Author: cowboysonthecommons

A podcast and blog featuring Matt Stannard and several esteemed guest writers and producers, dedicated to theory and praxis of cooperative and anti-capitalist law, economics, policy, and culture, with occasional emphasis on (and a general orientation towards) rural and western U.S. socialist and cooperative history and organizing.

Laramie’s Cautious Police Reform Moves Forward

April 9, 2021
by Matt Stannard

On Wednesday night the Laramie City Council and those city residents able and interested to attend spent several hours debating and working through a proposal for some kind of police oversight entity. The thing they came up with was a 23-member ad hoc committee to study and develop recs and specs for that entity.

Two things I want to say at the outset–first, I live some number of yards outside of city limits, although my mailing address says Laramie and I’ve lived all over the city over the past 20-ish years. Our intentional community is, however, county not city. So I don’t presently get to vote for city electoral candidates or engage in their deliberations.

Second, I’m happy and think we all should be happy that the Council, with its increasingly progressive leadership and among some members a genuine feel for the events of the past three years here, is going through this process. Yes, we should be as impatient as hell, but we should take this process as a signal that local politics really matter, with lives in the balance.

Those things said, what about the meeting and its outcome? Public debate was contentious, as Derek says in our conversation on the upcoming episode of Solidarity Wyoming (I’ll link it here). During the past couple of years, the fierce backlash against police accountability in the City of Laramie and Albany County has fueled everything from threats–and some individual acts–of violence against Black Lives Matter demonstrators, arbitrary and selective arrests of demonstrators, public officials and candidates taking the stage with fascists at an extremist rally, and lots of shit talk at City Council meetings. It remains to be seen how much difference it will make in the outcome of this process.

The more serious danger is that well-meaning liberal and moderate members of the council and ambivalent ad hoc committee members will allow themselves to be walked away from meaningful police oversight. Democrats in the city and county are an often uneasy coalition of affluent liberals and less privileged militants (and students), and political outcomes, particularly on police reform, have reflected this.

The ad hoc committee established Wednesday consists of 23 voting members, including community residents, 2 of whom must be “engaged in social services,” and institutional members with positions like criminology professor, mental health worker, and significantly a member of UW student government. Mental health workers are included, along with 2 city council members and the (always disproportionately powerful) city manager. And the committee includes 3 police officers, including Chief Dale Stalder, who is a case study in police chiefs who think they’re apolitical but are political as f*** (one Laramie Human Rights Network leader talks about Stalder’s misleading budgetary orations in front of the City Council on this episode of our podcast).

Heavy with professionals, the committee will have to proactively commit not only to race and gender diversity, but also to working class representation and an understanding of disability. The presence of the chief of police and two other officers on an ad hoc committee might seem more reasonable than having cops end up on the actual oversight entity (although watch police apologists demand that very thing), but I will be pleasantly surprised if they contribute anything resembling ideas for increased accountability. I’ll come clean on that if I turn out to be wrong.

Which brings us back around to the real danger that this endeavor won’t bring meaningful change. The source of that danger is not understanding the ideology and aims of police and policing. The deliberative process that comes out of this will be a lot of things, but one thing it won’t be is apolitical.

Any approach that doesn’t at least acknowledge that the pro-cop position is partisan, that it is conservative, and that it hides its political agenda behind a badge, the fear of crime, and its very claim to be apolitical, will yield a flawed outcome that won’t prevent police abuse. And police abuse is what this is about, it’s why we’re here, why the Council was given this mandate through whatever combination of public pressure and good conscience convinced them to start this process.

The far right, in fact, understands that this is a political fight. For them, police being allowed to crack the heads, shoot first and ask questions later, make marginalized people afraid of cops, these are policy choices. Police brutality is hardwired into their desired outcomes, a point repeatedly made by their leader, ex-president Trump.

Pretending cops aren’t political allows them to claim a disproportionate share of our budgets, and avoid legal accountability when they do things like kill unarmed people or hit protesters with their cars. Police chiefs and cop unions get their own public pulpit, speaking on politics and policy behind a veneer of authority and objectivity when they’re often completely wrong about their own effectiveness and what works and doesn’t work in the criminal justice system.

And if instances of police abuse aren’t enough to compel people to fight for reform, I would add that what we are really fighting for is what our commons, our public spaces, our communities look like. Public violence, almost all of which is institutional, crowds out and discourages collective action and cooperative engagement. We surrender our own agency, and our shared resources, to paramilitary and reactionary bad actors. We gradually lose the ability to take care of one another. Cooperative politics moves in the opposite direction of that, and so must demand a completely different paradigm of public safety. I hope that vision exists in some form among the members of this committee, whose inclusion of 3 police may be 3 too many.

Matt Stannard is a member of the Solidarity House Cooperative media team and is co-chair of Southeast Wyoming Democratic Socialists of America. You can support his work at the Solidarity House Patreon page.

Photo: Laramie protesters confront police after the arrest of a demonstrator, June 2020. From video by Matt Stannard.

And Now A Brief Moment on Christian Eroticism

by Matt on April 5, 2021

I don’t have a lot of time to devote to this today but would love to collaborate with anyone interested and willing to do more research. We could make it an article (although many have been written–we could do so with a socialist feminist lens, perhaps?) or a podcast episode.

Anyway, there’s a ton of scholarship and general cultural examples for the thesis that Jesus is a sexualized superhero. This doesn’t bear on Jesus’s historical authenticity. I agree with Reza Aslan that a Judaean nationalist, mystic, and orator called Jesus existed–and had a brother named James who was later made the Bishop of Jerusalem. A google search on erotic Jesus bears much fruit, from “deification through corporeal perfection, artistic vogue, as well as humanization through sexualization” to “Mary [Magdalene]’s passionate and erotic love for Christ . . . an immensely popular topos . . .”

And on and on–there are countless analyses of this, and there’s even a Voxplanation.

Also check out (and then google) God’s Vagina.

I find all these arguments cohere with my own aesthetic, spiritual and theoretical engagement with Christ as a figure. Also Christian pop is extremely erotic.

I’ve had this discussion with lots of friends over the years and I expect to keep having it. If anyone wants to devote something longer that would be a nice project to engage.

Meanwhile, you can support the media and education work of our commune, which also supports research and analysis like this, designed to democratize religion and all other aspects of life.

Wyoming Rep. Gray Exposes GOP Fossil Fuel Gullibility

by Derek Jolley and Matt Stannard, on March 1, 2021

On the February 26 Solidarity Wyoming podcast, the writers of this post discuss the North American winter storm and the widespread political misinformation covered here. We also discuss the sweetheart deal that failed coal mine owners struck with the Department of Interior to the detriment of people and communities in Wyoming.

From February 13-17 of this year, Winter Storm Uri covered Texas with snow and ice. The underdevelopment and maldevelopment of Texas energy infrastructure resulted in widespread power outages in that state.

On February 16, Wyoming State Representative and former talk show host Chuck Gray of District 57 asserted on his Facebook page:

“Just as Wyoming conservatives predicted, the Texas grid is failing because of their reliance on renewables. I’m bringing a bill in the upcoming legislative session to assert that utility decisions must be made with consideration to reliability. We must save our coal-fired power plants.”

Congressman Gray’s effort to conform to one of the most lucrative tenets of the GOP party line shows how little he respects the intelligence of his constituents, as his statement on Facebook makes one of the most easily refutable yet oft-repeated claims by his particular brand of punditry.  In the continuing wake of ‘Winter Storm Uri’, this claim has seen a renewal in mainstream political discussion.  These unfounded attacks on the supposed unreliability of renewable energy sources are long past due for retirement.

Casper’s own Oil City News provided the most basic numerical refutation of the claim that the continual rolling blackouts experienced in Texas are the fault of “their reliance on renewables.”  In the first place, wind-generated power accounts for only 25% of Texas’s total electricity supply.  Offline power from renewable sources amounted to 16,000 megawatts, compared to 30,000 megawatts offline from gas, coal, and nuclear sources.  Wind power in particular proved to be, on average, more reliable than nonrenewable sources during the February outages.

In examining the lie that Congressman Gray is parroting, a simplistic narrative emerges: the winter storm coated wind turbines with ice and otherwise induced malfunction, in contrast to fuel-burning energy sources, which are impervious to such problems due to the high-temperature nature of their operation.  Yes, there were cases of storm-produced wind turbine shutdowns (due to a lack of proper weatherization).  In the big picture, the extreme freeze largely disrupted off-source electrical equipment regardless of what that source was, again, thanks to the lack of sufficient weatherization.  Severe winter storms in the region are not unprecedented – they occur rather regularly every eight to ten years, thus the excuse that proper equipment weatherization is not worth the cost is invalid.

An interesting case study in the propagation of this lie takes the form of a meme primarily transmitted on Facebook in the wake of the power crisis.  Originating with Texas fossil fuels pundit and consultant Luke Legate, the meme consists of a 2015 photograph of a helicopter deploying a fluid de-icing agent to a wind turbine in Sweden with a caption that reads: “A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical made from fossil fuels during an ice storm is awesome.”  Another variant comprised the same image superimposed with the text “Only two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity. – Albert Einstein”.  It seems clear that the meme was spread with the intention of making the viewer think that this aerial maneuver was photographed in Texas, and more insidiously, that “helicopter turbine rescues” widespread practice in Texas.  The photo was in fact taken during a research and development exercise for improving turbine weatherization technology, not an attempt to put a turbine back online “during an ice storm”.  Weatherization technology has made wind a viable source of power from Canada to Antarctica.

The February winter storm has brought to widespread public attention the infrastructural anomaly that is the Texas Interconnection, the power grid that covers most of the state; this provides critical context for understanding the significance of the previously mentioned numbers.  At no point crossing the state line, the Texas Interconnection’s manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is spared the trouble of having to comply with FERC regulations.  This geographic confinement also nixes the state’s ability to take in power from outside sources, at least in a reasonable amount of time. In short, Texas’s intentional separation from outside electrical grids is the reason for the deadly power outages, not a reliance on renewable energy. The profit incentive so foundational to a capitalist economy has, as it always does, superseded the value of human life.  The motivation for a separate Texas Interconnection was based on fossil fuel moguls’ unwillingness to sacrifice revenue to federal regulation; scores of otherwise preventable deaths are attributable to the Texas power outages alone.

One might question how such disasters are the fault of capitalism.  To illustrate one aspect of this declaration, let’s look at the alliance between dozens of key players in the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who ensure their continued survival.  Three members of Congress who represent Texas, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Ted Cruz, and Congressman Dan Crenshaw, are widely known as being some of the most outspoken proponents – and reliable voters – for the interests of the fossil fuel industry.  In the 2020 election cycle alone, these three politicians together were the recipients of over $1.1 million in donations from fossil fuel donors.  These donors took the form of political action committees organized by dozens of corporations, including giants like Chevron and Exxon and smaller regional players like Wildhorse Energy and Chief Oil & Gas, as well as thousands of individuals employed in these companies.  Interestingly, Senator Cruz received tens of thousands of dollars in donations apparently just as personal spending money, since he wasn’t up for reelection this cycle and not running a campaign.  

Hundreds of thousands more are donated to Texas state-level politicians every year, like Governor Greg Abbott, who in a recent appearance on The Sean Hannity Show claimed that the blackouts “shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America…” and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who is preparing a bill that would blacklist Texas companies that “don’t love fossil fuels”.  Fossil fuel corporations use this method of legislative electioneering as a form of insurance.  Every dollar that they give to their political allies is a frantic attempt to protect themselves from legislation that would otherwise gut their profits or ultimately work toward replacing them.

A few days after Rep. Gray’s ridiculous comments, according to the Powder River Basin Resource Council,

“the Department of Interior, Eagle Specialty Materials (ESM), and the attorneys in Blackjewel’s bankruptcy case released a settlement agreement for unpaid royalties on federal coal leases mined by Blackjewel, and its predecessor, Contura, at the Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. According to the legal filing, over $32 million in royalties are unpaid at the Belle Ayr Mine and $27.8 million in royalties are unpaid at the Eagle Butte Mine, with hundreds of thousands owed in interest.”

Be sure and read the whole story. Belly-up mine owners are regularly taking millions of dollars away from mine workers and residents of Wyoming, often while getting away with their own golden parachutes. That makes it even more disturbing to far right politicians making such earnest efforts to lie for the industry. Who are their stakeholders?

The exorbitant amount of political power wielded by industrialists demonstrates a mortal flaw in a government system heavily influenced by liberalism (in this case referring to the political philosophy that props up free markets and private property rights).  Democratic ideals are ineffectual when the capitalist elite have such an enormous influence on the information we have access to and the way we interact with each other.  If you “vote with your dollar” under capitalism, in what way is the system where a few people have billions of times more votes than you democratic?  Americans, and all who live under capitalist hegemony, live their lives with the unspoken understanding that, in the end, it is the rich and powerful who have the final say in how decisions are made.  

Fossil fuel barons and their political allies are not our friends.  Just as tobacco executives promised that their products were not addictive, fossil fuel executives are aware their products have been environmentally poisonous and are not economically viable.  This is why companies that fund climate denialism and economic scare-mongering in the media are at the same time insuring their facilities against the effects of climate disruption. 

It takes a great deal of moral fortitude to admit we’ve been duped, and we hope you’ll join us in the struggle for a healthier world and a more democratic society.

Derek Jolley and Matt Stannard are members of the Solidarity House Cooperative media team in Laramie. You can hear their discussion of this article on the February 26 episode of the Solidarity Wyoming podcast. You can support their work here.

Democratize Love

by Matt Stannard

October 11, 2020

” . . . the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him [sic] a need.” ~Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism

Maybe the shaping of our love-needs is a micro-instantiation of our entire regime of private property and colonialism, our personal primitive accumulations as our sources of traumatic seizures and losses, violent encounters, making some of us need multiple others to love us, and others need the exclusivity of one partner to call (to name, claim surety of) one’s own. In any case, none of it is clean. Polyamory even with the “ethical” designation still risks all kinds of power assertions and unspoken rewards and deprivations, while monogamy can go from liberating to coercive as easily as a gust of wind can slam a door.

In other words, if there is a disagreement between poly and mono advocates, I don’t think one side or the other can ever have moral high ground. Our needs may be met by multiple partners or one; the point is to abolish hierarchy. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t advocate–and particularly that critics of monogamy shouldn’t speak out on how monogamy carries the concept of property and “mirrors capitalism’s deficiencies.”

We know that, in the broadest senses, the fulfillment of human needs is a collective project. People express their emotional and sexual needs in different ways, and the necessity of a collective response can be expressed by those able to express. Gracie Brett describes the thought process, and the desire process, in the form of a question grounded in socialist theory and a kind of ethical curiosity: “I questioned why we are socially limited to one partner, when we could probably fulfill each other’s sexual, emotional, and other desires more comprehensively as a collective project.”

Gracie argues that since we have been “conditioned to not share in other facets of life” monogamy becomes an extension of this hegemony–an enclosure, like the enclosure of the Commons. I get it and I feel a strong attraction to that metaphor, but it’s not quite on point, or at least there’s a lot of work to be done in re-describing the construction of the partner-subject in order to envision the socialization of intimate relationships. Again, and regardless of whether it reproduces capitalism, monogamy may also fulfill a deep yearning not to have one’s intimate bits scattered or subject to a working group vote.

As Zoe Belinsky writes in an essay that anyone interested in these questions should read, “our relationships with each other are a part of our means of producing the world” which makes them “valid objects of communist political critique, ones that ought to be acted on, clarified, critically assessed, and mobilized as a resource for material practice.” Socialism is the movement toward elimination of material hierarchy in every sphere of life. If relationship exclusivity deprives one of a need that would better be fulfilled under a paradigm of collectivism, then exclusivity reinforces a hierarchy, even if it’s a microhierarchy (and it is not just that anyway). So the call to “abolish” monogamy doesn’t mean to forbid it, but only to say that the choice of one partner should not be seen as a default–and to emphasize how collectivizing and democratizing relationships can happen. The question is what can non-exploitatively meet our needs.

If you want to support my work, you can become a supporter of Solidarity House Cooperative, where you’ll be supporting lots of other people’s work too.

Art: Untitled First Abstract Watercolor (1913) by Wassily Kandinsky, at the Art History Project

“They Don’t View Us as Being Human” — the ongoing killing of Andy Antelope in Wyoming

by Matt Stannard

October 8, 2020

Last year, Solidarity Wyoming co-host Yana Ludwig interviewed Riverton, Wyoming organizer Chesie Lee and activist Ron Howard concerning the complex and often hostile relations between indigenous people and white residents (called settler colonials by some theorists) in Lander, Riverton, and the Wind River Reservation. The police killing of Andy Antelope was still fresh in everyone’s minds then. It hasn’t diminished since then, and the reason for that is largely the actions and inactions of public officials there. 

Earlier this week Wyoming Public Media published a detailed story of the unrest and mistrust in Riverton, and on the Wind River Reservation, surrounding the police killing of Mr. Antelope, a 58 year-old member of the Northern Arapaho Nation. What began as an arrest for public intoxication outside of a Walmart on September 21, 2019 ended with a fatal shot by a still-unknown cop to Andy Antelope’s head (in an act of disturbing opacity not present in higher-profile killings by police, the name of the officer hasn’t been released to the public). 

The cops’ and Fremont County’s narrative is that Mr. Antelope charged the unknown officer with a knife, earning him a shot to the head. “Antelope’s family members and others who knew him well have doubts about whether he could have posed a real physical threat,” reports WPM’s Savannah Maher. “He was 58-years old and in bad health, largely because of his addiction. He had poor balance and struggled to get around without help.” But the numerous questions raised by both native and non-native community members have not only gone unanswered, but have been treated with demoralizing contempt. The state DCI seemingly did little more than rubber-stamp the killing by re-telling the narrative exclusively from the anonymous officer’s point of view (a technique DCI also deployed when sugarcoating Albany County deputy Derek Colling’s killing of the unarmed Robbie Ramirez in November of 2018). And Fremont County has not allowed a public inquest into the killing. 

The reason for the lack of a public inquest appears to swing somewhere between local political disagreements and a genuine fear on the part of Fremont County that an inquest might reveal that the officer they are shielding from scrutiny acted inappropriately. But it seems unfathomable that such an investigation would be denied to a white victim of a police shooting. Mr. Antelope was dead within seven minutes of his encounter with Officer Anonymous (who allegedly was wearing body armor more than sufficient to protect him against serious injury from a knife attack even if Mr. Antelope hadn’t been disabled and physically weak). 

Mr. Antelope’s family and friends are furious that there was no public inquest. The police and public officials have been behaving exactly as police and public officials typically behave, revealing — and thus reconciling and restoring — as little as they are allowed to get away with. The settler paradigm demands maximum deference to law enforcement and zero to a vulnerable human displaying instability in an act that was probably minimally dangerous. For us to debate proportionality, we’d have to acknowledge precisely how much Native lives matter to non-natives.  

Although the heartbreaking story has not received the kind of media attention it warrants, it illustrates the way colonialism and capitalism do violence to indigenous people, and people of color, on rural stolen land. It’s a particularly sad illustration of how the system brutalizes its most vulnerable victims gratuitously, meaning unnecessarily but also as a kind of surplus, a piled-on kind of violence. 

Unnecessary because there seems to be no rational policy-based reason, and no ethical reason, and no public safety-based reason, and no medical or clinical reason, why that cop had to kill Mr. Antelope. There are countless examples readily obtainable of police disarming white hostile suspects, so even if Mr. Antelope was hostile, (we’ll never actually know), he likely could have been peacefully pacified and put to bed (and in a truly rational society, provided thereupon with the human and institutional resources to get him through whatever he was going through). 

According to Chesie Lee, at least one retired police officer, Ed Fowler, agrees with Lee and the Antelope family and friends that the killing was unwarranted, and I’m certain that if this were investigated by others outside of DCI, even more questions would emerge. 

But as is so often the case (and here egregiously so) with police shootings, official inquiries only ask if the officers’ actions are justified and very rarely if they are necessary–and never, if so, what makes them structurally necessary. What sets the conditions of necessity? Such structural discussions don’t ever happen because the protection of (particularly indigenous) life is not a policy priority in American policing–not explicitly, not implicitly in the dusty soul of white government. 

Uncertainty over how much Native lives matter inspired Ms. Lee to host a forum on September 26 asking that very question. A few days earlier, on the one-year anniversary of the shooting, 50 residents had marched in protest of the death and cover-up. I was present at the September 26 event, and the speakers all expressed outrage and sadness at the way every responsible party seems to have treated the incident as a regrettable inconvenience. 

One speaker, Karen Returns to War, charged that white people in Lander and Riverton do not understand their Arapahoe neighbors, nor how white material practices perpetuate disparities including addiction. Returns to War quoted John Trudell on how American platitudes of freedom and dignity are never extended to indigenous people. “They don’t view us as being human,” she said. Wyoming ACLU’s Antonio Serrano also spoke at the event, in his usual engaging and heartfelt fashion, invoking the commonality of struggle between all people of color in Wyoming and in the country, promising that “Someday we will get to a better place but it’s gonna take all of us to get there.” 

A letter sent to Chesie Lee from former Riverton mayor Ron Warpness illustrates Return to War’s point concerning white residents’ and leaders’ view of the Native community. In the letter, Mr. Warpness berates Ms. Lee her for holding the forum and for comparing Mr. Antelope’s martyrdom to Jesus (Ms. Lee’s work includes a strong religious component and such comparisons are common and appropriate theological positions, given the gospels’ citation of Jesus’s attitude towards people society views as flawed). The letter is mean spirited in the extreme, ridiculing Ms. Lee for being “an apologist for all things tribal” and asserting that Mr. Antelope had lived an “unproductive, destructive and criminal life” (it’s especially important that reactionaries like Warpness call indigenous people “unproductive,” since being indifferent to capitalism is part of what led settlers to condemn indigenous people in the first place). For good measure, the former mayor urges Ms. Lee to read Blackout by Turning Point USA spokesperson Candace Owens, and asserts a parallel between Black Lives Matter and the conditions of indigenous people. It would be hard to make up a fictional minor public official making such toxic and frankly laughable arguments. 

Similarly, when Wyoming State Rep. Andi Clifford (D. Riverton), on behalf of her fellow Arapaho Wyomingites, called for transparency in the investigation during a legislative hearing, her Republican colleagues chastised her for her lack of decorum. Their response reminds me, once again, of rhetorical scholars Donald Smith and Robert Scott’s well-known critique that “civility and decorum serve as masks for the preservation of injustice” and, echoing what Karen Returns to War said, “that they condemn the dispossessed to non-being.” 

Mr. Antelope’s son, who spoke at the event via telephone, called from jail, where he had been for some time, unable to make bond for a minor charge. Nobody in power is asking what connection there might be between the father’s unnecessary and carelessly addressed murder and the son’s subsequent actions. A diagnosis of trauma is only available for the privileged. For white settlers, asking such questions on behalf of the indigenous are as inconvenient as the demands made by the families of victims of police shootings. We can do whatever we want, kill whomever we want, and resolve ambiguities completely in our favor. 

One powerful conclusion for me is that, apart from Wyoming ACLU’s limited resources, there is little-to-no legal aid infrastructure for victims of police violence here. Maybe a benevolent advocate will read this and get in touch with the Antelope family. They’re hurting, and Wyoming is unsurprisingly indifferent. If a rich white university student in Laramie had been ticketed for MIP on a Saturday night, they’d have more resources at hand than any indigenous person killed by a cop in Riverton.

Photo by Angela Burgess, USFWS

Neoliberalism Enables Fascism. It is not Fascism.

September 23, 2020

by Matt Stannard

Neoliberalism seeks to build normalcy by hiding and peripheralizing the violence of capitalism. Fascism builds on the glorification of violence in order to achieve widespread enforcement, compliance, and celebration of a mystical order that is really just capitalism.

The failure of neoliberalism to do what it promises to do calls fascism into its performative life.

The performativity of fascism matters. Jedd Legum reported a few weeks ago on the Trump campaign’s acceptance of “thousands in donations from a notorious neo-Nazi leader and other racist extremists.” The neo-Nazi leader is Morris Gulett, leader of the Aryan Nations. “The Trump campaign has repeatedly accepted cash from Gulett”, who preaches that “White, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and kindred peoples are the direct descentants of the Adamic man . . .” and has called for genocide against those of African descent, calls Jewish people children of Satan, and so on.

Gulett’s contributions were brought to the attention of the Trump campaign in July 2018 by The Forward. At the time, Gulett had donated to the Trump campaign three times for a total of $200. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Forward.

The Trump campaign also did not respond to a request for comment by Popular Information about Gulett’s continued donations.

Judd’s post at his really good Popular Information site lists a handful of additional donations–in the several thousands of dollars–Trump has accepted from other open racists and white nationalists. There’s no attempt to hide any of this. Nobody in Trump’s support base, which may total as much as 40 percent of the country, will walk back that support. The reason they won’t isn’t because they are fascists (politically active and committed white supremacists, to functionally describe what I mean by this) per se, but because they’ve accepted that the open celebration of white supremacy is an effective means of protecting and promoting their own perceived interests and values.

For U.S. politics, including for a socialist approach to politics, it matters that one side is doing this and the other side isn’t.

There are two things that make the Democratic Party’s difference from, in particular, the Trumpian Republican Party, matter strategically. One is the presence of social democrats and democratic socialists in the party. Their presence is not “cover” for neoliberal and right-wing Democrats, but rather is the result of factional political struggle and popular support for the left in the United States’ two-party system.

The second implication of the difference is the philosophical positioning of the Democratic Party as embodying the promise that capitalism can be made humane.

Strategically, these implications give socialists the opportunity to emphasize both neoliberal capitalism’s broken promises and the importance of electing and protecting left Democrats while building an independent infrastructure for both direct action and electoral anticapitalism–whatever forms those take in the coming months.

Trumpian fascism, like all fascism, begins with the premise that capitalism can’t and shouldn’t be made humane, but rather that its violences are its virtues, the desirability of a violent hierarchical system, a sadistic celebration of brutality and caste order.

Fascism exists because humane capitalism rests on a lie. Neoliberalism’s stability rests, in turn, on the always-looming threat of fascism. We should be pointing this out–not as a pretext for comparing candidates or making epistemically sloppy arguments about equivalencies or third parties, but for building socialism as mass movement in opposition to capitalism, neoliberalism, and fascism.

You can support Matt Stannard’s political writing by supporting Solidarity House Cooperative on Patreon.

Notes on the Current Fascism

September 7, 2020

by Matt Stannard

Several converging events summon these notes: a massive upsurge in right-wing violence encouraged by the Trump administration, the infusion of fascist ideology into the covid-19 pandemic crisis (particularly the often hidden argument that it’s okay for vulnerable people and the elderly to die), a concern with how socialists should approach the Republican and Democratic parties politically, and a friendly disagreement with Chris Richards of Political Hack & Slash, which we dig into on this episode of the Cowboys on the Commons podcast. 

Donald Trump has been an incipient fascist figurehead, and whether he’s done so consciously or not, members of his administration are conscious white nationalists with yearnings for the administration to possess absolute executive power, the ability to silence both governmental and media criticism, and a preference for visible brutality. The administration and its boss have encouraged the growth of far-right street and militia-sustained violence against minorities and the left. The administration is fiercely nationalist. All of these traits are fascist. Although a few initial assessments of Trump a few years ago concluded against the label, such as this not-very-prescient Vox piece that relied on extremely bourgeois opinions, the fact behind those assessments have rapidly changed, and many of their conclusions failed even to consider the evidence at hand at the time. 

But there’s a thread of thinking (which has been around at least since the term “liberal fascism” emerged in the 1980s from anarchist-punk discourse and then received a new iteration from the far right), that puts both neoliberal, centrist Democratic Party governance and far-right Republican governance on the same basic canvas and calls it “fascism.” Chris Richards’ use of this term to describe the entire spectrum ranging from Biden-Harris to Trump-Pence led me to invite him to a friendly debate on the podcast. I felt like it was important to distinguish the current administration as uniquely fascist, and I still do after listening to Chris, although I think he raised some important issues that problematize making that conclusion too soon. In the end, he feels he has empirical justification for his broader use of the term, and I feel I have arguments justifying the distinction, and we’ll each go our separate ways doing what we need to do (and we largely agree that there are important differences between Biden and Trump although they’re both awful), but I wanted to explain my distinctions in more detail.

The Historical and Marxist Definition of Fascism

Fascism plays a distinct role in brutal institutional countermovement against the democratization of economic and political life. Fascism is when capitalism has a temper tantrum, stripping back liberal reforms and the rule of law, punishing the humanitarian tendencies of liberalism, and doing direct violence against socialist and anti-capitalist movements, liberatory identity movements, and progressive public dissent. 

I don’t consider myself an orthodox Marxist, but the general definition of fascism at marxists.org contains what I think are the vital components of a definition of fascism: “Fascism is right-wing, fiercely nationalist, subjectivist in philosophy, and totalitarian in practice. It is an extreme reactionary form of capitalist government.” The definitional essay lists several “fundamental characteristics” including that fascism is right wing, nationalistic, hierarchical, anti-equality, religious, capitalist, warlike, voluntarist (in that it advances a particularly metaphysical view of “the will”) and anti-modern. 

Fascism is Performative

Moreover, although this is not explicit in the Marxist definition, these characteristics are performative as well as substantive. By this I mean that fascism celebrates nationalism, the fervor of its hierarchy, and its insistence on violence. Fascism isn’t just authoritarian nationalism in substance–it’s a violent and forceful public argument for authoritarian nationalism.

Although during our conversation on the Cowboys on the Commons podcast, Chris argued that fascism inherited its violent practices from, say, Italian politics or an American tradition of party-based violence that implicated the communists as much as the fascists, the communists did not celebrate their violence or make it party ideology, and by all accounts, fascist violence in Italy, Spain, and Germany far exceeded prior manifestations of political violence. Violence was often the sole argumentative tactic of fascists. The Italian fascists systematized and stepped up political violence. The Spanish fascists were unrelentingly abusive towards peasants and communists and used violence to demoralize republicans in the Civil War. And Kenneth Burke writes of Hitler’s early street-level political team deliberately antagonizing people at rallies in order to start fights that would become performative arguments for National Socialism: 

“Hitler also tells of his technique in speaking, once the Nazi party had been effectively organized, and had its army of guards, or bouncers, to maltreat hecklers and throw them from the hall. He would, he recounts, fill his speech with provocative remarks, whereat his bouncers would promptly swoop down in flying formation, with swinging fists, upon anyone whom these provocative remarks provoked to answer.”

. . . a tactic duplicated by the Trump campaign. 

So the difference between authoritarianism (which tolerates the liberal state) and Fascism (which doesn’t tolerate the liberal state) is obvious in the way the two forms of governance and political movement function. And there are other distinctions. Fascism flirts with a few revolutionary demands. It typically does this by promising a strong executive, a “strongman” who will bypass the democratic process to create special “exceptional” policies favoring some group or another and overriding procedural barriers to meeting their needs or demands. The Trump administration has done this, though the degree to which the administration has any legitimacy on this is determined by the outcome of internal cabinet struggle and placating big capital. 

Above all, fascist ideology glorifies violence, celebrates mythic strength, divides strong and weak. The Trump administration does this by encouraging interpersonal violence, police violence, right wing nationalist violence, the death of “weak” people vulnerable to disease, and the explicit celebration of immigrant detention (rather than Obama’s and presumably Biden’s, more humane-appearing and sugar-coated anti-immigrant violence, which also contains zones of exception and the space for change that explains why most immigration attorneys would undoubtedly prefer a Biden administration to a Trump one). 

Fascism is inseparable from white American nationalist and white Euronationalist ideology. Where nonwhite groups have exhibited fascist tendencies they have done so in the context of right-wing nationalism (e.g. Hindutva) or anti-Semitism and mysticism (Nation of Islam under Farrakhan). 

Fascism relies on the conscious, publicized creation of street-level gangs and, in the American context, right-wing militia. Fascism is not as contemptuous towards the managerial or liberal state, the military and the intelligence sector as it is to the far left–that is, fascists believe the far left must be eliminated first–but fascists do want to dismantle the liberal state and remake it as a totalitarian state based on mysticism and force. That this goal is ultimately unattainable* is not an immediate concern. 

The difference between the fascist state and the liberal state is that the liberal state tolerates judicial review, popular demands, local control and other checks on totalitarianism up to a point. Fascism can’t do that. Liberals form relationships with those protections, demands, and procedural checks that are very different from the bare, aggressive antagonisms of fascism. 

Errors from Misunderstanding fascism or Conflating it with General Authoritarianism: 

1. Misunderstanding the push-and-pull game of liberalism and fascism. Liberalism is based on the argument that the progressive liberal state can co-exist with capitalism. Fascism rejects that argument, sees liberal progressivism as a threat to capitalism (and to the white supremacist order behind it), and thus periodically destroys it. 

To some extent, the working class can demand and take advantage of the reformism of the liberal capitalist order. The socialist movement can use the tension between liberalism’s promises and failures to deliver them to open up wider political space. Fascism closes that potential and that space. Fascism doesn’t just function to reassert capitalism but also to reassert white supremacy and patriarchy and really the whole Kyriarchy, to borrow from the feminist term. Ultimately, just as the looming threat of communism has forced parliamentary democracies to enact social democratic reforms (like universal health care), the threat of fascism serves to close that reformist space. Thus, fascism and liberalism can never “be the same” functionally because to do so would undermine their ability to play off of each other in the service of capitalist white supremacy. 

2. Misunderstanding America First-ers’ & MAGA’s argument that Trump won’t start wars. This is a particularly frustrating public argument–that Trump will keep us out of war where liberal internationalists and neocons are more likely to start wars. It’s frustrating because there is a kernel of truth in fascism’s arguments against the interventionist and internationalist state, but we also know that nationalism, particularly non-liberatory nationalism, is an antecedent to the kind of unilateralism that, had things gone a little differently in Iraq and Iran earlier this year, undoubtedly would have taken us into an extremely destructive war. I can write more about this later, or talk about it on a podcast (mine or someone else’s) because I have limited time here and it is a complex discussion. Short version: Trump, like Hitler and Mussulini, would risk millions of lives if he believed it would advance his interests, including very immediate and very personal ones. We already know that he has no qualms about spending American lives in the service of illusory leadership. 

3. Misunderstanding other far right regimes like Putin’s Russia. 

4. Ceding political space to fascists by not forming critical/contingent electoral alliances with left liberals/left Democrats. There’s a great discussion about this on the vast majority podcast, and I would add that those who believe electoral politics are irredeemable need to answer a few questions: what’s your theory of the state? Are we cool ceding state power, the administrative and material power of various elected and appointed positions, to the far right? How far down the ballot is this true? Do you feel comfortable with the kind of oddsmaking that says we’ll be “worse off” or “just as bad off” regardless of who occupies those positions? 

5. In all of these errors, confusing bourgeois identity politics with demands for civil rights, equality under the law, and more radical anti-oppression work. Do we want to be the Socialist Workers Party or the Socialist Equality Party, the former praising the Bundy family and the white supremacist takeover of federal facilities, the latter mocking campaigns against sexual assault? I say that instead of this, we need to acknowledge that even though class and materiality contextualize struggles for equality under the law and equality in the anti-capitalist struggle, we still should support strong steps towards securing political and civil rights within the capitalist system. 

6. Sliding into accellerationism. This is where the rubber meets the road, as far as I’m concerned, about socialist praxis. Accellerationists, including people who don’t really know or admit that they’re advocating accellerationism, do this by rejecting reforms that socialists have traditionally led the way in demanding of the capitalist state, and by committing what I’ve come to call the “bare face” fallacy, assuming it’s preferable to have an open fascist in control of the state than a liberal. 

Conclusion

This kind of analysis will always feel futile and fleeting if we’re being honest with ourselves. Method and analysis can’t capture the dynamic, ever-changing clusters of material power and meaning-making around us. Nevertheless, in my own attempt to make sense of it, I find that the difference between liberal/neoliberal capitalism and fascistic neoliberal capitalism is that in the former, there is space to fight for, carve out, and demand non-systemic, but useful reforms; in the latter, there is a mad, overwhelming dash to end reforms, relief, and any checks possible against the self-directed excesses of capital. 

The liberal/neoliberal capitalist state is still brutal, often exporting or hiding or otherwise deferring the violence away from the political centers of its regime. But it is more likely to pay legal and rhetorical heed to political equality across identities, and more open to demands for relief and service as a function of democratic processes and public bureaucracy or coordination than the fascist state. In those instances where the fascistic capitalist state grants relief, it does so under the public warrant of strong executive power, so that all relief and reform depends on the will and the grace of the strong (and aspirationally unitary) executive. And the fascistic capitalist state is likely to continuously engage in the stripping of legal protections for minorities, as well as sanctioning rhetorical dehumanization of minorities.  

These distinctions are problematic; as my discussion with Chris revealed to me, the liberal/neoliberal capitalist state has broken down the distinction between legal and extralegal violence that used to enhance fascism’s reliance on street gangs and militias. But I think the distinctions still explain how liberalism creates the conditions for fascism, and in a sense relies on the looming threat of fascism to prevent the material delivery of socioeconomic rights, or sometimes weaken the enforcement of civil rights. 

The U.S. electoral system, particularly where presidential elections are concerned, is pretty much broken, and so I don’t think it’s constructive to get involved in the numerous debates about whether socialists should vote for the Biden-Harris ticket, abstain from voting for a presidential ticket, or vote for a third party. The system is soaked so full of voter suppression and electoral college distortion that one can’t confidently draw an arrow from one’s individual vote to a predictable outcome. What I can say is that a Biden-Harris presidency will raise extremely different needs and tasks for socialists, the anti-capitalist movement, and those concerned with cooperation and justice, than a Trump-Pence re-election–and that there are many people fighting on the front lines of labor, immigration, LGBTQAA+ and civil rights who note an exhausting, perpetually demoralizing, ship-always-sinking, fires-always-burning feeling from the Trump administration. Such an effect is intentional when an administration is full of open white nationalists, radical supply-siders, and advocates of unitary executive governance. There will not be fewer challenges presented by a Democratic administration, but the challenges are likely to manifest in a different, less exhausting and demoralizing way for many categories of progressive resistance. Although we should never pretend that’s good enough, I don’t think we should discourage people from preferring that outcome. It remains for us to educate people why it is, at best, necessary but not sufficient.

* Unattainable because the function of fascism is to beat back resistance to capitalism; when it fulfills that purpose it often (but not always) goes into retreat. Its remnants are assimilated into the liberal state, but that doesn’t make the liberal state a fascist state. The explicitly fascist traits are watered down, rehabilitated, and change rather drastically in form.  

Solidarity Collective Fights to Survive in 2020

We aren’t going down yet, but we haven’t achieved long-term viability

by Matt Stannard
May 22, 2020

Solidarity Collective’s landing at this space, with its large 1878 main house, and 3-acre estate full of other structures, pasture, and abandoned junkpiles, has always been a work in progress. It wasn’t some comfortable and ready-made space, although it has striking wonderfulness all over it. Making it work was going to take time and money. Making it work as an anti-capitalist commune was going to be even more challenging, because that meant we would not exploit each other or anyone else in the restorative process. At our approaching two-year mark, we’re running out of the resources–all the resources–to make it work.

We are still fulfilling our mission: we host (now virtually) political and social events and open our resources and spaces up for a wide range of socialist, left-wing, intentional community, anti-capitalist, anti-oppression and progressive causes. We give away and sell food. We produce podcasts with hundreds of downloads per month. In some instances, resource and labor shortages, and now the pandemic, have slowed our pace, and at our last annual retreat we lamented our failure to get more projects off the ground, particularly work in anti-racist education. But we are productive and values-aligned enough that our service and output is not the reason we’ve recently come so close to calling it quits.

I point out that we’re still living our values and fulfilling our mission because the consensus of the comrades, at least now, is firmly that deciding not to live that mission and those values would mean that the work we are putting into maintaining the space of the collective wasn’t really worth it. We’re not yet ready to concede we need some kind of Cuban “special period” of capitalism, and i suspect none of us could be capitalists even if we wanted to (capitalism means exploiting the labor of wage workers for profit; on the relationship of worker-owned cooperatives to anti-capitalist politics, see the work of Richard Wolf, among others). We also recognize the limits of the cooperative model.

Finding a way to make it work means finding a way to make all of it work: the finances, the values, our sustainable and nurturing treatment of each other. Our radical egalitarianism is non-negotiable. If we were to fold, it would be cooperatively, with the expectation that everyone will do everything they could to make sure each comrade finds a stable transition and destination.

We have some good things going for us: we’re bringing in 3 new members in the next three months, we’ve gotten additional inquiries beyond those, socialist and alternative economics are surging in popularity, including in Wyoming, and we are still full of energy and ideas to push forward.

But we have some bad things going against us too: Solidarity Collective isn’t presently financially viable in the long term. None of us are remotely well-off financially, and collective ownership was the only option for owning this space. Paying our mortgage, keeping the power and heat on, feeding ourselves and others, maintaining our main work and living spaces are our top priorities, and the lights aren’t going out, nobody’s hungry, we’re warm and safe, and won’t default on the mortgage. But repairs, taxes, and project financing have put us in a slowly growing hole, such that our long-term projections are not viable without increasing our prospective membership by around 50%. In the best case scenario, climbing out of the red won’t take as long as it took us to get there, but it’s not going to be easy or quick, and our current configuration doesn’t have the resources to do it.

We have viable, if modest, business models for the enterprises we run (again, if the point was to make huge profits, we would not be operating communally or within our values), and we are exploring ways to increase our Patreon support, produce more podcasts and grow our listenership, and expand our farming operations. But these take human labor and we’re all stretched very thin.

Partnerships may work for some of them. We’re meeting twice a week, painstakingly (and emotionally) considering possibilities and propositions. We can always re-prioritize our labor but we have no room to reprioritize our financial commitments. They have been massaged and scrutinized over and over again, and we’re at the part of that slide show which shows that we will not survive long-term.

Another important factor is that it’s hard to do what we’re doing. Material and cultural cooperation isn’t just learning the skills needed to share. It also proceeds from the same general principle as socialism: that a wide scaling of shared resources can serve everyone’s needs. “From each according to ability, to each according to need” can only really meet the diverse needs of a group of people if the gives-and-takes are sustainable. Our financial, physical, and emotional resources are stretched and often broken, week after week, month after month. There is no more “from each according to” to take.

We’ve also just had some bad luck. Some of us have lost work due to Covid-19; two comrades’ jobs have been eliminated. Another has had a string of tough health issues. Expected move-ins have been delayed by the pandemic and roadbumps in people’s lives. A guest who was temporarily staying with us seriously damaged an apartment and we don’t expect them to be in any position to fund the repairs we need. At the same time, we’re aware that some unexpected good luck could turn up, as it has before. In any event, we aren’t viable if we depend on good luck and dread the bad knowing we can’t absorb it. Viability under capitalism is nothing if not highly dependent on the ability to absorb bad luck.

I write this even though what sticks out in my reflection over the last two years has been the number of times each person here (and some who have left) have risen above and beyond what might be normally expected of people. Communal heroism has been on alternating display here, from those that live at the commune and those who actively support it from the outside (whose visits and constant help has been the stuff of legend). In other words, I say this feeling strongly that each person involved with this project has at one time or another been vital to our functioning.

That’s outstanding. It confirms, for me, a lot of my beliefs about the viability of solidarity–when people’s care for others is sustained by socialized, restorative systems. We don’t presently have enough people to create or sustain all the systems we need, but we’re trying to find a way.

Why am I telling you this?

Because we’ve always been transparent about our intentions and our resources.

Because if a strong part of you or someone you know tells you that you have been wanting to join an anti-capitalist commune and you like fighting good fights with long odds, this is your opportunity to do it–get in touch and help us soberly and objectively make our decision about the future.

Because if you are fascinated by processes and challenges like these, you are welcome to follow our saga through to whatever conclusion it reaches.

Because regardless of the outcome, we have hard work ahead (dissolving or rebuilding will both take tremendous amounts of work) and we need to maintain our connections to supportive and well-wishing friends: we need the love and connection of those who care about us and what we’re doing.

Because we have accomplished a whole lot here, and that won’t change even if we end this phase of our work, and you can help us celebrate that. We need celebration too.

You can support Solidarity Collective in many ways (contact members for more information) but one easy way is to subscribe to their Patreon at this link.

Broken Promises Threaten Lives of Greeley Meatpacking Workers

by Michael Yates
April 24, 2020

The largest employer in Greeley, Colorado is the food processor JBS USA Holdings Inc. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of JBS S.A., a Brazilian company and the largest processor of fresh beef and pork in the world. The plant in Greeley employs some 6,000 people, many of them immigrants. In Greeley, nearly 40 % of the population (which is about 107,000) is Hispanic, meaning that many of the workers are Hispanic as well.

Work in a meatpacking factory can best be described as laboring on a disassembly line, as animal carcasses are disassembled as the animal moves along a mechanized line. By all accounts, the work is intense and dangerous (see Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism, in Meatpacking, 1930-90, along with my review in the Oct. 1998 issue of Monthly Review). Animal blood everywhere. Knives flying, cuts omnipresent, as the line moves ever faster and the boss demands more and more production.

There was once a strong and radical union of packinghouse workers, but mechanization, globalization, and business consolidation, along with red-baiting, damaged the union beyond repair. Today, the much weaker and less radical United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) represents workers in some of the US plants, including the one in Greeley. Of course, just about any union is better than none, but the old union, the United Packinghouse Workers, won wages that were among the highest in the country. It also had an ingenious structure of shop stewards, who coordinated confrontations with management across plants nationwide. Today, wages are much lower and the union much less militant.

As essential labor, the operatives at the Greeley facility continued to work during the pandemic. The company did no testing, and the workers went without adequate personal protective equipment. As could have been predicted, employees soon became infected by the virus, and then they infected family members. Or they contracted the virus outside the plant, and then infected their coworkers. Hundreds were ill, and several died. The situation went national when Trump and Pence referenced it at a daily news conference. Pence promised that tests would be quickly made available, and the company also promised testing immediately. Not surprisingly, neither promise has been kept. A report from Contact 7 in Denver on April 22 states:

“Now less than a week from the scheduled reopening of the plant, promises from the White House and JBS management have not been kept. ‘We can only assume the reason they stopped testing is they don’t want the numbers to come out, it’s bad PR,’ said Sylvia Martinez, a spokesperson for Latinos Unidos of Greeley. Multiple informed sources confirmed to Contact7 Investigates that JBS management stopped testing shortly after it started doing so on April 11 and well before its promise to test its 6,000 employees. Insiders have told Contact7 Investigates that between 40% and 80% of managers/supervisors tested positive on the initial day of testing and those results prompted JBS to end the testing program. ‘I believe when it became apparent that most of the supervisors tested positive JBS abruptly stopped the testing,’ said JBS Union President Kim Cordova.”

Sadly, the plant reopens today, April 24. The UFCW national president, Anthony Perrone, warns that it is not safe to reopen the meatpacking plants that have been closed, including the one in Greeley. Stories out of the Smithfield plant is South Dakota are heartrending, with the same management lack of concern for the largely immigrant workforce. BBC News reports:

“But according to Smithfield employees, their union representatives, and advocates for the immigrant community in Sioux Falls, the outbreak that led to the plant closure was avoidable. They allege early requests for personal protective equipment were ignored, that sick workers were incentivised to continue working, and that information regarding the spread of the virus was kept from them, even when they were at risk of exposing family and the broader public.”

Today, governors in several states have begun “opening up” their economies, and many others are itching to do so. Let what is happening at these meatpacking plants, and many other “essential” workplaces serve as a warning as to what is likely to happen if we return to business as usual. We are in the midst of a horrible pandemic. Our “leaders” are advising tactics that will only worsen things, sickening and killing more people. Yesterday, Trump suggested that we could inject disinfectants to cleanse our bodies of the virus. Maybe that will be the salvation of the packinghouse workers, and all of us. Hitler, anyone?

Michael Yates is Editorial Director of the Monthly Review Press. He was a labor educator for more than three decades. He is the author of The Great Inequality, Why Unions Matter and Can the Working Class Change the World?

Old SDS, New DSA, and Trump vs Biden

From the Editor:  In this guest post by Participatory Economics innovator and longtime organizer Michael Albert, we open up space for a very contentious but important dialogue among the anti-capitalist left on questions of presidential politics, the dangers of fascism, and whether contingently “supporting” (mainly voting for) an extremely problematic Democratic nominee is a desirable position given the multiple stakes involved in removing the current administration. Last week, a group of 1960s members of Students for a Democratic Society signed a letter in The Nation calling for the left to support Joe Biden.  Daniel Finn responded to the letter at Jacobin, accusing the SDS emerita of “haranguing” socialists into supporting Biden. Other statements have been released as well. In the spirit of ecumenical left debate, we’ll publish future guest editorials on the question as long as there is interest. ~MJS

By Michael Albert
April 20, 2020

In a recent letter a group of old SDSers hoped to engage some young critics of the Democratic Party and Joe Biden. Those critics actually ought to be mightily commended for many of their analyses, insights, actions, intuitions, and feelings.

For example, the critics are correct that Biden is a tribune of power and wealth and of the current socio-economic system, not a friend of the poor, the disenfranchised, those doing rote and tedious work, those reviled and repressed by police, those living under occupations and bombs, those suffering the many diseases of our times.

The critics are also correct that Biden, Obama, the Clintons, and the establishment Democratic Party power brokers reject fundamental and even just substantial change and that many feared Sanders reducing their influence more than they feared Trump retaining the Presidency. Masters of war. Masters of impoverishment. Misanthropes of morality.

They are correct that U.S. elections don’t question underlying social and economic relations, and that the electoral college makes a mockery of democracy.

They are correct that even when rhetorically caring and humane, Democratic Party elites, like all the many TV ads now celebrating frontline workers to try to sell automobiles, are ultimately about business as usual.

The critics are also correct that as bad as Covid-19 is, multi-dimensional ecological collapse via global warming as well as death by starvation, inequality, and militarism are even greater threats to human survival. The young militant’s leadership on global warming and their observations that Biden and his overseers offer far, far less than we all ecologically need are also correct.

The critics would also be right if they pointed out that many old SDSers haven’t been very visibly active in a very long time, save for periodically supporting some Democratic candidate and that Old SDSers haven’t offered much inspiring vision and haven’t fully followed through on delivering a world worthy of young people’s on-going habitation.

Hell, the Biden critics would also be right to point out that Boomers writ large overwhelmingly exited “our generation” writ radical, and at a crucial historical moment became anything but Sanders supporters. They could reasonably ask those of us still radical why we didn’t do better reaching our own peers and how we could think we ever really knew much less that we still know how to reach out and organize? They could also reasonably wonder how come the old SDSers had barely a word to say about young leftists’ merits or about older leftists’ failings.

The young left has also been right that while Sanders didn’t voice all their desires and didn’t legitimate all their feelings, his was a brilliant campaign, program, and project that deserved their whole-hearted support. And they have been right to assert that the program, beliefs, and commitments of both DSA and the Green Party are monumentally superior to those of the mainstream Democratic Party.

Like the letter signers, I was in SDS and the broader left of the sixties but I don’t write this reply to the old SDSers based on my past membership. Like many of them, I have remained active since, in a myriad of ways, but I don’t write this based on that, either.

Like many of them, I have been and remain a militant advocate of fundamentally changing the racial, sexual, gender, political, economic, and ecological contours of contemporary life, right down to the roots, and I do hope that maybe that will weigh just a little bit positively on what follows, especially since what follows seeks to be heard not by old-timers like myself, but by young people looking around at crushing chaos and escalating pain and trying to find an effective path forward.

I write this seeing that because of their above views and many more besides young militants are the hope of the future. And because I want more than anything that they should have the room to pursue their own better world successfully.

But there is another dimension to address, because for all the many points that young radicals are rightly pursuing, one widely held stance many of them share is understandable but appears to me, as it did to the old SDSers, nonetheless ill-conceived.

And it isn’t that the young left are speaking from privilege because many aren’t in jail, or in detention camps, or looking up at drones, or starving…that is no more legitimate a criticism now than when my generation’s then elders, fifty years ago, threw such charges at us as we fought for civil rights and Black Power, for Women’s Liberation, for the Vietnamese, for the poor, dispossessed, shackled, and sickened in all lands. We old-timers should remember how we reacted hearing from older leftists – who did have insights worth hearing – that our form of militance was sometimes suicidal, that our analyses were sometimes misguided, that our anger and beliefs were sometimes the folly of immaturity? We wrote them off and didn’t look for the nuggets of wisdom they did indeed have to offer. And now, here we go again, except this time we are the old-timers undercutting our own chance to contribute usefully.

Here is the thing, young militants. I believe you are wrong about just one set of interrelated beliefs. And while in confused times like these that is a remarkably small debit, the problem is that that one set of interrelated beliefs matters a whole lot.

Trump winning in 2020 would not be less than a world historic disaster for all else you believe, feel, and think. Biden winning would be vastly better (albeit, of course, abysmally short of) all else you believe, feel, and think. Not voting or voting other than for Biden against Trump, at least in swing states, would not somehow strategically do more to uproot the two party system, to defend Democracy, to expand equity, to reverse racism, or to slay sexism, than would beating Trump while simultaneously working on all those and many other agendas as well. And finally, your choices in these regards do matter. Not only might the election hinge on fewer votes than you can swing, but who is better informed to talk successfully with working class Trump voters from 2016?

You have acknowledged Sanders’ intelligence, commitment, and courage. How comes it then that you so easily dismiss his choosing to keep fighting for his whole program, which is in large degree your current program, but also, and as part of that, to fight for Trump’s defeat via Biden’s election?

You believe in fundamental change. Me too. I have spent a lifetime trying to give it wings rooted in clarity. You passionately hate those who purvey business as usual over the bodies of countless corpses and uncountable diminished souls. Me too. “Hey hey LBJ?, how many kids did you kill today?”

You feel that supporting Biden against Trump is signing on to preserving the existing abominable system with, at most, some modest mitigating policies. And that feels to you like a direct route to being what you oppose. And I understand that feeling too. And to an extent, I think you are right. Slip sliding into being what we hate, or contributing to others doing so, is not only possible, it is oftentimes rather likely – unless we are very clear in our motives and actions.

But the good news is that the needed clarity is easily in everyone’s reach. Why not advocate voting for Biden in swing states where doing so could matter to beating Trump, on the undeniable grounds that Trump winning again also involves a slip slide – into hellish days well beyond those already endured, if not worse still. Do it not based on Biden’s non-existent merits but because Trump winning would accelerate the race to destroy the environment that sustains organized human life, maybe even reaching irreversible tipping points, with mounting and hideous catastrophes along the way primarily among the poor abroad and at home. Why not do it because Trump winning would increase the risk of terminal nuclear war, which is transparent, and because his winning would pack the judiciary with young ultra-right justices who, for at least a generation, would persevere to block any even mildly progressive legislation. And why not do it because Trump winning would mean further gutting the remaining structures of popular participation reducing democracy beneath even its current abysmal state. Of course this litany of reasons could go on, but let me just add why elderly passions are high, even as leftists who oppose supporting Biden and leftists who advocate supporting Biden in swing states agree on so much else.

As old as sixties SDSers are, we have elders too. And I hear them tell me how the Nazi plague engulfed Germany and ravaged the world in large part because the huge German Communist party refused to join with others to stop Hitler because they saw those others as “social fascists” and, they felt, Hitler wasn’t really all that bad a guy. And so when I and others my age hear them say they came into the world seeing that mistake wreak havoc, and they now fear leaving the world seeing that same mistake wreak havoc again, it adds to my sense of urgency. Do we really want to risk that for our kids, for the planet, for humanity, because we see Biden as bad to the bone and feel Trump isn’t really all that bad a guy?

So the SDS-ers’ point is, it is indeed possible to urge voting for Biden, and to do so in swing states, and to simultaneously retain radical commitments, beliefs, and integrity because we want to prevent the obvious known ills of Trumpism, not to mention the extrapolated even greater ills of resurgent fascism. It is possible to do it and not become what we hate. And not only will our doing it not contribute to solidifying existing social relations and not contribute to entrenching existing obstacles to change, it will help prevent those two dynamics and prepare for fighting on. Isn’t that what Sanders is doing? And if he can do it, can’t his supporters, and even people to his left also do it — without an iota of compromise, without an iota of hypocrisy?

But yes, I know some who reject voting for Biden will have followed this line of reasoning to this point but then decided that Sanders is selling out. He seemed good, great even, but he has shown himself a horrible shill for the mainstream power brokers.

I will admit I don’t know how to address those of you taking that path. Those decrying Sanders, and no doubt jettisoning the views of Chomsky, Ehrehreich and so many folks we have previously appreciated and perhaps even learned from, indeed perhaps even learned the views that we now think require us to reject voting for Biden – for example that the two parties are two wings of one corporate party.

But we know that Sanders, Chomsky, Ehrenreich and other such advocates of Biden over Trump — hell, of the nearest lamppost over Trump, if need be — including the old SDSers, are not dumb. We know their position isn’t due to their being unable to draw logical conclusions. But we also can’t shake nor should we shake that we feel it is transparently obvious that Biden favors system maintenance. For sure, he does, but the question is, does that recognition mean we can legitimately conclude that anyone smart and informed who favors voting for Biden must also be for system maintenance? That anyone who says we can be radical, revolutionary, and true to our values and aspirations, and simultaneously so realize the necessity to beat Trump that we advocate voting Biden – must want system maintenance? That people wanting Biden to beat Trump and willing to help in that task must actually like Biden’s beliefs and motives? That they must have sold out? Is it warranted for us to decide Sanders is a sellout, and so too for so many others?

Or, if we call those we disagree with our enemies rather than considering that they might be just as radical, just as revolutionary as they always were, and might differ from us because they see something we are missing, wouldn’t that be doing that which we would ordinarily ridicule and decry — being leftists who accuse everyone who disagrees with us of being an enemy of change despite the fully visible contrary evidence of the their words and deeds?

So if this debate has to happen — and I have seen it surging up online already — can we all, on every side, at the very least, agree to remove the personal denigrations, and agree to stick to the issues, so that the issues might be resolved and we might in the end agree on what is true and what is not true – on what is doable and what is not doable — and thus on where we can usefully act and where our actions, or lack thereof, may do irreparable harm even against our intentions.

Michael Albert, host of the Revolution Z: Life After Capitalism podcast, is an organizer, publisher, teacher, and author of over twenty books and hundreds of articles. He cofounded South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, ZNet, and various other projects, and works full time for Z Communications. He is the author, with Robin Hahnel, of the economic vision named participatory economics. He helped create the International Organization for a Participatory Society in 2012.

Image: Florida State University students marching for anti-war protest, courtesy of State Archives of Florida