💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › melbourne-anarchist-communist-group-after-trump.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:24:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: After Trump Author: Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group Date: 1 January 2021 Language: en Topics: Donald Trump, United States of America, Elections Source: Retrieved on 12th October 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/32130 Notes: This is the main article in the latest issue of “The Anvil”, newsletter of Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (MACG). It can also be found directly at the following address: https://melbacg.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/the-anvil-vol-9-no-6.pdf
The US Presidential election is over and Donald Trump has lost. While he
has convinced his hard core supporters than the election has been stolen
from him, he has failed to get sufficient backing from powerful actors
to mount a coup. Joe Biden will take office on 20 January.
Biden will have no honeymoon. The previous two Democratic Presidents
faced a massive Right wing reaction as soon as they took office,
although they had no opposition worth noting from the Left. The
Republicans will try a third time to mount a reactionary movement and
Trump will probably lead it. Biden campaigned on a platform of being a
“normal President” — but “normal” politics is precisely what led to the
election of Trump in 2016. Left to his own devices, Biden will bring the
Washington establishment even further into disrepute and set the stage
for Trump to be re-elected in 2024 (health permitting). Biden will rule
for Wall Street, allow inequality to grow unchecked and confine
progressive policies to gestures that will infuriate the Right while not
satisfying the burning needs of the mass of workers in the US.
There is a new factor. Obama took office when the grassroots Left was
small, weak and inexperienced. As a result, there were massive illusions
in him, something that demobilised the Left for some years. Under
Clinton back in 1992, the situation was even worse. The Left was
ideologically shattered by the collapse of the USSR and its
organisations were falling to pieces. The capitalists were celebrating
the “death of communism” and proclaiming “the end of history”. Now the
grassroots left is confident and growing, having left full or partial
ideological dependence on the USSR behind it. For the first time since
LBJ, a Democratic President will take office with a grassroots challenge
from the Left.
The social movement in the United States faces a fundamental strategic
choice. Either it works through the Democratic Party or against it.
Every movement throws up a layer of activists who use it to climb into
Parliament, but the crucial issue is whether the movement will follow
them and divert itself into Parliamentary channels. The moment the
movement tones down its actions or demands to suit the fortunes of
Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s finished as an
independent force. It’s not for nothing that the Democratic Party is
known in the US as the graveyard of political movements. It’s happened
so many times before that activists have no excuse for not seeing it
coming.
Anarchist communists in the United States need to avoid being distracted
by the siren call of demands to change the Democratic Party. The
priority must be to build the grassroots struggle, in whatever sphere it
erupts, while engaging patiently with those who think there is currently
no alternative to the Democrats. And the argument has to be that “We –
the grassroots movement – are the alternative to the Democrats. We’re
creating facts on the ground to which all politicians must respond in
some way, while the organisations we are building are the new society
within the shell of the old.”
Finally, we must consider the fields of struggle available. The struggle
against the police and their racist violence, the struggle for
immigrants’ rights and against borders and the struggle to prevent
rampant climate change have all generated strong grassroots movements in
recent years. The first of these struggles is the one that has shaken
the United States the most, because US capitalism is founded on the
legacy of slavery. The demand that the State merely recognise that Black
lives matter is enough to undermine the stability of its order and send
the cops into a frenzy of violence.
The militant demonstrations against the police murder of George Floyd,
for example, were entirely justified and spread like wildfire.
Demonstrators can be beaten off the streets, however, as eventually
happened in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta, Portland and elsewhere.
What would give this struggle, and all other struggles, the social
weight to win would be bringing it into the workplace. If grassroots
radicals were strong enough in the labour movement in Minneapolis to
force the staging of a one day general strike there, the capitalists
would have been hit where it really hurts. Cutting off the flow of
profits would achieve far more to defund police and change their
behaviour than any amount of reform pursued electorally.
The workplace is the source of the capitalists’ power, so the struggle
in that location is decisive. It is the vehicle for fighting the
economic inequality that is driving down living standards for US workers
for the first time since the Great Depression and fuelling the growth of
Fascism. It is, though, much more than that. The struggle in the
workplace can unite the multi-racial, multicultural and gender diverse
working class in the fight against all forms of social oppression and
build the solidarity needed to make the revolution to overthrow
capitalism as a whole.
After Trump, the fundamental task is the same as before.
BUILD THE CLASS STRUGGLE