Cletus Conscript responds to the recent victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US presidential election with a polemic on the future of the US socialist movement.
Donald Trump will be president of our nation a second time. His triumph over nearly ten years of our country’s politics has been mind-bending. The force of his will is undeniable. He stands as tall over our nation as any great man ever did. His designs have completely realigned both major electoral parties from the bases up to the elites. He strikes fear into tens of millions here and hundreds of millions abroad. His grievances are as great as they have ever been and his mandate to compensate himself for them is equally as resounding. His retinue has been refashioned into a vulgar court of resentment as has never been seen orbiting an US president in the last century. His charisma worms its way like a parasite into every brain in this nation. He is leaning toward us, blade in hand, unimpeded at the end of US liberalism as its final executioner. We are powerless to stop him from striking his kill, even if we, doubtful, wanted to save the victim. He is, in contemporary times, the greatest and most formidable leader of the enemies of our people. We must not only destroy his movement but disassemble and thresh it by root and stem into something new. Through this class warfare, our movement will be reborn as a fighting movement. We must found a Workers Party.
With her defeat, her Party’s lies have also gone to bed forever. Thankfully there will now no longer be anyone alleging low unemployment or the most pro-union administration. The image of his bloodless rickety lily-white cadaver forever embalmed in the electric navy blue tailored two-piece will emboss itself in the history books after January as the last iconic testament for all time to the fact that their Party’s vampiric leadership, far short of waging an offensive on behalf of the majority of this country, was not even able to use the last victory of a corpse general to create defensible space against the innumerable legal and electoral advantages enjoyed by its organized opponents, let alone begin the process of undoing them structurally. The Supreme Court, the Electoral College, the filibuster, the gerrymandered House of Representatives, and the taxation without representation of Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico—each of these alone guarantees a structural advantage to the Republicans in pursuing their agenda and taking control of the country following elections they cannot fairly win, but taken altogether they are as certain to determine future events as the bones of an unholy witch cast onto her pentagram. They are the undoers and interrupters of the flow of history, reaction against the will of the majority crystallized in time for the future payment of the debts which progress incurs in this capitalist system.
The Apocalypse Now
We can frankly take stock of the situation now. I could give the same turgid statistics about wages, union density, homelessness, the imprisoned, the victims of drugs, the declining median lifespan, and the increasing age of retirement. I could say ‘not since the last Gilded Age…’ and reproduce the same tired old whining we’re all familiar with. But why not paint a picture instead, starting from the bottom upward?
Under almost every major freeway overpass in this country, there is a holocaust of insanity and degradation pummeled onto motley huddled breathing corpses that is as terrible as anything since the leper colonies of the Hebrew Bible. This condition afflicts not a few hundred or a few thousand, but many hundreds of thousands of our country’s people. In our prisons, many more hundreds of thousands of tortured men eat food chewed up and shat on by rats to give them fuel to fight wildfires, assemble license plates, and pick up litter on the roadsides. These penal laborers maintain our public infrastructure. Adjacent to them, in the broad daylight on the sidewalks and street corners are the food vendors and casual laborers fresh over the wall, who have no education, speak no English, possess no skills, have no connections in-country, have no papers or political rights, and who have absolutely no investment whatsoever in the institutions in their communities other than a base desire to find work as a wage laborer, which for them is an hour-by-hour struggle against virtually all the forces of American society to make a dollar.
Weaving through this mess on the margins of our streets, piddling through the armies of unemployed, slaves, and the emaciated insane, are cars. In most of these cars are members of the lowest rung of workers—the low-wage, casual, and ultra-casual “gig” workers. These people, if they hope to live in a major US city, work at minimum 60 hours per week doing utterly menial tasks—picking bags in a warehouse from one bin to another, wiping down tables at an airport, stocking shelves with dog food, etc. They spend an additional 10 hours commuting just to get to and from these jobs. Many millions of them work for our country’s largest employers: Walmart, Amazon, Kroger. Even after decades of 60 hours of work per week at $18 to $25 per hour, these workers will never buy a house. They are a permanent class of renters. Many millions of the younger ones may never move out of living with their parents, who themselves are renters. If they are recent immigrants from Central America as millions are, they may live three, four, or five families to a single home, with the younger males sleeping like sardines in blankets and bags huddled together on the floors of their living rooms.
The classes here illustrated, making less than $25 per hour in major US cities and renting, imprisoned, or homeless, account for over half of our country’s population. By a simple majority, they are the United States.
Remaining on the outskirts of major cities, or only venturing into them a couple times per week, are what many in the US call the “middle class” but which is actually the best-off section of workers. The lower section of this class, generally, are members of unions without college degrees. Legacy building tradesmen, union drivers, union manufacturers, and most healthcare technicians earn a wage typically above $30 per hour thanks to strong unions with very high density in their respective industries. These workers are increasingly second-generation, the children of immigrants. They may have bought their homes after the price crash of the subprime mortgage crisis and are happily enjoying a quality of life less worsened but certainly not increasingly better. They commute unbelievable times to and from their workplaces thanks to the differential between where their good union jobs are clustered (major population centers) and where their income can afford a house in the price bubble of the last ten years (the distant suburbs or exurbs). They don’t realize it yet, but in trivially few years artificial intelligence will dramatically reduce employment in their industries and catastrophically undercut their unions’ bargaining power through deskilling and widespread unemployment. Millions of them will be left jobless and reduced to the former category of lower-rung workers, as millions already have in a slower process since the 1970s.
Above these workers are college graduates in government, non-finance professional services, and engineering. They typically earn a salary, not a wage, and they live in roughly the same places as the former, unless they are higher-earning, in which case they may enjoy a more bohemian city lifestyle among the more wealthy. Yet one rung higher are the so-called “tech” workers and technicians of finance. These are very high-earners on a salary, who tend to live in the inner cities and increasingly are the (dwindling) base for the inner-city service economy. These people do not see themselves as workers, generally speaking. Ironically, their jobs will also largely be lost to artificial intelligence, especially soon in the cases of the programmers and financial analysts, two of the presently highest-paying jobs in the US economy.
Up the ladder above these classes, there is nothing for miles. From the ground upward, traveling in a rocket, one will have reached just where the dark emptiness of space is about to begin, in the revolving quiet of the twinkling stars, before one arrives at the billionaires. They pillage across the world on jets. They own island chains in every major ocean. They pay unbelievable sums for extravagant experiences like tours of the Antarctic pole or handjobs from children, depravities and extravagancies that the rest of us will never get a glimpse into but for their impervious state-of-the-art firewalls of information security. With machines the size of skyscrapers, they move entire nations under water, and through wireless telekinesis command pillars of cobalt and silicon to rise out of the Earth so that they can build what they want, where they want, whenever they want. They are, compared to our scurrying rat classes of the botched and bungled billions, titans among mortals. They have gone even beyond building infrastructures of containment for us. The concentration camp and the ghetto, though still very much in use today, are too 20th century for the modern capitalist. They are insufficient. They have found it is necessary to further hem us in within our own minds. They have paid the greatest pioneers of cigarettes, casino slot machines, and television sports to design super-powered computers which we are all compelled to use in modern life, which degrade our sense of place, time, and independent being. These devices distract us, numb us, and, more recently with the explosion of purely fictitious automatically generated AI content flooding social media, challenge us to a Truman Show-like game of What’s What to decide if anything we even see on these devices reflects that which is truly real. Through this great industry of confusion, our class has left behind any aspirations toward liberal education, self-improvement, a sense of progress not only for our bodies and domiciles, but also for our minds. In this way, we have all found ourselves to share in the great dividend of schizophrenia that has descended upon our society.
But not them. You will see they have no interest in their own products. Disguised as a token for progress, they finance the cutting edge medical science to come up with all sorts of anti-aging or “bio-optimization” schemes. One week it is blood transfusions from teenage boys. The next week it’s outfitting private jets with hospital beds and intravenous vitamins. The week after it’s brazilian jiu-jitsu and long walks on the beach. They know what these products are doing to us. Just as in the past they knew not to eat the food they sprayed glyphosate on, today they know not to let rashes fester on the underside of rolls of fat while rotting prone in bed with that offensive blue glow of the screen beaming into the front of one’s skull. For this joyful experience, they harvest trillions of dollars out of the rest of us every year.
And what do we export? Here in Gaza, the spraying pink mist of child flesh that coats fathers’ and mothers’ faces as uncomprehending horror wells up like an ocean in their eyes. There in Ukraine, the industrial march of thousands of conscripts from out of trenches and into goddamn killing fields in a war of inches of territory, a criminal kind of war we claimed to have left behind in 1945, but this time magnified in its uncanny terror by hand grenade-dropping drones and TikTok.
So, yes, private sector density is 6%. Let us say it over and over again until we are blue in the face. Meanwhile, the apocalypse has already arrived for the US worker, but to the surprise of many, the disorganized class of the immense majority has accepted it with very little resistance and, in fact, found so many millions of psychic ratholes in the digital firmament in which to bury themselves in order to ignore it. Our society, the capitalist society, is collapsing around the margins of a mighty electronic fortress that rises up. We are not only being made into slaves, as the capitalists have always attempted, but further now in this brave new epoch into unthinking insects, a bundle of Skinnerian responses regimented into a section and throttle of daily work and metabolism, ordered among many hundreds of millions of others in a configuration that gives us the absolute minimal necessary means for life, with not even the illusion of any degree of liberty or sovereignty. Anything particular or deviant about any one of us is monitored and moderated by an algorithmic behavioral training super-device plugged into billions of human beings worldwide. It is in this context that today we must take stock of what has just happened: the world is a garden buzzing with us, myopic little insects, but littered with a great collection of bone-dry tinder from provenance we do not know and by which means gathered together here we cannot exactly say, yet we know for certain that someone has, basically blindfolded and with a gesture of one finger in some direction, just appointed a bundle of matches sitting on top of a barrel of gunpowder as the gardener.
The End of All Social Movements
Meanwhile, the world believed that the deconstruction and dispersal of the US communist movement was, many decades ago, completed to a permanent end. Yet despite our inadequacies and failures to launch, here we are, and modestly do we grow. The diminutive little pillar that stands for socialism and communism in this country today is entirely new and discontinuous with any chain of leadership back to the old movement of 100 years ago—it is fashioned of our own despairs, the collapse of our own hopes and dreams, the hypersonic disintegration of all institutional vehicles which were supposed to propel us forward in history—today, we have little in the way of a communist movement, but what little we have is ours. It is finally no longer the recapitulation of long-forgotten grievances from within the Soviet Union and China echoing across the world through a thousand garbling ravens. Our movement is newborn. It slithers like a premature crocodile hatchling in the mud and algae and blood of this once-great society that has slid into the marsh. It yawns its maw and screeches in pain as the fibers of its muscles break and reform with every twitch of its writhing slippery body. This horrible sight is the genesis of a great and beautiful predator, and today we must begin again to refuse our extermination and instead behold our infancy and take our first steps into the breach of hostile nature to fight for our survival.
The refoundation of the Party is no longer a sectional demand. It is not a “far left” position among a spectrum of legitimate proposals on the US Left. Since the second minor liquidation of electoral social democracy into the Democratic Party which has just collapsed, there simply are no other viable proposals. In other words, the burning up of Sanders and the Squad—but vastly so, the story is Sanders—has closed the third path for many years to come. It is precisely the historical contingency that Sanders decided to liquidate his movement into the Democratic Party in 2020 after being the most viable outside force in recent history that gives us pause to think whether such a renewed effort along similar lines is possible again. Would we even have the time to generate a new Sanders? Who on the scene is proposing this, and who might be the candidates for leadership, and where might their mass base be located? Would such a movement not be vulnerable to such caprice again, just as it died before? These questions are unanswerable. The argument against a third electoral party holds stronger today than ever as today it would have to spring from no material foundation, ex nihilo, into hegemony within a few short years, something which has never and will never happen in the US, not even in the outlandish case of Trump’s movement itself. Trump recapturing the state in this context leaves no space for other proposals: there is only space now for the Party of a new type that is consciously articulated by the drawn-together, most-advanced leadership of the working class; and this, not despite the US system, but actually guaranteed by its peculiarities and the heightened acuteness of the danger our workers’ movement faces now.
The political elite have closed off all avenues for invading and energizing the state. But also our own leaders, the very last generation of leaders of social movements laying politically indigent on the ground, concussed and confused by the explosion in their faces of their own utter failure and unable to defend their loot, deserve none of our sympathies nor our respect. We awaken today to see our civic life and social movements devastated, ineffective, excised from the great community of the world, and for this we blame the leaders of our enemies, but also our own leaders. In fact, looking at the leaders of the trade unions today and their origins and aims, it is more accurate to say that we are letting ourselves be led by the enemy in most cases. Instead of courting and serving these leaders with the hopes of advancement under their patronage, we ought to turn our attention back downward. We must return to the very roots of our class. Brand new leaders must be discovered and empowered to attack their superiors for political power. First, in the underground while a position is being organized; then in a public movement into positions of leverage within the trade union movement. A total war must be declared on the so-called leaders to whom we have hitherto bound ourselves as mentees. It is not only our country’s politicians who have criminally betrayed us, it is also the leaders of our trade unions, our oh-so-radical academics, and the gratingly lazy work-from-home professional protesters at the helm of our community organizations. We must form a fighting organization to bombard and unseat the majority of them. The rule ought to be that they are guilty unless proven innocent.
The Party will be reforged as it always has been in all places and times where it has succeeded since the October Revolution: through the organizational fusion of legislative and executive functions within hierarchical democratic-central committees of cadre, discovered and drafted by existing leaders for their discerned talent directly out of the class, trained in the means and methods of revolution, and deployed to engage in struggle in strategic fights across the class. Of course today, that does not mean the molotov cocktails of whiskered men, train robberies, and the shooting of presidents with revolvers. But from the application of the method of this organization, it will emerge from among us what it means to do what is necessary. It does not follow syllogistically on a page of paper that from the method of organization, a litany of policies and a strategic pathway open up; rather, it is the application of this method in the world and its results which indicate to the living participant-creatures what such policies and strategic pathway ought to be. As clearly and squarely in front of us as it has ever been, we have for a variety of reasons refused this proposal for organizing our class at our own peril and to the permanent, final detriment of all of our social movements. But refusing it any longer is untenable. The Democratic Socialists of America has proved organizationally incapable of engaging in serious struggle and elevating determined and effective leaders of our class. Its organs have failed at every task to which they have ever been put. Its anarchy of permanent legislation has rendered it utterly incapable of mobilizing at scale. Its checkered-flag victories in the electoral arena have been instantly undone by a total inability to hold its champions to discipline. Its membership remains stunningly bereft of powerful leaders in and among the working class. Leaders of the class hold its activists at a suspicious distance for their lack of discipline and the apparent absence of chains of authority whatsoever; structurelessness repels would-be leaders.
And yet, the lowest level of union staff organizers, those leaders with the deepest roots among the workers, in virtually all the trade unions in this country, are socialists. Many recruited just this year off campuses nationwide come directly out of the Palestinian struggle and are deadly serious about their politics. Further, many senior organizers are open to socialist politics or are reconstructed anti-war or Occupy movement people drafted into labor after their mobilizations collapsed. And even still, many organizing directors at major unions like AFSCME, UNITE HERE, SEIU, the various militant teachers’ unions, the UAW, and several more marginal unions are themselves socialists or paper members of the DSA, once again, open to a socialist politics and far from inclined to discriminate against organization that takes on a more overt political character. Why have these forces not been drawn into struggle and instrumentalized in a manner that takes advantage of their leverage in the labor movement to unseat the top leadership, which is as mentioned destroying the movement at haste hand-in-hand with the bosses? Because they haven’t been coordinated in any way across their various movements, cities, and positions. Each of these little clusters of working class leadership machinates in a total vacuum from every other, with few exceptions. It has always been the primary instrumental value of the Party to open a political space above-and-beyond the different departments of struggle in which this advanced layer of working class leadership can coordinate. The DSA has never, and will never, play this role. In fact, the authentic leaders of the class, themselves many times inclined to socialism or communism, are hostile to the DSA for its inability to keep itself organized, recognizing in DSA’s leaders the same short-sightedness, stupidity, lack of organizational talent, and absence of disciplined habits of mind that they do in the piss-poor leadership of their own respective unions and rightly identifying this leadership as the natural product of a poorly structured organization. And yet, DSA remains the largest reserve army of potential leftwing leaders.
The Roots and Stems
The reader may ask, to be specific, in the context of the labor movement, who are these existing leaders that ought to be unified? One would be shocked to see all of them enumerated, if one were under the impression there is ‘an insufficient social base’ for a mass workers’ party at the present moment.
For one, in most major US cities, there are at minimum three semi-effective salt programs for training young radical organizers: the DSA, UNITE-HERE, and Workers United. In some cities, one or two of these may blink in and out of existence while the others are steady. Furthermore, in several major cities there are Amazon salt programs whose provenances are variable but which have recently been fused with the Teamsters. Some cities may further have their own peculiar salting micro-scenes that are discontinuous with a national tradition and movement, including several with prosperous small PSL and CPUSA salt programs. All of these, city-by-city and workplace-by-workplace, must be unified by the Party. These radicals work only within their own groups, usually without knowing of each other’s existence in the same city and not held under a unified programmatic vision for the future of the socialist movement. By this organizational vacuum above them, most end up liquidating into the labor movement and out of discipline. Their work is arduous and their struggles are chronic. They don’t bother wasting time at DSA committee meetings which will have no bearing or benefit on their organizing campaign. And who can blame them? But taken together these salts number in the many hundreds and will form the best layer of future staff organizers at all major unions, particularly and most often in the more radical service sector unions.
Number two are the existing young staff at major labor unions. These are virtually to the person self-identifying socialists who believe strongly in a political vision far beyond that of the political directors and local presidents of most major unions; in most cities, a vision that cannot coexist with the Democratic Party’s political hegemony over the workers’ movement. These staff organizers are responsible for turf including between 500 and 5,000 workers each, and their main responsibility on a daily basis is talking to several dozens of the most advanced workplace leaders. Furthermore, these staff organizers are almost universally hardworking and willing to volunteer multiple hours per week for their union and other unions engaged in intersecting struggles. They are self-sacrificing, disciplined, and deeply ambitious. Usually, they have misgivings about the political and lobbying spending of their respective unions and have well-informed and reasoned critiques of trade union political leadership. These alone number several thousands. The need to draw them together is obvious.
The third group are the existing union entryists and rank-and-file reformers associated with the DSA. This section is the near-exclusive focus of the DSA’s labor strategy (the so-called Rank-and-File Strategy, although “entryism” is a more precise term for the real-world outcome of its practice). This group is roughly coordinated on a city or regional basis by existing DSA chapters, but like all DSA organization, this level of coordination is limited and breaches of discipline are frequent enough to create major schisms, or raw personal disagreements among local Whatsapp warlords that blow up into larger fracas. These tempests repel the recruitment of talented organizational leaders. As far as the inside component of the strategy, organizers associated with Labor Notes and reform caucuses represent the best elements of the existing trade union leadership. However, in the limit case study of the very-old and very-private-sector Teamsters for a Democratic Union, one would be lying to say that the caucus has made any significant strides in structural reform. The reality is that most locals, including the prosperous ones, remain under tight control of utterly incompetent business agents who pay themselves, family, and friends enormous salaries to sit around the union hall doing close to nothing at all. The union has lost hundreds of thousands of members since the turn of the century. Pensions are barely hanging on, to the point where the very tough and serious men running that union find themselves on their knees begging a different Democrat on Capitol Hill every other week. Contract standards are declining relative to the economy. The UPS standard is existentially threatened by changes to the industry (Amazon). And the Amazon organizing itself, though enjoying immense breakthroughs this year, is coming about ten years too late. Worst of all, the bare absence of meaningful democracy and member engagement with the union has left very little room for the influence of a leftwing at any level. Those Teamsters who want structural reform and big investments in new organizing need help from the outside and need to be a mutually supported component of a larger strategy. This is just one very large private sector example among a very active section of workers that is probably in the tens of thousands across the labor movement at various levels of organizational coherence.
The fourth group are those just outside the labor movement proper in the labor-canvassing-industrial-complex. Many writers on the labor movement need to consider what follows from the fact that the US system, due to its federalism and legally unlimited spending on campaigns, is essentially a country in a permanent state of election. This has resulted in the creation of labor markets in all major cities for thousands of canvassers employed by political action committees. In the major cities with strong labor movements like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, labor unions are the top PAC funding source for Democrats at all levels. But even in smaller cities with far weaker labor movements like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Phoenix, there is enormous Big Labor PAC spending by unions because these are the core urban political machines in swing states in presidential elections. These canvassers are no minor force, and represent several thousand per city. It would be wrong to say the majority of canvassing workers, per se, identify or organize as socialists, but a very major plurality and certainly the leadership strata in campaign field offices are drawn from the unions themselves, straight from the universities, from the DSA or Working Families Party, or from the miscellaneous grab-bag of do-nothing itinerant professional protesters just hanging around the area. These represent, rarely acknowledged, the most structurally powerful workers in the elections industry and the most technically competent elections workers in the country, not to mention the leadership of a mass base in the geography of the cities themselves.
Fifth would be, most predictably, the official leadership of the existing socialist and communist parties and groups: DSA, PSL, CPUSA, Socialist Alternative, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and any others too forgettable to list here but who might be reading. These are the intellectual leadership of the socialist movement in the US today, whether some may like it or not. And none can be got rid of by any others, it also seems.
There are at the fringes the hangers-on of aborted “grassroots” community social movements. Among the environmental movements, there used to be the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion; before that, Greenpeace. There used to be Black Lives Matter. And very soon there will have been SJP, PYM, and BDS. It may sound harsh, but each of these movements cosigned its execution order when it failed to parlay toward a source of more permanent structural leverage; that is, many of these disaffected but excellent organizers may be inclined to see a distant future realization of their respective utopias were they to embrace an instrument of unified class struggle as its vehicle, rather than simply the never-ending road to nothing that mass protest in the US, or anywhere else for that matter, offers. Among these distributed community protest leaders, we will certainly find many thousands inclined to accept class struggle.
Finally, there is perhaps the most frequently overlooked but perhaps the most exciting: the tenant movement. Its leadership in virtually all cities is socialist; in the really big cities, communist and anarchist. Much has been said about this movement but very little has been written about its relationship to a future mass workers’ party. Needless to say, thousands of community organizers embedded for the long-run in place-based campaigns against the landlord class are an irreplaceable component of the vanguard of working class leadership.
So it seems the supposedly undeveloped mass base appears much more developed than we have been told. In fact, it is precisely this American trip of distribution, structureless, anarchy, that gives the appearance of no mass base when in reality it exists qualitatively and numerically but is simply fractured structurally. We have workers, yes. We have tenants, yes. We have militants, yes. We have union reformers, yes. We have mass protesters, yes. We have bureaucrats, yes. We have community pillars, yes. We have all of these by the tens of thousands in every nook and cranny of this country and each of them carries ten more along for the ride. What exactly, then, are we missing besides the Party? I challenge the reader to answer that question with any degree of intellectual honesty. And notice that not once was it mentioned marshaling candidates for the House of Representatives or even city council, nor doing anything at all publicly against the Democratic Party. We need not mobilize before we have yet even tried to organize. The Party of a new type does not begin its organizational journey by running candidates; nor does it end there. The Party creates leaders of the class. Some of those leaders will one day, when a sufficient base among voters has congealed and when a sufficient likelihood of victory has been calculated, run for official government office, but most never will. Unlike the existing electoral parties, the new Party would never confine itself to simply the ballot nor would it—as do the third parties and symbolic candidates—waste a single penny on doomed candidates and fruitless skirmishes with bigger fish that only inflame sections of the working class, alienate hitherto un-radicalized class leaders, and embarrass moonlighting radicals who are too serious to stoop to the theatrics and public hysteria of a creature like Cornel West, or the godforsaken Green Party.
A Party For the Worst of All Worlds
This impasse is irresolvable as long as the current situation prevails that the leaders of all left movements in this country do not combine together to chart a path forward in a unified Party of a new type. We must have a Congress, and we must have it in 2025. The various factions across the socialist and communist left must convene delegates and decide on a unified vehicle: at minimum, a Congress that meets regularly; at maximum, a workers’ party. To agree on a fair procedure by which fruitless old grievances are unable to be re-litigated, the Congress may be circumscribed with policies that create a bias toward action, to give some examples: discussion is limited to purely the prospects and procedures of creating a new party; one delegate means one vote; simple majorities carry; committees or any other subdivision of the whole to pass preliminary recommendations on policy are prohibited, that is, one resolution means one single vote of the whole body; at minimum, a Party central committee must be elected by the end of the Congress. And so on.
Perhaps this seems imperfect. That’s right. Perhaps it seems rushed. That’s also right. It is. We have not one second longer to wait for structure to emerge from the boiling primordial anarchy of the existing left ecosystem. It simply will not. Over and over and over again, for decades, hasn’t. If we fail to meet this moment, we have taken our own poison. No one in retrospect will look sympathetically on our movement. Once upon a time, the KPD died of its ultraleftism in the face of the Nazi threat and the American Party was beset on one side by the FBI and on the other by the NKVD, constantly battered between the international swings taken by the Soviets. But not nearly so dramatic and noble of a death will our modern left movement have died, because ours will be simply out of sloth, of forgetting to nourish itself. A thousand imprudent lemmings have waddled around each other in endless circular motions pretending to be doing politics in the name of socialism for decades, inspiring righteous disgust in the true socialist and communist movements of all other countries the entire world over. US socialism is an abortive joke. Meanwhile, the once very real and powerful labor movement of our country is on death’s doorstep. The environmental movement is dead altogether. Movements for racial justice have degenerated into petty schemes to draw up cash and provincial political capital from the desperate. What’s the point? Our new president welcomes individuals of all classes, all races, all sexes, all genders: as long as they are citizen, the good, in contradistinction to non-citizen, the evil.
To remain stultified in irrelevant little reading groups possessing no structural layout in the working class at this moment will be a death sentence for our movement that on the long view condemns an entire country of 350 million souls. It would be a criminal dereliction of duty for any socialist movement in any country at any time that enjoys such broad speech freedoms, such broad legality in the courts, such broad rights in the elections systems and procedures, such broad liberty from any foreign nation or agency, to sit idly while its country descends into totalitarianism at home and genocide and nuclear brinkmanship abroad. Any holocaust, genocide, or world thermonuclear war perpetrated in the name of the United States of America at a future time will bear the initials, if not the full signature, of the drunken American socialist movement, if we do not get organized together for a unified attack on capital and the ever-more-menacing American gangster state. It is also to stave off this world-historical moral outrage that we ought to found the Party.
The funding for our Congress can easily be found. The dates can easily be set. All potential delegates, who ought to feel a pang of guilt as they read this at their years spent bickering over questions of historically minor importance, can certainly get a hold of each other and begin to discuss it. All that stands in the way is the political will and the a priori agreement that we must bind ourselves together in a higher instrument, a vehicle through which all our struggles can be unified. If no such agreement can be reached in these simplest possible terms, then our movement and our country truly are given away to the Devil. The demiurge of artificial intelligence infused with the logic of capitalism itself will construct around us the perfect new digital Dark Age that could last just as long as the last one. One day we may even have forgotten completely in this country that there was ever a thing called socialism. The everlasting digital present moment may entrap us for one thousand years, only to be shaken off by the abrupt sensation of burning on the skin and the vision out the window of a mushroom cloud erupting off the near side of the Moon.
Donald Trump has won again, and may win for all time. But the madness of this nuclear world is growing even wider than the shadow he casts over it. The end of something approaches, but what comes next is a great mystery to everyone, and yet without the Party to chart a vision of something better, each future in near sight of contingency appears as menacing as the next. All that is certain is impetus toward action itself, the snapping of the jaw against our attacker, that individual imperative always underneath civilization: run, fight, or be killed.
