist David Ricardo’s public retraction of an incorrect theoretical claim he had made, calling it an example of “the scientific impartiality and love of truth characteristic of him” (see note 132 here). In an “Afterword” to the same book, Marx also severely castigated post-Ricardian economists for having allowed usefulness, expediency, and apologetics to displace truth-seeking as their primary objectives. The fact that “the class struggle … took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms,” he wrote, sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic. (The above examples could readily be supplemented with dozens more; Marx’s steadfast commitment to truth-telling and truth-seeking is obvious. Yet we unfortunately need to stress the obvious because of the recent popularity of efforts to attribute to Marx the opportunistic doctrine that the practical success of a proposition makes it true. The sole textual basis for this attribution is a misrepresentation of Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach. He wrote, “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking, in practice.” This statement is not about particular propositions. It is about “human thinking” as such. Marx was engaging with the Kantian question of whether human thought can grasp objective reality—arrive at “objective truth”—or only grasp reality as it appears to us. His statement has nothing to do with the claim that practical success makes a particular proposition true.) However, we cannot expect much help from the mainstream left in the battle for truth and reason. The post-truth sensibility that helped Trump win the US presidency is not a creation of the far right and new electronic-communications technologies alone. Much of the left has contributed to nurturing post-truth politics and needs to be held accountable. Philosophical trends on the left bear some responsibility, as we discuss below. Even apart from this, however, the standard practices of the left are to blame. Public meetings, conferences, podcasts, and journals of the left “tell it like it is” (i.e., validate the preconceived notions and prejudices of the faithful) and are replete with emotional appeals. Beyond very narrow confines,

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there is little debate, and almost no reasoned debate. There is very little fact-checking––and no theory-checking to speak of. And those who seek shelter in these left “bubbles” far too often regard truth-seeking and reasoned debate as threats. To be sure, the political and intellectual leaders of this left understand the importance of reason, at least instrumental reason, which helps them to make tactical and strategic decisions and promote their views effectively. The problem is that they “divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.” Reasoning and knowledge of truths are for them, but not for the faithful and certainly not for the unwashed masses. “Affective politics,” for which “the truth of a narrative isn't so much in its literal veracity as in its resonance and affective power,” is the way to win adherents and gain power. As we indicated above, MHI steadfastly opposes this vanguardist conception. The grounding of politics in emotional appeals may perhaps be sufficient to destroy the existing society. But it is a barrier to the creation of the new human society that needs to replace it––a society in which the “full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle” and in which “every cook shall govern.” Depriving people of access to truths, reasoned debate, and familiarity with conceptual thought is detrimental to their full development and their ability to govern themselves. Although we cannot count on the mainstream left to combat post-truth politics––and we especially cannot count on it to help clean up its own mess––it remains important to fight for truth and reason within the left. Many people, in the left as well as in the broader society, do not yet fully recognize that truth and reason are of crucial importance in the struggle for the survival of our species and the struggle for a new human society. Many do not fully recognize the techniques of persuasion that are used to manipulate them. We need to reach out to such people. Despite the lack of support that we expect from the mainstream left, we do have allies. On Earth Day (April 22), we joined about 40,000 others in New York City––and more than a million people in about 600 cities across the globe––in the March for Science. This was unprecedented, the first time “hundreds of thousands of people turn[ed] out to demand that truth be respected and employed.” On the same day, the “Pro-Truth Pledge” project was launched. Those who take the pledge commit to practices such as distinguishing between opinions and facts, asking people to retract false statements, and celebrating those who do so. A principal aim of the project is to pressure politicians and public figures to take the pledge, whereupon they can be held accountable by the pro-truth community for violating it. To date, close to 3000 people have taken the pledge. Bringing this and similar strategies into the left can help to combat post-truth politics within it.

Dialectical Reason as Counterweight to Post-Truth Epistemology Although the current embrace of unreason by many on the left should trigger alarm bells, the attitudes underlying it are hardly new. Epistemic relativism and social constructivism have been common in left thought for several decades now. Consider, for instance, the work of the

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economist Rick Wolff, perhaps the most prominent Marxist thinker in the United States. Since the 1980s, Wolff has advanced an Althusserian theory of “overdetermination,” in which “it is impossible to establish a definitive hierarchy of interpretations” and “it is not possible to establish ‘objective’ validity outside the frame of a particular analytical regime or project.” Thus, “the question of the choice between different theories or entry points involves not which is more accurate or true, but the consequences of choosing one rather than another.”12 (Wolff seems to be silent on the current post-truth climate.) A disdain for science has also been prominent in leftist thought for some time now. The postmodernist component of this disdain received attention in the “science wars” of the 1990s and the Sokal hoax. There is also an older, Romantic variant particularly prevalent in the ecology movement, like that found in the thought of eco-feminist Vandana Shiva. Left unreason also extends to a penchant for conspiracy theory; some recent examples include the 9/11 “Truth” movement, “false flag” theories, and the anti-Semitic conceptions of finance capital that were on display in the Occupy movement. As a good deal of popular commentary has observed, the new post-truth trend is firmly rooted in the influence of poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, including the work of late 20thcentury thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. The irony of the embrace of such putatively left-wing and liberal social theory by the alt-right and other forces of reaction has not been lost on these commentators. A New York Times opinion piece, for instance, notes that “Trump and Stephen K. Bannon probably don’t spend evenings poring over Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation or Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge,” but “parallels between Trump’s attacks on accepted knowledge and critical philosophy’s insistence that we interrogate truth claims suggest that not all assaults on the authority of facts are revolutionary.” Other commentators point to older philosophical roots, especially the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, who held that “there are no facts, only interpretations.”13 Figures ranging from Martin Heidegger and other intellectuals of Hitler’s Third Reich, such as political theorist Carl Schmitt, to the American Pragmatist thinker William James, have also been considered progenitors of the current post-truth trend. And there are even earlier progenitors. There is more than a whiff of today’s post-truth epistemology to be found in what Hegel identified as the “Third Attitude to Objectivity” (alternatively translated as the “Third Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity”) in his Smaller Logic. In our battle against today’s post-truth politics, MHI draws on Hegel’s discussion of the Third Attitude and the several commentaries on that discussion written by Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism. Indeed, our statement “The Self-Thinking Richard Wolff, “Toward a Poststructuralist Political Economy.” In J. K. Gibson Graham, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff, eds., Re/Presenting Class. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2001. 13 Time magazine’s April 3, 2017 cover, echoing Nietzsche’s statement about God, inquires, “Is Truth Dead?” 12

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Idea Does Not Mean You Thinking,” which we issued shortly after our organization was founded, helps to establish the objectivity of its reason for existence (raison d'être) by articulating the importance of organization for the “public process of demonstration and rigorous scrutiny” of ideas that reason and knowledge require. Marxist-Humanist Philosophy and Organization vs. Unmediated “Knowledge” Hegel’s account of the Third Attitude focused on the direct or immediate approach to knowledge of the Intuitionist thinker Friedrich Jacobi, a contemporary of his. It is an approach that rejects mediation––including proof, demonstration, and method––in favor of a direct or immediate knowledge. Hegel noted (para. 63 of the Smaller Logic) that Jacobi’s category of immediate knowledge includes “inspiration, the heart’s revelations, the truths implanted in man by nature, and also in particular, healthy reason or Common Sense, as it is called.” He likened this Attitude to the unmediated starting point of Cartesian philosophy: Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Descartes’ famed maxim, Hegel posited, “is the same doctrine as that the being, reality, and existence of the ‘Ego’ is immediately revealed to me in consciousness …. This inseparability [of thought and being] is the absolutely first and most certain knowledge, not mediated or demonstrated” (para. 76, emphasis added). Dunayevskaya, one of the few to have seriously explored Hegel’s presentation of the Three Attitudes to Objectivity, stressed that he focused on demonstration and proof. Throughout Hegel’s discussion of the Third Attitude, she noted, “the point … is on the necessity of proof” and “the whole attack is very, very deeply rooted against anything, whether Cartesian or Jacobi or Spinoza[,] that roots its philosophy in ‘unproved postulates, which it assumes to be unprovable’” (para. 62).”14 She also called attention to Hegel’s statements that philosophy “tolerates no mere assertions or conceits, and checks the free play of argumentative see-saw” (para. 77) because “all superstition or idolatry [would otherwise be] allowed to be truth” (para. 72). Dunayevskaya also focused on the issue of mediation in Hegel’s discussion of the Third Attitude. He contrasted Intuitionist philosophy, which Jacobi described as a “philosophy of faith,” to Christian faith. The latter, Hegel noted, “comprises in it an authority of the Church: but the faith of Jacobi’s philosophy has no other authority than that of a personal revelation.” Moreover, “Christian faith is a copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine” (para. 63). Thus, in addition to proof and demonstration, Hegel here identified two other mediations of knowledge, namely authority and a body of ideas (or system of knowledge). In her 1961 “Notes on the Logic from Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences,” Dunayevskaya observed: “Over and over again, Hegel lays stress on the necessity to prove what one claims, and the essence of proof is that something has developed of necessity in such and such a manner, that it has been through both a historic and a self-relationship which has moved it from what it was ‘in itself’ (implicitly), through a ‘for itself-ness’ (a process of mediation or development) to what it finally is ‘in and for itself’ (explicitly). Or put it yet another way, from potentiality to actuality, or the realization of all that is inherent in it.” 14

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But Dunayevskaya’s commentary identified yet another mediation that was implicit in his discussion: the Church itself, as an institution or organization that interprets and develops its principles. In a December 8, 1986 letter to George Armstrong Kelly, a Hegel scholar of some acclaim, Dunayevskaya noted that she now saw Hegel in “a new way”: “the dialectical relationship of principles (in this case the Christian doctrine) and the organization (the Church) are analyzed as if they were inseparables.” Dunayevskaya, of course, had no interest in Christian dogma; she was concerned, rather, with the relation of philosophy and organization. Viewing philosophy and organization as “inseparables,” she stressed the need for “organizational responsibility” for philosophy15––that is, the need for an organization to take responsibility for developing and projecting Marxist-Humanist philosophy. Inasmuch as the development of ideas requires proof and demonstration, a task that cannot be accomplished by individuals alone, there is a need for an organization to take responsibility to ensure that ideas are rigorously tested. Without the rigorous testing of ideas, there can be no forward development of Marxist-Humanist thought and there is a real danger of retrogression. At a fundamental level, then, organizational responsibility for philosophy means taking responsibility for ensuring that proof and demonstration are provided for ideas, both old and new. These arguments, developed in our 2009 statement on “The Self-Thinking Idea,” take on a new urgency in the current climate in which reason and truth face serious attack and appeals to emotion and personal belief, in lieu of rational argument and evidence, have become increasingly pervasive. Marx’s dialectic, as Dunayevskaya stressed, is not an applied science; it has to be recreated for every new period. This means that Marxist-Humanism is premised on the development of ideas. This makes a commitment to reason, objectivity, and truth an absolute necessity; and it demands that the pull of intuition, common sense, and personal belief be checked. Marxist-Humanism is also rooted in a rejection of vanguardism. Dunayevskaya’s 1953 letters on Hegel’s “Absolute Idea” and “Absolute Mind,” which she described as “the philosophic moment” of Marxist-Humanism, disclosed a dual movement of theory/practice––the movement from practice, which is itself a form of theory, and the movement from theory, reaching to philosophy. This dual movement is premised on a conception in which reason is not the privilege of intellectuals alone; it entails the self-development of both intellectuals and workers in tandem. Marx’s humanist conception of freedom is centered on the full and free development of the individual. His philosophy of revolution in permanence entails struggling against alienation in all its guises, including unreason. Thus, we repeat: the embrace of unreason on the left must be fought head-on. Hegel regarded the Third Attitude to Objectivity as “reactionary” (para. 76), a retrogression in the history of thought. The contemporary philosophical trends that have contributed to the embrace of unreason on the left represent a similar retrogression. Her December 8, 1986 letter to Kelly concluded: “In this way I see the dialectic flow in the third attitude to objectivity from a critique of the one-sidedness of the Intuitionalists to organizational responsibility.” 15

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Transcending the Limitations of Enlightenment Rationality and Capitalism In response to these trends, a number of popular commentators have called for a “return” to or a “rediscovery” of the Enlightenment. In the main, this shapes up as a sensible call for reason and truth in political discourse, a welcome antidote to postmodern fashions that would jettison the Enlightenment project wholesale. However, there are risks. There is the risk of papering over the contradictions of the Enlightenment, including racism, sexism, and the relation of the Enlightenment to capitalism. And there is the risk of overlooking Marx’s contribution, a new continent of thought, to the struggle for human freedom. For example, Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim argue in the pages of Jacobin that “if the Left wants to resist the alt-right’s growing power, it needs to return to the roots of Enlightenment rationality, which insists on the equality of all people and provides a strong theoretical basis for social transformation and universal emancipation.” They add, “from Descartes, Spinoza, and the French materialists to the French and Haitian revolutions to Hegel and Marx, we have a strain of thought that proceeds from an intelligible world to the full emancipation of humanity.” On the one hand, this is a salutary alternative to the social constructivism of their fellow Jacobin contributors, and its engagement with Hegel and Marx is more serious than that of other leftist commentators. On the other hand, it stops short of the heart of Hegel’s dialectic––absolute negativity, which Marx affirmed as “the moving and creating principle” (while also criticizing the dehumanized form it took in Hegel’s hands). In fact, Fluss and Frim’s return to the Enlightenment turns out to be “a return to Spinoza.” They promote a “Marxist Spinozism,” which endeavors to rescue Spinoza from Deleuze and Althusser. They never touch on Hegel’s famed critique of Spinoza’s concept of Substance: “In my view … everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.” By Subject, Hegel meant that which has movement and self-movement. Self-movement is the product, not of contradictions between things, but contradictions within things, and it was this that Hegel found to be absent from Spinoza’s concept. “Spinoza stops short at negation as determinateness or quality; he does not advance to a cognition of negation as absolute, that is, self-negating, negation” (Science of Logic, para. 1179). Thus, Hegel distinguished between two kinds of negation, or negativity: “abstract negativity,” which he termed a “first negation,” and “absolute negativity,” which he termed a “second negation” (Science of Logic, para. 210). Abstract negativity remains defined by what it negates, while absolute negativity transcends this dependent role of negation. It offers a new beginning from itself. Much of contemporary left thought and activity is characterized by a kind of abstract negativity: a marked inability to move beyond the boundaries of what it is opposed to––that is, to develop a new vision that transcends the bourgeois horizon. For instance, Chantal Mouffe’s left populism of affect and passions is tied to a “project of radical democracy … opposed to the notion that we need a revolution.” Similarly, as we discussed earlier in these Perspectives, the left populism of Bernie Sanders offers little more than a politics of economic redistribution that is driven by emotional appeals and a kind of denialism concerning economic conditions (especially recognition that successes of the welfare state were predicated on a booming economy that is not

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on the horizon today). This self-limiting character of most current left thought has a counterpart in the self-limiting character of many of today’s social movements. Given the failed revolutions and the counterrevolutions of the 20th century and their many horrors, this abstract negativity that frequently passes itself off as “socialism” is quite understandable. The prospect of a thoroughgoing, liberatory socialism, a new beginning that transcends the contradictions of bourgeois society, is not likely to grip the minds of a great many people without articulation of its content and demonstration of its feasibility. This impasse cannot be resolved by recourse to the affective dimension, the construction of mythologies, and the like. On the contrary, these retreats from reason are a symptom of that impasse. It is no coincidence that poststructuralist and postmodernist thought emerged as a pole of attraction in the wake of the defeat of both the May 1968 revolt in France and the broader revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s. Nor does the return to Enlightenment reason advocated by Fluss and Frim, shorn as it is of the dialectical reason of Hegel and Marx, open a path forward. Inasmuch as a position that begins from Spinoza’s Substance lacks a concept of internal contradiction, it occludes recognition of the possibility of capital engendering its own opposite, and thus tends to reinforce the reformist and substitutionist tendencies of today’s left populism. Overcoming the self-limiting character of many contemporary social movements requires engagement with absolute negativity–– development and projection of a viable and liberatory alternative to capital. Marxist-Humanism’s unique contribution to the present period is our effort to work out and project a viable and liberatory alternative to capital, grounded in Marx’s conception of a new society, particularly as detailed in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.

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Part V COMBATTING WHITE NATIONALISM: LESSONS FROM MARX

This part of our Perspectives seeks to draw lessons from Marx’s writings and practice that can help combat Trumpism and other expressions of white nationalism. In Section A, we argue that Trump’s election was not due to an uprising of the “white working class” against “economic distress” brought about by neoliberalism, but an expression of a long-standing white-nationalist strain of US politics. Section B examines Marx’s writings on and activity around Irish independence and the US Civil War. The foremost lesson we draw from this examination is that fighting white nationalism in the tradition of Marx entails the perspective of solidarizing with the so-called “white working class” by decisively defeating Trumpism and other far-right forces. Their defeat will help liberate the “white working class” from the grip of reaction and thereby spur the independent emancipatory self-development of working people as a whole. In the UK, the surge of support for Brexit last year, which secured the victory of the “Leave” forces, was driven largely by anti-immigrant backlash. In France, neo-fascist Marine Le Pen won more than a third of the vote in this year’s presidential election. Most ominously, the virulently racist and xenophobic Donald Trump is now US president, and he enjoys the firm support of avowed white supremacists. This nexus has given rise to a shocking increase in far-right violence, up to and including the recent murder in Charlottesville of anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer by a neo-Nazi. Clearly, we must combat this resurgence of white nationalism. And we must understand how to do so, and how not to do so. For Marxist-Humanists, the goal remains, as always, complete human freedom: the free development of each human being as the condition for the free development of all. What kind of responses to the threat of white nationalism help us to move closer to the realization of this goal, and what kinds do not? To aid us in working out an answer to that question, we will examine Karl Marx’s writings and praxis and seek to draw some lessons from them. In his day, Marx likewise had to confront white nationalism, and he developed some ideas about why it exists and how to overcome it. Specifically, we will examine some of Marx’s writings and activity around the US Civil War and around the struggle for Irish independence from England. Although these were quite different events, Marx regarded the problem of white nationalism in the US and anti-Irish prejudice in England as essentially the same thing: “The ordinary English worker … cherishes religious,

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social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the ‘poor whites’ to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.”16 Before we can turn to Marx’s writings on these questions, however, we need nail down the point that Trumpism really is an expression of an extremely entrenched and long-standing whitenationalist strain in US politics. If that were not the case, what good would it do to re-examine how Marx confronted the threat of white nationalism and try to draw lessons from his thinking and activity? Thus, we first have to expose the factual flaws in the narrative, which is quite popular in anti-neoliberal “left” circles and among “populist” liberals, that Trumpism actually is, and/or that Trump actually won the 2016 election because of, an uprising of the “white working class” against a rapacious neoliberalism that has caused its income to stagnate for decades. Immediately after the election, that line of argument seemed almost ubiquitous, especially on the left. In the wake of the Charlottesville massacre, it seems a lot less plausible than it did before. But the real case against it rests on other facts: (1) The income of the working class did not stagnate. (2) “Economic distress” was not the reason why Trump garnered exceptionally strong support—for a Republican—from a segment of the so-called “white working class.” And most importantly, (3) an examination of the historical record shows that Trumpism is not a response to neoliberalism or economic distress; it is a pre-existing condition.

A. Trumpism: A Pre-Existing Condition The Anti-Neoliberal “Left” Narrative The anti-neoliberal “left” and “populist” liberals frequently tell a story about the 2016 US election that comforts them by blaming their neoliberal adversaries and holding out hope of their own ultimate triumph: Trump’s victory was due to the forgotten “white working class,” which rose up against decades of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. For example, Cornell West’s instant analysis of the election was that [t]he monumental election of Trump was a desperate and xenophobic cry of human hearts for a way out from under the devastation of a disintegrating neoliberal order …. White working- and middle-class fellow citizens––out of anger and anguish – rejected the economic neglect of neoliberal policies and the self-righteous arrogance of elites. [… There was an] abysmal failure of the Democratic [P]arty to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people …. And in February, Boris Kagarlitsky, an apologist for Putin’s regime and self-described Marxist theoretician, opined:

16

April 9, 1870 letter to Sigrid Meyer and August Vogt. Because letters written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels are readily available in a variety of print and electronic versions, they are cited here and below by date and recipient(s) only. 36

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The collapse of the neo-liberal world order is a spontaneous and natural process, generated by its own self-destructive logic …. The victory of Trump is itself a consequence of the crisis …. No matter what the liberal pundits say, these were the votes of workers who brought him the victory. Not the so-called “white men”, but the working class, who openly and, largely, in solidarity, made a stand against the Washington establishment. … This really was an uprising of the forgotten and resentful provincial America against the spoiled people in California and the cosmopolitan officials from Washington, who comfortably exploit cheap labor of illegal migrants …. The crucial factoid regularly cited in support of what West calls “the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people” is the stagnation of middle-class incomes. For example, David Cay Johnston’s instant election analysis was that Trump won because many millions of Americans, having endured decades of working more while getting deeper in debt, said “enough.” From 1967, when Lyndon Johnson was president, to 2014, the average income of the vast majority of Americans rose by only $328 to $33,068. That’s just 1 percent above inflation after 47 years and this income stagnation applies, statistically, to the 90 percent, everyone who made less than $121,000 in 2014.

Middle-Class Income Stagnation? Johnston got his figures from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. For a long time, their work on income inequality was taken to be authoritative and incontrovertible in many circles. Under neoliberalism (i.e., since the early 1980s), they reported, middle-class income has stagnated in the US and there has been a massive and shocking growth of income inequality. However, in response to other researchers’ criticisms, they have recently abandoned the claim about stagnating income. In a paper written together with Gabriel Zucman last December, they conceded that bottom 90% pre-tax income growth is significantly greater than that estimated using the Piketty and Saez (2003) data, according to which average bottom 90% incomes has declined since 1980 …. The real income figures from Piketty and Saez (2003) underestimate the growth of bottom 90% incomes and exaggerate the share of growth going to top groups.17 They went on to state that “[t]here are three reasons why middle-class growth has been stronger than in the Piketty and Saez (2003) series.” First, they had adjusted for inflation by using an (inconsistent) inflation index that exaggerated how much inflation had occurred, thereby Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 22945, Dec. 2016, p. 32. 17

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underestimating “real” income growth. Second, they had looked at the income of “tax units” rather than individuals. Since the number of tax units has grown faster than the number of individuals (because of a declining marriage rate), their previous figures had diluted income growth per person. Finally, and most importantly, their previous work did not count tax-exempt income—such as employers’ contributions, on their employee’s behalf, to Social Security, Medicare, and private pension and medical-insurance plans—which has “grown significantly since 1980.”18 Revised estimates in their December paper, which addressed these problems, tell a very different story. Middle-class income growth was substantial. Between 1982 and 2014, the real per-person after-tax income of the bottom 90% of the population increased by 45%. For the middle 40%, the increase was 53%, and even the income of the bottom half of the population rose by 31%.19 Piketty, Saez, and Zucman also found that, once tax-exempt income is counted, the share of national income that employees receive did not decline throughout the neoliberal period. Prior to the Great Recession, there was no decline at all.20 In recent years, employees’ income share has declined (by a relatively small amount), but this decline was not caused by neoliberalism. It was caused by the recession and the economy’s failure to rebound briskly from it. This evidence lines up very well with what other researchers have found when they measure income using the methods that Piketty, Saez, and Zucman have recently taken on board. It is crucial evidence that the anti-neoliberal “left” explanation for Trump’s election is seriously flawed. If there was no stagnation of income caused by neoliberalism, globalization, or financialization, Trump’s win simply cannot be attributed to a working-class revolt against such stagnation!

Why Votes of Non-College Whites Flipped to Trump Yet even were the story about stagnating middle-class income correct, the narrative propounded by the anti-neoliberal “left” runs into other serious problems. One is the fact that Trump’s “base” has been sticking with him through thick and thin. His approval rating fell somewhat during the initial months of his presidency—apparently, some of the “reluctant” Trump voters became disenchanted—but it has remained steady during the last four months. This would not be happening if Trump’s election had been a revolt against neoliberalism, and for populist economic policies. He has been president for eight months, and there is still no jobs 18

Ibid., p. 33. The statistics cited by Johnston are likewise seriously affected by their failure to count tax-exempt income. 19 Ibid., Appendix 2, Table C3b. For the 1967–2014 period to which Johnston referred, Piketty, Saez, and Zucman’s figures indicate that, after inflation, the per-person income of the bottom 90% of the population rose by 60%. For the middle 40% of the population, the rise was 67%; for the bottom half, the rise was 47%. 20 Ibid., p. 42, Table 1 (top graph). 38

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program in sight. He repeatedly pushed hard for the passage of legislation to “repeal and replace” Obamacare that would have taken away medical insurance from more than 20 million people. And he has populated his administration with the super-rich, including Wall Streeters. So, if the support for Trump among his base had truly been rooted in economic distress and populist concerns, we should by now have seen the base flee from him in substantial numbers. That has not occurred. Another serious problem with the anti-neoliberal “left” narrative is that a substantial and growing body of research indicates that its explanation for why Trump won the election is just not correct. It is true that he received a substantially larger share of the votes of whites without a college education—the so-called white “working class”––than previous Republican presidential candidates had received. This single fact is the statistical hook on which the anti-neoliberal “left” explanation for Trump’s election hangs, but this fact means very little by itself. First of all, educational attainment is a rather imperfect proxy for social class as measured by income or occupation. Second, it is illegitimate to latch onto a fact about “working-class” whites voting for Trump and then “explain” the fact with a made-up story about this having been a working-class revolt against the economic distress imposed on it by neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. That story is no more than one of a great many possible hypotheses about why the shift occurred. It should not be accepted as correct unless the preponderance of additional facts indicates that economic distress was the main cause of the shift.21 However, they indicate that it was not. The controlled studies that have been conducted indicate that, if economic distress had any effect at all, it made people more likely to vote for Trump’s main opponent. The shift to Trump instead seems to have been due to some combination of racism, sexism, discontent with cultural change, anti-immigrant sentiment, and authoritarianism. 

In a post-election analysis, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver found that “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump.” There was a shift to Trump among whites without a college degree, but not because they tend to be lower-income. Once one controls for differences in education levels, “lower-income counties were no more likely to shift to Trump.” This fact alone strongly suggest that economic distress was not a driving force behind the shift to Trump.



Similarly, Stephen Clarke & Dan Tomlinson of the Resolution Foundation found that, although it initially appears that the shift to Trump was determined in part by income level and residence in a manufacturing area, these economic variables cease to be statistically significant predictors of the shift to Trump once one controls for level of education. What determined county-level differences in the extent of the shift to Trump

21

Actually, even that would be insufficient. The facts would have to indicate that the revolt was against economic distress caused by neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization––which is highly unlikely, since these processes have been taking place for several decades, while the shift in the vote of non-college-educated whites was sudden. Why haven’t they been voting to topple the “neoliberal world order” all along? 39

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were differences in education level, race, national origin, and age, not differences in these economic variables.22 

Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell of the Gallup organization analyzed a massive dataset on Trump’s favorability ratings between July 2015 and October 2016. They found that, after controlling for the influence of other variables, Trump was more popular among more affluent people—even if one looks only at non-Hispanic whites. In addition, “[h]is supporters are less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time”; support for Trump is not substantially affected by one’s occupation; nor is it affected by being exposed to international-trade competition and jobcompetition with immigrants, which “make[s] it very unlikely that direct exposure to harm from globalization could be a causal factor in motivating large numbers of Trump’s supporters.”



Analyzing a post-election survey of more than 4000 people, Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel found that, after controlling for the influence of other relevant variables, there was “little evidence to suggest individual economic distress benefited Trump.” Nor did “economic anxiety” influence the election choices of white voters. In contrast, “racial attitudes towards blacks and immigration are the key factors associated with support for Trump.” Two of their three variables that measure different dimensions of “racial animus” are “significant predictors of Trump support among white respondents, independent of partisanship, ideology, education levels, and the other factors included in the model,” and they have a quite sizable influence on Trump support as well.



Daniel Cox, Rachel Lienesch, and Robert P. Jones analyzed attitudes to Trump among whites without college degrees. Their analysis was based on a large pre-election national survey and four post-election focus groups in Cincinnati. Contrary to the story that Trump’s election was driven by “economic distress,” they found that, once one controls for other relevant variables, “being in fair or poor financial shape actually predicted support for Hillary Clinton among white working-class Americans, rather than support for Donald Trump.” Those who said that their financial situation was fair or poor were almost twice as likely as other respondents to support Hillary Clinton. The factors that actually stood out as predictors of Trump support were identification with the Republican Party, feeling that the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence, feeling like a stranger in their own country, favoring the deportation of undocumented immigrants, and believing that “investment” in college education is a risky gamble.



Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta sought to explain why support for Trump was substantially stronger among whites without college degrees than it was among whites with such degrees. Analyzing results of a YouGov survey conducted shortly before the election, they found that

22

They also found that county-level differences in labor-force participation had a statistically significant effect, but only in “battleground states,” and that recent changes in labor-force participation were not a statistically significant predictor of a shift in support for Trump. 40

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very little of this gap can be explained by the economic difficulties faced by less educated whites. Rather, most of the divide appears to be the result of racism and sexism in the electorate, especially among whites without college degrees. Sexism and racism were powerful forces in structuring the 2016 presidential vote, even after controlling for partisanship and ideology as well as age, income, gender, and race (pp. 24–25). (Furthermore, their “economic dissatisfaction” variable was based on answers to the question, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your overall economic situation?,” which is not really a measure of actual or even perceived economic well-being.23 It is arguable, especially in light of other research surveyed here, that the small portion of the gap in support for Trump that they attribute to “economic difficulties” might actually be attributable to “economic anxiety” rather than objective economic problems.) 

Matthew MacWilliams conducted and analyzed two surveys. One was a nationwide survey of 1800 Republican voters conducted at the end of 2015. The other was a survey, conducted two months later, of 538 people likely to vote in South Carolina’s Republican primary. In both cases, he found that “education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate.” The only statistically-significant variables were authoritarianism and fear of terrorism.



Christopher Weber, Christopher Federico, and Stanley Feldman came to a similar conclusion. They analyzed survey data on more than 4000 voters, collected after the November 2016 general election. After controlling for the influence of education, income, age, gender, and religiosity, they found that a voter who scored “high” on a scale of authoritarian attitudes had a 79% chance of having voted for Trump, while those who scored “low” had only a 30% chance of having done so. This 49-point gap is much greater than the 34-point gap between high- and low-authoritarians’ chances of having voted for Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for president, and almost double the 28-point gap between their chances of having voted for George W. Bush in 2000.

These studies do not add up to a single, unified explanation for why whites without college degrees were actually more likely to vote for Trump than for previous Republican presidential candidates. But the negative results are indeed univocal and unequivocal. Once the influence of other factors is controlled for, there is no evidence that the shift to Trump was a revolt of lowincome voters or people exposed to competition from imports or immigrant workers.

Trumpism is Wallace-ism Redux Yet the strongest evidence that Trump’s electoral victory was not an uprising of the forgotten working class against economic distress brought about by neoliberalism and globalization is the 23

Some people might say that they are dissatisfied because, even though they currently do not face serious economic problems, they wish that they were even better off or they are worried about the future. 41

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evidence that Trumpism is a pre-existing condition. It has unfortunately been with us all along, as the resurgence of atavistic and revanchist white supremacism helps to make clear. An examination of the presidential campaigns of George Corley Wallace, the long-time authoritarian, racist, right-wing governor of Alabama makes it far clearer. Wallace ran for president three consecutive times between 1964 and 1972. This was well before neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization came along and allegedly pummelled the working class. Yet the messages and authoritarianism of his campaigns are eerily similar to Trump’s, as is the strong support he garnered in the North as well as the South––particularly in the industrial Midwest where the flip to Trump occurred last year. Wallace became governor of Alabama in January, 1963. In his inaugural address––which was written by Asa Carter, who had started a paramilitary Ku Klux Klan organization in the mid1950s, and left it only after shooting two other members in a dispute over finances––Wallace famously promised to fight for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Five months later, he stood in the doorway of a University of Alabama auditorium to prevent enrollment of its first Black students. These two events were the first to bring him widespread recognition, and tons of fan mail, outside the South. The following year, when President Lyndon B. Johnson was in the process of getting the Civil Rights Act passed by Congress, Wallace decided to oppose him in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Although Johnson’s eventual nomination was assured, Wallace decided to run in select states outside the South—Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland—to demonstrate that his segregationist, “anti-elite,” and anti-Washington message was popular, not only in the South, but in the North as well.24 Wallace did surprising well in all three states. Even though Johnson was an incumbent president, and very popular (his approval rating at the time was close to 75%), Wallace received 34% of the vote in Wisconsin, 30% in Indiana, and 43% in Maryland against “surrogate” candidates standing in for Johnson. It is important to note that Wisconsin is one of the three states in the Democratic “firewall” that flipped to Trump in 2016. And it, as well as Indiana, are in the industrial Midwest—which globalization and neoliberalism had not yet turned into a Rustbelt. Martin Luther King commented that the results in Maryland showed that “segregation is a national and not a sectional problem.” Wallace swept all eight counties on Maryland’s rural Eastern Shore. It was estimated that more than 90% of white voters there cast their votes for him. (In 2016, Trump received 65% of the Republican primary votes on the Eastern Shore, compared to 54% statewide. In the November general election, his overall vote share in Maryland was only 24

During the period in which Wallace ran for president, 1964–72, the major parties’ nominating systems were very different from those in effect today. Party officials and elected delegates played a much larger role in choosing the nominee; there were relatively few primaries and caucuses in which voters (in effect) directly vote for presidential candidates. In 1964, there were only 17 primaries; in 1972, there were 22. 42

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35%, but he received 57% on the Eastern Shore.) Wallace voters in Glen Burnie, a suburb of Baltimore, “went to the polls with big grins on their faces,” according to a local newspaper editor. “I never saw anything like it. They were going to show Uncle Sam that they had had it.”25 They had had it with what, exactly? Globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization that would not arrive on the scene for another decade or more? This was the heyday of Keynesian “fine tuning” of the economy. In 1968, Wallace ran for president in the general election as a third-party candidate, against Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the vice-president. He received 14% of the vote, almost half of which came from outside the states that had been part of the Confederacy. Wallace might have performed even better had Nixon not co-opted his “law and order” message and his claim to be the candidate of “forgotten Americans,” in what Wallace biographer Dan T. Carter has described as “a desperate, undignified game of political catch-up.”26 Wallace once again competed as a Democrat in the 1972 presidential primaries. The battle against de jure segregation had by this time been lost, and Wallace did not try to revive it, but instead ran as an implacable opponent of efforts to achieve the integration of public schools through “forced busing.” In terms of the popular vote, the primary contest was a tight, three-way race between Wallace, Humphrey, and George McGovern, who ultimately secured the nomination. Humphrey obtained 26% of the nationwide popular vote; McGovern received 25%; and Wallace received 23%.27 Wallace ran in 17 of the 22 primaries held that year. He won five of them, and came in second in six others. As might be expected, he did very well in the South, winning primaries in all three southern states that held primaries––Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee––and pulling down an absolute majority of votes in the latter two. Yet Wallace also performed remarkably well outside the South. He won primaries in Michigan— where he again received an absolute majority—and Maryland. He came in second in Indiana, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.28 Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are the three Democratic “firewall” states that flipped to Trump in 2016. And they, as well as Indiana and West Virginia, are part of the Rustbelt. This 25

Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics, 2d ed. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000, p. 215; Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003, p. 125. 26 Dan T. Carter, “Legacy of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American Politics,” Journal of Southern History 62:1, Feb. 1996, p. 9. 27 The earlier front-runner, Edmund Muskie, ran a distant fourth, getting 12% of the popular vote, and dropped out of the race early. 28 His shares of the vote in the states mentioned were: Tennessee, 68%; Michigan, 51%; North Carolina, 50%; Florida, 42%; Indiana, 41%; Maryland, 39%; West Virginia, 33%; New Mexico, 29%; Wisconsin, 22%; Pennsylvania, 21%; and Oregon, 20%. Wallace also won the Texas caucus, coming away with 43% of its pledged delegates. 43

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was 1972, however, before globalization and neoliberalism; the region was not yet a Rustbelt. Nonetheless, Wallace won a majority of votes in one of these five states and placed second in the other four. Writing in 1996, Wallace biographer Dan T. Carter remarked that “Wallace, more than any other political figure of the 1960s and early 1970s, sensed the frustrations—the rage—of many American voters, made commonplace a new level of political incivility and intemperate rhetoric, and focused that anger upon a convenient set of scapegoats.”29 What were these voters enraged about? Globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization had not yet arrived on the scene. For a few examples of the political incivility, intemperate rhetoric, and anger to which Carter refers, consider the following Trump-like moments of Wallace’s campaigning. During the 1964 primaries, 1000 supporters—and about 75 protesters—showed up to hear Wallace speak in Serb Memorial Hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (which seated 600). The band played “Swanee River,” an infamous racist minstrel song, and the audience sang the Confederate anthem “Dixie” in English and Polish. The man who introduced Wallace, Bronko Gruber, singled out the only members of the audience who didn’t have the “cordiality to stand up” during the national anthem, “these two colored gentlemen here.” The crowd hissed and booed. Another Black protester, a minister, then shouted “Get your dogs out,” referring to a tactic used by Southern police to intimidate civil rights’ protesters. “I’ll tell you something about your dogs, padre,” Gruber replied. “[T]hree weeks ago tonight a friend of mine was assaulted by three of your countrymen or whatever you want to call them.” As the audience urged him on, Gruber continued, “They beat up old ladies, 83 years old, they rape our women folk, how long can we tolerate this?” Wallace said nothing about these comments.30 This behavior persisted. At a rally in Tennessee during the 1968 race, Wallace famously declared, “If some anarchist lies down in front of my automobile, it will be the last automobile he will ever lie down in front of.” New Republic columnist T.R.B. [Richard Strout] described a Wallace rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, shortly before that year’s election, as follows: “There is menace in the blood shout of the crowd. You feel you have known this all somewhere; never again will you read about Berlin in the ‘30s without remembering this wild confrontation.”31 When protesters interrupted this rally, Wallace said: “We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of ‘em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all.”32 Dan T. Carter, “Legacy of Rage,” p. 6. For fuller accounts of this meeting, see Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage, pp. 206–8, and Matthew J. Prigge, “Dixie North: George Wallace and the 1964 Wisconsin Presidential Primary,” Shepherd Express, Dec. 22, 2015. 31 [Richard Strout,] “T.R.B. From Washington,” New Republic, Nov. 9, 1968, p. 4. See also Michael A. Cohen, “Trump Rally Oozes Fear, Anxiety, and Paranoia,” Boston Globe, Apr. 7, 2016; Cohen writes that he “immediately thought” of Strout’s account of the Wallace rally when he attended a Trump rally on Long Island, New York in 2016. 32 Bill Barrow, “Are there echoes of George Wallace in Trump’s message?,” PBS NewsHour, March 24, 2016. 29 30

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Unlike Trump, Wallace did not succeed in becoming president. But how well might he have done in 1972 if he had not been burdened with certain disadvantages compared to Trump? What if he had had the advantage of not being a professional politician? The advantage of billions of dollars of his own money, to demonstrate that he could not be “bought”? What if he had been a TV star with 100% name recognition? What if he had had 24/7 media attention and assistance from right-wing and fake news like Trump enjoyed? And what if he had run as a Republican? This was the main thing that was new about the 2016 election. The Trumpite base is not new––it is not a reaction to neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. It is a pre-existing condition, as the look back at Wallace’s campaigns has shown. But until 2016, mainstream Republicans managed to retain control of their party, by making concessions to this base and placating it with racist and misogynistic “dog whistles.” In 2016, however, mainstream Republicans lost control. The base was allowed, for the first time, to vote for a Trump, not a mainstream Republican, in the general election. And thus the base wrongly seems––on the surface––to have emerged from out of nowhere, and to be a reaction to recent economic changes.

B. Lessons from Marx Taking the “Independent Movement of the Workers” Seriously—and Literally The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. –– Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party As we will see, Marx’s response to the threat of white nationalism was very different from that of much of the “left” today. The basic response of the anti-neoliberal “left” is consonant with its overall orientation, which can be called “Left First.” Its primary concern is to “build the left” and win victories—elections, campaigns, adherents, power––for itself. Accordingly, it regards common people as a “constituency” to win over in its quest for political power. And it seemingly has no compunction about winning them over by “meet[ing] them where they are at.”33 Thus, it offers an alternative version of “populism” that (it hopes) the authoritarian white-nationalist base that supports Trump, Le Pen, et al. will find appealing. As one of its most prominent proponents, Canadian political scientist Sam Gindin, put it last December, “Any attempt to fight the expected direction of the Trump presidency can’t start by blaming the white working class for Trump’s victory but must take the frustrations of the white working class seriously and win them to its side.” And when polls indicated that as many as 12% of those who voted for anti-neoliberal “left” French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon “Socialist Alternative used what we call ‘the transitional method’: We connect with the consciousness of everyday people, meet them where they are at ….” Ramy Khalil, “How a Socialist Won––Lessons from Kshama Sawant’s Historic Victory,” Socialist Alternative, Jan. 31, 2014. 33

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in the first round planned to vote for Le Pen in the second, Mélenchon’s supporters did not accept that this fact raises troubling questions about the character of his campaign. At least one even had the audacity to argue that it was a mark in Mélenchon’s favor, since it showed that his campaign pulled voters away from Le Pen!34 To be sure, the “Left First” types do not endorse explicit appeals to white-nationalist sentiments. Their words carefully condemn racism, xenophobia, misogyny, etc. The problem is rather that they seek to win over the authoritarian white-nationalist base by offering one or another “positive program” that does not fight the base’s authoritarianism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia head on. For instance, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara recently wrote that “Antifascist action is a moral and strategic imperative,” which should go together with “a positive program to contrast with the neoliberal consensus of the center.” For Sunkara, the positive and the negative “come before consciousness without reciprocal contact,” as Hegel put it. The negative component, antifascist action, is not allowed to “contaminate” the positive program that can supposedly win people over by “meeting them where they are at.” This approach is especially dangerous at this moment in history, because it normalizes Trumpism. It treats Trumpism, not as a threat and abomination that must be eliminated, but as a legitimate rival for the allegiance of the “white working class.” It seeks to out-compete its rival on the basis of an alternative-but-comparable “positive program.” This is also the approach encoded in the Democratic Party’s new “A Better Deal” economic program. The program rails against Wall Street, “[s]pecial interests, lobbyists, and large corporations,” while literally saying nothing against Trumpism or against xenophobia, racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. To understand Marx’s response to the threat of white nationalism, it is imperative to situate it within his overall political-philosophical orientation, and to recognize how sharply the latter contrasts with the “Left First” orientation sketched out above. Here are some of the most striking differences: 

Marx championed and encouraged what he called the “independent movement of the workers.”35 This is simple enough to understand if one takes it literally (as one should). But a long legacy of substitutionism—substitution of some other entity for “the workers”––has made it easy to misunderstand Marx’s meaning. For instance, Jill Stein’s Green Party is construed as an “independent movement” because it is independent of the (explicitly) pro-capitalist political parties and it advocates policies that would supposedly benefit the working class. The championing of such substitutionist “independence” encourages a further error: creation of false equivalences between pro-capitalist politicians, such as Macron and Le Pen, or Clinton and Trump. Macron and Le Pen may indeed be equally bad for the electoral prospects of Mélechon’s movement; and Clinton and Trump may indeed be equally bad for the electoral prospects of the Greens. Yet when one takes Marx literally, the question becomes: Are they equally bad for the future trajectory of the independent movement of the workers themselves?

34 35

This information was obtained through personal Facebook communications. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chap. 10, sect. 7. 46

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Marx supported the independent movement of the workers as a necessary means to achieve the goal of overcoming class society and state domination over individuals, not as an end in itself (and certainly not as a means to further “the left”). From this vantage point, support from below for far-right “populism” is completely retrogressive, notwithstanding its “anti-elite” and “anti-establishment” character, because it rivets working people more firmly to class society and the state. As MHI wrote a year ago, We stand for emancipatory self-activity from below. There is no greater obstacle to this than figures such as Trump, who use racism, sexism, etc. to pit working people against one another, in order to divide and conquer them and have them fall in behind the great leader who tells them that “I alone can fix it.”

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Marx’s perspective was thoroughly internationalist. He recognized, of course, that solidarity across national borders strengthened working-class movements. He also staunchly opposed all forms of nationalism that sought to forge or strengthen working people’s identification with the ruling classes of “their” nation, since it is antithetical to their independent emancipatory self-activity: “The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.” “Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!”

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Largely for the same reasons—the liberation of workers from identification with “their” ruling classes and international solidarity—Marx opposed and actively fought, not only national and racial prejudices and privileges, but also economic and social conditions that divide working people from one another (e.g., into freemen vs. slaves, and natives vs. immigrants) and thereby foster these prejudices and privileges. This is a main, if not the main, reason why he supported victory for the North in the Civil War (especially once it became an explicit anti-slavery war) and Irish independence from English rule. In other words, the abolition of slavery in the US and English rule over Ireland were not only good for Blacks and Irish people. They were good for white and English working people as well. By weakening their identification with “their” ruling classes and eliminating privileges that kept them from solidarizing with Black and Irish workers, the abolition of slavery and English rule would help put white and English working people on the path of independent self-activity that aims to overcome of class society and class rule.

The contemporary analogue to this is, clearly, the perspective of solidarizing with the “white working class” by decisively defeating Trumpism, white supremacism, etc. Their defeat will help liberate the “white working class” from the grip of reaction and spur its independent emancipatory self-development.

Marx on Irish Independence In 1867, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (Fenians) rose up in armed struggle to win Ireland’s independence from England. Although Marx was sharply critical of their terroristic methods, he—as well as Frederick Engels and their organization, the International Working Men’s 47

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Association (IWMA; later known also as the First International)––actively supported the struggle and organized unsuccessfully to secure amnesty for Fenian political prisoners.36 However, it was not until the end of 1869 and start of 1870 that Marx worked out a forceful theoretical position in favor of Irish independence. He developed this position in private communications and in official documents of the IWMA, which adopted and worked to carry out his perspective.

English workers’ “own social emancipation” His principal reason for supporting Irish independence was not “humanitarian.” He was instead seeking to stimulate the independent emancipatory self-development of the working class, especially the English working class. In a November 29, 1869 letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, Marx stressed that his aim was not merely to “speak[ ] out loudly and decidedly for the oppressed Irish against their oppressors.” He wanted the English working class to fight for the independence of Ireland, “not as a matter of sympathy with Ireland but as a demand made in the interests of the English proletariat.” Similarly, in a December 10, 1869 letter to Engels, Marx wrote that, while support for “‘international’ and ‘humane’ justice for Ireland” should be “taken for granted,” there was an additional reason that Irish independence was important: “it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland” (emphases in original). Three weeks later (on January 1, 1870) a “confidential communication” from the IWMA’s General Council to its section in “French Switzerland,” written by Marx, stated that quite apart from the demands of international justice, it is an essential precondition for the emancipation of the English working class to transform the present enforced union [the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland] (in other words, the enslavement of Ireland) into a free and equal confederation, if possible, and into a total separation, if necessary.37 And on April 9, 1870, Marx wrote to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt that it was the “special task” of the IWMA’s General Council to “make the English workers realise that for them the

After three Fenians were executed, Engels remarked, “To my knowledge, the only time that anybody has been executed for a similar matter in a civilised country was the case of [martyred American abolitionist] John Brown at Harpers Ferry,” but he added that the action of the English government was even less civilized, since “[t]he Southerners had at least the decency to treat J. Brown as a rebel, whereas here everything is being done to transform a political attempt into a common crime” (Nov. 24, 1867 letter to Marx; emphasis in original). 37 The confidential communication’s discussion of Ireland was repeated, almost verbatim, in a letter of March 28, 1870 that Marx sent to Kugelmann, for distribution to leaders of the German Social-Democratic Worker’s Party. 36

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national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation” (emphases in original). This position raises a couple of questions. First, if Marx and the IWMA were so internationalist, then why were they so concerned with the working class of one single country, England? The answer is that, in Marx’s view, the English working class was crucial because revolution in England was the lynchpin of world revolution. He argued in the January 1, 1870 “confidential communication” that England was not “simply … a country along with other countries[, but] the metropolis of capital.” A “revolution in economic matters” there “must immediately affect the whole world.” Moreover, class antagonisms had become much more simplified in England (into a head-to-head antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) than they were elsewhere, and it was the only country in which working-class struggle and organization had acquired “a certain degree of maturity and universality.” Thus, “England alone can serve as a lever for a serious economic revolution” (even though “revolutionary initiative will probably come from France”).38 This perspective has relevance today, when the US is the “metropolis of capital.” An economic revolution in the US would have even more of an immediate effect on the whole world than a revolution in England would have had in Marx’s day. Thus, while we certainly cannot pander to white-nationalist sentiment within the so-called “white working class,” we must be concerned especially––but not exclusively––with the emancipatory self-development of the US working class (which is multi-racial, -ethnic, and –national), inasmuch as it is critical to world revolution.

Irish immigration and xenophobia Second, how could Marx argue that Irish independence was in the “absolute interest” of the English working class? He was keenly aware of facts that seemed to suggest otherwise, facts rooted in Irish immigration to England. In a passage of his letter to Meyer and Vogt that is particularly salient in light of today’s struggles over immigration, Marx noted that, because Irish peasants were being steadily evicted from the land and “forced” to emigrate, “Ireland constantly sends her own surplus [population] to the English labour market.” And he argued that the consequent over-supply of labor in England “forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class.” As a result, “[t]he ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.” But this hatred was not merely economic. It was shot through-and-though with prejudice, supremacist attitudes, and nationalistic identification with the English ruling classes: In relation to the Irish worker[, the ordinary English worker] regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. 38

Emphases in original. See also Marx’s April 9, 1870 letter to Meyer and Vogt. 49

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Furthermore, the Irish masses returned the hatred. In both England and the U.S. (where Fenianism was especially strong among Irish immigrants) “[t]he Irishman … sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.” Thus, “[e]very industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians.”39 Faced with somewhat similar facts today, prominent voices in the anti-neoliberal “left” want to “meet people where they are at.” For example, the leader of the alleged left-wing of Germany’s Die Linke party, Sahra Wagenknecht, “is trying to win over large chunks of working- and middle-class supporters of the AfD [Alternative für Deutschland],” a racist, xenophobic, far-right party. She favors limits on immigration into Germany and deportation of at least some immigrants convicted of crimes. And Gindin, in his quest to “build a mass socialist party,” wants to win people over to a “regulated border policy,” on the grounds that support for “fully open borders in the present context of economic insecurity cannot help but elicit a backlash …. Workers who have seen their own standards undermined over time … are not going to prioritize open borders.” Freeing English workers from the “leading-strings” of the ruling classes Marx’s attitude was the exact opposite. He did not compromise with xenophobia or antiimmigrant sentiment. Because his goal was the emancipatory self-development of the working class, not winning over a “constituency” to his party or program, he focused unwaveringly on the actual—world-historic—interests of the working class. He did not pander to the perceived All quotes in this and the preceding two paragraphs are from Marx’s April 9, 1870 letter to Meyer and Vogt. Emphases are Marx’s. The January 1, 1870 confidential communication from the IWMA’s General Council contains a very similar analysis of the causes and effects of Irish immigration to England: 39

In the second place, in dragging down the working class in England still further by the forced immigration of poor Irish people, the English bourgeoisie has not merely exploited Irish poverty. It has also divided the proletariat into two hostile camps. The fiery rebelliousness of the Celtic worker does not mingle well with the steady slow nature of the Anglo-Saxon; in fact in all the major industrial centres of England there is a profound antagonism between the Irish and the English proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who brings down his wages and standard of living. He also feels national and religious antipathies for him; it is rather the same attitude that the poor whites of the Southern states of North America had for the Negro slaves. This antagonism between the two groups of proletarians within England itself is artificially kept in being and fostered by the bourgeoisie, who know well that this split is the real secret of preserving their own power. This antagonism is reproduced once again on the other side of the Atlantic. The Irish, driven from their native soil by cattle and sheep, have landed in North America where they form a considerable, and increasing, proportion of the population. Their sole thought, their sole passion, is their hatred for England. [emphasis in original] 50

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interests, or the interests-within-capitalism, of those elements of the working class whose existing opinions impeded the struggle for the freedom of every individual. In Marx’s view, the nationalism and anti-Irish sentiment of much of the English working class were crucial impediments to that struggle. To overcome these impediments, English rule over Ireland needed to be ended. As long as the United Kingdom remained in existence, “the English people will remain tied to the leading-strings of the ruling classes, because it will have to join with them in a common front against Ireland. Every one of its movements in England itself is crippled by the strife with the Irish …” (letter to Kugelmann, November 29, 1869). The metaphor of leading-strings—strips of fabric attached to children’s clothes, which adults held and used to restrain the children or help them walk—suggests that the nationalism of much of the English working class allowed the ruling classes to restrain and control them. Marx argued, further, that the English bourgeoisie consciously exploited and fomented nationalism and anti-Irish sentiment in order to stay in power. The January 1, 1870 confidential IWMA communication stated that “[t]his antagonism between the two groups of proletarians [English and Irish] within England itself is artificially kept in being and fostered by the bourgeoisie, who know well that this split is the real secret of preserving their own power.” And in his April 9, 1870 letter to Meyer and Vogt, Marx wrote, This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this. [emphases in original] Marx’s account identified two distinct sources of anti-Irish sentiment within the English working class. One was that competition from Irish immigrant workers was driving down their wages. The other was that native-English workers tended to look down upon Irish immigrants. As we have seen, Marx compared their typical attitude to the attitude of “the ‘poor whites’ to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.”40 Engels reiterated this analogy in the May 14, 1872 meeting (that Marx did not attend) of the IWMA General Council, in a statement opposing a proposal to subsume Irish sections of the IWMA under the British Federal Council. He denounced it as analogous to “members of a conquering nation call[ing] upon the nation they had conquered and continued to hold down to forget their specific nationality and position, to ‘sink national differences’ and so forth.” That is not Internationalism[; … it is] attempting to justify and to perpetuate the dominion of the conqueror under the cloak of Internationalism[, … and] sanctioning the belief, only too 40

As in the US case, though to a lesser degree, the feeling of superiority had a material basis. Irish immigrants in England suffered from economic and social disadvantages (and, possibly, residential segregation). They disproportionately lived in slums racked with disease, violence, and alcohol abuse, and they tended to take the dirtiest, most dangerous, and lowest-paid jobs. A ballad of the time stated that “When work grew scarce, and bread was dear / And wages lessened too / The Irish hordes were bidders here / Our half paid work to do.” 51

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common among the English working men, that they were superior beings compared to the Irish, and as much an aristocracy as the mean whites of the Slave States considered themselves to be with regard to the Negroes. The coincidence of these two sources of anti-Irish sentiment—job-market competition and supremacist attitudes—is important. In the absence of supremacist thinking, Marx might conceivably have favored dealing with the job-competition problem with a “unite and fight” working-class strategy that overlooked national differences.41 For instance, native-English and immigrant-Irish workers might have been able to join together to form unions in order to reduce competition between them and thereby relieve downward pressure on the wages of both groups. Accelerating the “catastrophe of official England” In fact, Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman actually had the audacity to tell us that this is what Marx recommended.42 But not only does Marx’s text say nothing about the Irish “unit[ing] with the English workers in England”; what it does say makes clear that it would have been ludicrous to try to implement the class-reductionist and economistic perspective favored by Ackerman. Owing to anti-Irish prejudice within the English working class, and the consequent antagonism between English and Irish workers, any “sink national differences; unite and fight” strategy was simply untenable. In her response to Ackerman, Jennifer Roesch, a member of the International Socialist Organization (US), recognized that he “miss[ed] the entire thrust of Marx’s argument.” But she missed it as well, writing that Marx was “call[ing] for the English worker to overcome his ‘artificial antagonism’ in order to make a united working class movement possible.” This reading is almost as unrooted in the texts as Ackerman’s is. Marx had come to the conclusion that, as long as English rule over Ireland persisted, appeals for unity (such as the one that Roesch put into his mouth) were abstract and futile. As he wrote to Engels on December 11, 1869, 41

Given Marx’s unwavering internationalism and his desire to free English workers from the “leading-strings” of their ruling classes, support for immigration controls would still have been out of the question. His 1869–70 letters and confidential IWMA communications on Ireland implicitly put forward a quite different—revolutionary—solution to the job-competition problem: Irish independence would break the power of the absentee English landlords whose evictions of Irish peasants from the land were a key cause of their migration to England and elsewhere. Earlier, Marx had opined that “the characteristic features of Fenianism are socialistic tendencies (in a negative sense, directed against the appropriation of the soil) and the fact that it is a movement of the lower orders” (letter to Engels, November 30, 1867). 42 After quoting the relevant section of Marx’s letter to Meyer and Vogt, Ackerman sarcastically commented: “As a social theorist, Marx unfortunately lacked the subtlety of, say, a Hillary Clinton [who said that ‘racial inequality is not merely a symptom of economic inequality’]. His ‘reductionist’ solution was for the Irish to free themselves from their English landlords in Ireland—and unite with the English workers in England.” 52

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For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. … Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland.43 This letter does not explain how Marx came to this conclusion. However, he wrote to Kugelmann twelve days earlier that, unless and until Ireland was freed from English rule, “the English people … will have to join with [their ruling classes] in a common front against Ireland” (emphasis added), and they will therefore “remain tied to the leading-strings of the ruling classes.”44 Marx therefore eschewed empty appeals to English workers to overcome their anti-Irish prejudice that failed to confront the objective conditions that engendered the prejudice. What he actually called for—to change the objective situation––was the defeat of England in its struggle with Ireland: It is … the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association to hasten the social revolution in England. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. [April 9, 1970 letter to Meyer and Vogt, emphases added] To accelerate the social development in Europe, you must push on [beschleunigen, accelerate] the catastrophe of official England. To do so, you must attack her in Ireland. That’s her weakest point. Ireland lost, the British “Empire” is gone, and the class war in England, till now somnolent and chronic, will assume acute forms. [March 5, 1870 letter to Paul and Laura Lafargue, emphasis added] Thus, in Marx’s view, it was futile to appeal to English workers to overcome their hostility to their Irish counterparts unless that appeal was tied tightly to the defeat of England.45 Only England’s defeat would deflate their supremacist pretensions, free them from identifying their interests with those of the English ruling classes, and put them on an independent, internationalist, and emancipatory path. 43

Emphasis in original. Marx’s November 29, 1869 letter to Kugelmann similarly argued that “the English working class …can never do anything decisive here in England” as long as England continued to rule over Ireland. 44 Extant texts seem to contain no direct explanation for why Marx thought that English workers would be compelled to take to the side of their ruling classes, but the most likely explanation is that job-market competition objectively pitted English workers against Irish immigrants. 45 When the two things were tied tightly together, Marx did of course favor and participate in activity to lessen anti-Irish prejudices. In October 1869, the IWMA General Council helped to organize a mass “Justice for Ireland!” demonstration in London that called for amnesty for Irish political prisoners. According to General Council minutes of October 26, Marx said that the “main feature” of the demonstration was that “at least part of the English working class ha[s] lost their prejudice against the Irish.” 53

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With the rise of far-right xenophobic nationalism, we face a somewhat similar situation today. While much of the anti-neoliberal “left” was muting its opposition to Trump, if not indeed enabling his victory, on the grounds that he enjoyed strong support from some of the “white working class,” MHI warned that there is no greater obstacle to emancipatory self-activity from below than politicians like Trump, who pit working people against one another, in order to divide and conquer them, and strive to make them his followers. Only the defeat of Trumpism can deflate the supremacist pretensions of Trump’s white-nationalist base, free it from his leading-strings, and re-orient it toward genuinely independent—i.e., anti-racist, internationalist, emancipatory—self-activity.

The Impact of the US Civil War on Emancipatory Working-Class Self-Activity Marx, as well as Engels, closely followed and wrote extensively about the US Civil War. Their writings on the war consist largely of battle reports, discussions of military strategy and tactics, and analyses of changes in the political situation in the North. But various other topics were also taken up. Raya Dunayevskaya’s commentary in Marxism and Freedom remains important for highlighting Marx’s support for and engagement with the Abolitionist movement and the changes that he made to his book Capital under the impact of the Civil War. Here, where we will focus on what can be learned from these writings about white nationalism and how to combat it, we can be fairly brief. Marx supported the North in the Civil War, not only in his writings but in organizational activity as well. He helped to organize a March 1863 meeting, sponsored by the London Trade-Unions council, and attended by as many as 3000 people, that successfully opposed Britain’s entrance into the war on behalf of the South. (The English union leaders involved in organizing that meeting went on to join with Marx in founding the IWMA eighteen months later.) His support for the North was unwavering, even though he was well aware that it was by no means “pure.” In an October 11, 1861 article in the New York Daily Tribune, Marx discussed bourgeois London publications that took the opposite tack: they “affect[ed] an utter horror of Slavery” but took a “hostile tone against the North, and [harbored] ill-concealed sympathies with the South.” For example, he quoted complaints in The Economist that Abolitionists had been mistreated in the North, and that the US government had impeded efforts to end the international slave trade, which was mainly financed and operated by Northerners. Marx did not dispute these facts. Instead, he exposed what would today be called the whataboutism of The Economist: “The necessity of justifying its attitude by such pettifogging Old Bailey pleas proves more than anything else that the anti-Northern part of the English press is instigated by hidden motives, too mean and dastardly to be openly avowed.” (There is an unmistakable parallel to this today, when the anti-neoliberal “left” spends its time railing endlessly against the impurity of Hillary Clinton, “centrists,” and liberals, while letting Trump and Trumpism off the hook by dismissing them as a “distraction.” Does this whataboutism hide motives that they choose not to avow openly?)

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Marx’s overriding reason for supporting the North, despite its checkered past, is that he was convinced that its victory would put an end to slavery in the US. That fact, which is obvious now, was not so obvious then. The North’s original aim in the war was not to free the slaves, but to preserve the Union, and Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves in the South until the middle of the war. However, Marx anticipated that the war would result in the abolition of slavery, in part because the North would probably have to free the slaves in order to defeat the South. In a May 6, 1861 letter to Lion Philips, he predicted the ultimate victory of the North, “since, if the need arises, it has a last card up its sleeve in the shape of a slave revolution.” In an August 7, 1862 letter of Engels, Marx attributed the North’s early difficulties in the war to the fact that that it was focused on preserving the Union, not ending slavery: “wars of this kind ought to be conducted along revolutionary lines, and the Yankees have so far been trying to conduct it along constitutional ones.” But he predicted that “[t]he North will, at last, wage the war in earnest, have recourse to revolutionary methods and overthrow the supremacy of the border slave statesmen. One single n[____] regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves.”46 On September 22, Lincoln announced his intention to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In an article published by Die Presse on October 12, Marx wrote that this “proclamation … is the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing tip of the old American Constitution.” Grounds of Marx’s anti-slavery activity Why was the abolition of slavery so important to Marx? He was, of course, staunchly opposed to it on “humanitarian” grounds. He wrote in Capital that a world market for Southern cotton had led to “the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system” in which “the civilised horrors of overwork [were] grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery ….” However, just as in the case of Irish independence, Marx’s concern was not solely “humanitarian.” He was also doing what he could to accelerate the “independent movement of the workers”––white as well as Black, and internationally as well as in the US. He considered the abolition of slavery, and thus victory for the North, to be in the interest of the whole working class. For instance, when Lincoln was re-elected president in 1864, Marx wrote a congratulatory “address” to him, on behalf of the IWMA, which stated, “The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.” In the same address, Marx wrote: While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, 46

After the Emancipation Proclamation was announced, the North did begin to recruit Blacks to the military, and in May 1863 it established the Bureau of Colored Troops. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 Blacks served in the Northern army and navy.

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they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war. A lot of ideas are packed into this sentence. Marx criticizes white workers for allowing slavery to “defile their own republic” and for prizing their privileged status vis-à-vis Black slaves. He also criticizes them for their lack of solidarity with European workers. He characterizes their attitude to the slaves and slavery as a “barrier to progress”—not only to the progress of the slaves, but to their own progress as well, since their attitude prevented them from “attain[ing] the true freedom of labor” (an apparent euphemism for a classless socialist society). And finally, he hails the actions of the North in the Civil War for having swept away this barrier to progress. Here again, then, Marx focused on the actual—world-historic—interests of the working class. He did not take his cue from the perceived interests of elements of the working class whose existing opinions were barriers to their own progress. And just as he would soon champion the Irish struggle for independence because of its potential to deal a blow against the supremacist attitudes of English workers that diverted them from the revolutionary, internationalist path, he here championed the North’s war against slavery for its potential to deal a blow against the supremacist attitudes that diverted the “white working class” of the US. A few years later, Marx reiterated the same idea in a famous passage in Capital: “In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Taken by itself, this latter statement is somewhat vague. Marx does not spell out why “labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” When read together with the address to Lincoln, however, it becomes clear that Marx is suggesting that supremacist thinking and acceptance of slavery among elements of the “white working class” of the U.S. caused them to “forge their own chains.” (The January 1, 1870 confidential communication from the IWMA’s General Council would later express a similar thought, regarding the attitudes of the English masses to the Irish: “What ancient Rome demonstrated on a gigantic scale can be seen—in the England of today. A people which subjugates another people forges its own chains.”) But when Marx made the statement about labor in the white and black skins, the slaves were already free and the North had won the Civil War. He noted with approval that these events had begun to undo the “paralysis” of the working-class movement: “But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation [i.e., agitation for the workday to be legally limited to eight hours], that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.” A May 12, 1869 address of the IWMA to the National Labor Union in the US, written by Marx, reiterated this point as follows:

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the victorious termination of the antislavery war has opened a new epoch in the annals of the working class. In the States themselves, an independent working-class movement, looked upon with an evil eye by your old parties and their professional politicians, has since that date sprung into life. … On you, then, depends the glorious task to prove to the world that now at last the working classes are bestriding the scene of history no longer as servile retainers but as independent actors, conscious of their own responsibility, and able to command peace where their would-be masters shout war.47

Conclusion Compromises with white nationalism, disregard for its dangers, and abstract rhetoric about interracial and inter-national unity are not solutions; they have contributed to the crisis we now face. The time is now to reclaim the revolutionary humanism of Marx’s struggle against white nationalism. We must decisively defeat Trumpism and other manifestations of far-right xenophobia and racism––and soon. Their defeat is in the interest of all humanity. Not least, it is in the interest of the white-nationalist base that Trump has in his grip. Only the defeat of Trumpism can free it from his grip and help redirect it away from white nationalism, and onto the path of independent emancipatory self-activity.

47

The comment about war and peace is part of the address’s call on the National Labor Union to try to help prevent a war between the US and the United Kingdom. 57