Who Are "The People"?

[Pictured: Waiting several hours to vote has become commonplace in the United States]

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Republished in modified form from The Specter.

If democracy is government by the people, then perhaps the first and most important question to ask is: Who are the people? When the United States was founded, the answer was brutally simple: white men of property. This class, of course, comprised only a minority of colonial America. But confining rights and representation to an elite subset was hardly unique in the history of “democratic” governance. Women were excluded from republics as far back as Athens in 500 BC. Similarly, in the early United States, slavery and “democracy” coexisted.

Of course, the United States is different now. It formally abolished chattel slavery and many women, as well as people of color, can now vote and hold office. Yet the American electoral system still blocks, by law, countless marginalized people from having a say in government.

Over 5 million Americans, for example, are legally disenfranchised due to felony convictions. That’s almost 2% of the voting-age population. And the majority of these disenfranchised people have already finished their sentences.

There are also millions of Americans who are disenfranchised by virtue of where they live. Residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands have no representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Those living in Washington DC also have no congressional representation. Hence why their license plates read “Taxation without representation.” Under the most general definition of “democracy” — citizens governing themselves through elected leaders — America isn’t fully democratic.

But even those officially granted the right to vote may lack the ability to exercise it. After the 15th Amendment granted black men voting rights, various methods of suppression arose to limit expansion of the franchise. Decades of political struggle combating this culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Among other things, it required nine states with especially discriminatory pasts to obtain federal approval before altering their election laws.

In 2013, however, the Supreme Court nullified this key part of the Voting Rights Act. Shortly thereafter, huge purges of voter rolls commenced and are still ongoing. Election officials purge millions each election cycle, a deeply disturbing trend even absent any particular political motivations.

It’s hard not to see this as yet another example of white supremacy in the political system. Felony disenfranchisement affects blacks at more than four times the rate of whites. In potentially decisive swing states like Florida and Virginia, more than 20% of black adults are disenfranchised. 

Disenfranchisement also cuts along class lines. The five aforementioned territories, for example, all have average incomes below that of the poorest state. And their lack of representation worsens existing material deprivation.

Take Guam, for instance. Its people disproportionately fight and die in American wars. Meanwhile, they receive far less money per capita from the Department of Veterans Affairs than any state. American Samoa finds itself similarly deprived. The federal government does virtually nothing for Samoans. In fact, they aren’t even granted full citizenship. Incredibly, though, American Samoans still legally owe “allegiance to the United States.”

That American Samoans aren’t citizens may strike some as sufficient reason for their disenfranchisement. But this is misguided. More people are currently living outside their country of origin, mostly by necessity, than ever before. In the United States alone, there are roughly 22 million non-citizens of voting age. These people live under the American government, fund it with their taxes, and participate in its capitalist economy and culture. It makes little sense to say that they do not deserve a say in how those systems run.

Enfranchising non-citizens is both moral and feasible. Until the 1920s, non-citizens in the United States enjoyed voting rights. They could participate in state, local, and even federal elections. Even today, a number of cities allow non-citizens to vote in municipal races. And countries other than the United States let non-citizens cast ballots in certain elections.

Of course, expanding the franchise is far from a panacea. If all Americans were instantly granted full voting rights, that might change a lot. But the United States would still be a bourgeois republic. And so long as capital runs the show, the rest of us will be left subject to its insatiable lust for profits. That means systematic disempowerment of the majority, both politically and economically.

In this key sense, the dictatorship of capital under which we live is fundamentally undemocratic. Fully realizing the promise of democracy therefore requires moving away from capitalism and toward collective ownership of society’s productive resources. In a word, socialism.

Nevertheless, the facts of disenfranchisement in America are quite illustrative. More specifically, they reveal a key insight regarding political disengagement. It’s no surprise that many Americans don’t feel represented by the political system. Millions of them literally aren’t. They are systematically denied a say in huge decisions that affect their daily lives. And this, of course, disproportionately impacts low-income people and folks of color. Clearly, the United States still privileges the rights of the white and wealthy at the expense of those who aren’t. Racism remains as American as apple pie.

The Unbearable Emptiness of Voting

By Roger Williams

Election season makes me feel like the kid who doesn’t have a stuffed animal on “bring your teddy bear to school” day. Everyone else has a favorite who they can tell good stories about and cuddle with, but I don’t so I feel left out. But then I remember that there are good reasons to resist getting pulled down by the undertow of elections.

Like cute stuffed animals, politicians make people feel good while having a marginal effect on positive social change. The main differences between stuffed animals and politicians are that 1) stuffed animals are actually cuddly, and 2) people don’t invest vast amounts of political hope and agency in stuffed animals. I recognize that arguing against what many people hold dear makes me kind of a grump, but I at least aspire to be one who is not stuck in idle criticism but is proposing alternative ideas. The particular variety of grumpiness that I espouse is one grounded in grassroots social movements that focus on direct action independent of party politics.

The prickly issue of politicians relates fundamentally to questions of the leftist orientation to the state. The cheery reformer smiles big and promises to make the system work for you. The grouchy revolutionary rolls their eyes and gets back to trying to transform the system from the ground up. The recent prominence of social democratic politicians on the left, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provided a big platform for the cheery reformers to make their case to the public. They speak of universal healthcare, free college, and many other nice things.

What of the curmudgeons? In rejecting electoralism do they abhor healthcare and cherish student debt? Do they ignore the plight of the masses by focusing only on long-term goals at the expense of the need for immediate material reforms? Are the grouches ruining socialism? As a card-carrying grouch myself, let me soothe your fears and dispel some mistaken notions about political crankiness.

First, grouches like free and universal health care as much as starry-eyed reformers. It’s just that the grumps think that running election campaigns are a much less effective strategy to secure positive reforms. The grouches drastically de-center voting and object to giving time or money to political candidates and instead focus on building grassroots organization to be able to take mass disruptive actions like work stoppages and civil disobedience to win demands. Second, while less the focus of this article, building grassroots social movements is the only way to increase raw working class power that makes more complete social transformation possible in the long-term.

Granted, the state is an enigmatic beast, and politicians are strange and unwitting creatures. The level of discourse in movement spaces about the merits of electoral strategy often regrettably devolves into sparring aphorisms such as “all politicians are sellouts”, “we can’t ignore political power”, “The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements”, “Do you want Trump to win?”

This essay attempts to spell out the revolutionary grump’s critique of electoralism by showing how the institutions of voting, election campaigns, and politicians make citizens into political bystanders and undermine their ability to effectively implement popular reforms. These critiques are distinct from but complimentary to the much more widespread objections of how electoral politics under capitalism are dominated by the wealthy through corporate lobbying and shady campaign funding. I contend here that such movements comprise the true architecture of positive social change that lies behind the shimmering facade of electoralism.

Representative democracy? Harumph

The ideal of representative democracy is that elected officials govern in the interests of the population or at least in the interests of their constituents and voters. In practice, there is an immense gap found between polls of public opinion and existing policy. The reformers think the state can be fixed and made to embody the public interest, while the revolutionaries are unconvinced. Before getting to the heart of the critique of electoralism, it’s worth briefly reviewing the evidence that our government does not embody the democratic rule of the people.

In a recent paper, political scientists Miles Gilens and Benjamin I. Page perform a large-scale quantitative analysis of public opinion data compared to legislative policy and conclude “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens.. have little or no independent influence.”

To take just one important example, why is the US the only wealthy industrialized country in the world that doesn’t offer universal healthcare? From 2008-10, the only time when major healthcare reform seriously made it on the table in over 50 years, 77% of Americans polled said that it was the government’s responsibility that everyone’s basic healthcare needs be met, 73% supported a public option for the government to compete with private insurance plans, and 60-70% across a series of polls showed support for single-payer healthcare.

The resulting Affordable Care Act produced none of these basic and overwhelmingly popular reforms. Instead, the continued defectiveness of our healthcare system is evident today with 30 million Americans still lacking health insurance, 44 million additional Americans remaining under-insured, and an average of 20% of all people with health insurance forgoing or delaying treatment each year for a “serious condition” because of high costs. Healthcare offers a stark illustration of the public opinion-policy gap, but similar discrepancies can be found across the most important policies in the country, including defense spending and wars, higher education funding, and climate change.

Despite the insistence by some that the high school civics class theory of politics holds true, most Americans have a pretty low (and perhaps accurate) estimate of the quality of our governing institutions. Public approval for Congress over the recent decades has mostly oscillated between 10-30% and only 34% of Americans think the two major parties adequately represent the people.

While public opinion data alone provides neither a sufficient analysis nor a coherent vision for leftist politics, it’s often considerably more reasonable than the policies actually in place and provides a useful starting point for understanding the inequalities of power in society. That voting for mainstream politicians as a way to implement popular policies is not what it’s advertised to be is the unifying starting point for the buoyant reformer and grave revolutionary alike. That voting can not be fixed is the less obvious but central thrust of the grump’s grumpiness.

Voting? Phooey

Voting is a tactic for creating social change that involves expending virtually no effort. Yet, the common-sense notion that if you want something you have to work for it holds true in the realm of social change as much as anywhere else. When people tell me that all (or much of what) we need to do to change the world is check a box for a few minutes at a time once every 2-4 years, I wonder how that actually works. The pen may at times be mightier than the sword, but is the fill-in-the-bubble quiz called a ‘ballot’ really mightier than all of society’s billionaires, militarism, structural racism, and gender violence?

“But what about all the deliberation, debate, and discourse that goes into voting? Surely that’s an effortful endeavor?” Surely, but deliberation, debate, and discourse are prerequisites for political action of any kind, so the only distinguishing feature of voting is that the act itself requires no effort.

“But by engaging in debate with others and also encouraging people to vote, doesn’t voting then become a kind of mass collective action that’s exactly what’s needed to change society?” Mass collective action is not inherently progressive or effective, even if collective action of a certain kind is precisely what’s needed to create social change. I find little conceptual distinction between the millions of people who buy Coca-Cola (over the greater evil of Pepsi) every day as a collective action from those millions who vote. Individuals buying and drinking Coca-Cola is not the cause of society’s problems, but neither is it the solution. If anything, millions of people acting as mere aggregated sums through the institutions of the status quo is a prime way the status quo is perpetuated, not challenged.

“But don’t we need some way for the population to interface with governing institutions to influence their functioning and to ensure that they are run according to the desires of the citizens?” Yes, but the best way to make that mode of interfacing as meaningless as possible is to make the form of interaction between the government and the citizens as narrow as possible, such as voting. I agree that we need to interface with existing governing institutions, but voting is the least effective way of doing so.

“But if we don’t vote, the bad guys will take over!” Scaring people into voting is no way to create change nor prevent disaster but rather glosses over deeper problems of the political system that voting doesn’t address. However, for those who truly believe some politician is not as bad as the other one, it’s not that I disagree. Despite my many grumblings, I don’t insist that voting is entirely futile, just that it’s mostly so. If you think it’s worth the minuscule effort, go for it and don’t feel bad about it. I’m just critical of the widespread belief that voting will have more of a positive effect than a normal effort-to-reward calculus would indicate. The degree that voting is overvalued as a form of political engagement is the degree it displaces other more effective forms and forestalls social change.

“People died for the vote.” More than just that, they fought for the vote. The point that people fought and died for the vote and then won is less an argument about how voting is the most important thing. Rather, it’s more an argument that when people expend effort to build social movements to fight for a better world, then they win things.

“Social movements aren’t magic pixie dust that you can just sprinkle on every social-historical problem and expect it to go away.” As a tentative definition of social movements to ground these critiques of electoralism, let’s try this: Social movements are rooted in webs of mass-oriented organizations that build bases in communities and move with those communities towards direct action that disrupts the status quo, such as the strikes of the 1930s labor movement and the mass civil disobedience of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. They are characterized by a disconnect between official policy and shifting popular sentiments, where a significant (but not necessarily majority) degree of public sympathy gives mass actions legitimacy. Such mass action is channeled towards those in power demanding that they alter formal policy but also is channeled towards the base by reshaping ideas and practices of political agency and self-determination.

So are social movements magic pixie dust? “Yes” in that they actually are the source of past positive social change and have the potential to create such change in the future, but “No” in that they are in any sense a cheap short-cut. Social movements take a lot of work, but it’s the actual work of making a difference. Voting, on the other hand, might more fully be characterized as magical in that it doesn’t have any real-world effect of its own and its presumed consequences are based on misperception.

Elections? Bah humbug

There’s a number of defining elements of electoral campaigns that are inimical to social change. These elements are the same ones that corporations use to create markets of passive consumers focused around brand identities, shallow exchange transactions, and individualized consumption.

Every political campaign relies on constructing a branded cult of personality around a candidate. Because sound-bites are an inadequate medium for presenting policy ideas, political campaigns come to revolve more around a candidate’s personality than their policy proposals and political records. This isn’t the fault of any individual politician; it’s the logic that all political campaigns have to apply if they want to maximize their appeal and exposure to fit the requirements of using mass media.

So the vast majority of voters come to know a politician through a picture of their smile as plastered across mailers and TV ads, a couple slogans like “tough on crime” or “tax the rich”, and a few labels such as “experienced”, “outsider”, “bipartisan”, “progressive”, “movement-oriented”, and so on. This political packaging comes to stand in for actual policy records and political relationships that might be indicative of future governance. Biden’s recent presidential campaign had little to say about his role in financial deregulation that paved the way for the 2008/9 financial collapse or the 1994 Crime Bill that helped super-charge mass incarceration. While I am more sympathetic to many of Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals, his campaign ads certainly didn’t focus on some of the less flattering parts of his political record, such as his past symbiotic relationship with an arms manufacturer or close friendship and political alliance with a Vermont billionaire developer. As corporations know very well, the best way to maximize appeal and exposure to mass markets (millions of voters are treated like millions of any other kind of customer) is to build a brand around a simple object that is injected with surface-level emotional appeal, however loosely that is tied to the rational interests of the consumer.

The most devious and disastrous aspect of the individualizing nature of the election campaign is that it encourages people to outsource their political agency to a politician. It’s the politician who has to promise they’ll fix things, and the citizens come to see themselves as largely passive consumers whose only meaningful participation is choosing one political brand over another. All of the laziness entailed in merely voting is converted into a mindset that it’s the politician’s responsibility, and not ours, to fix things. Rather than expressions of the general will of the citizenry, elections are mass disavowals of political responsibility.

Since the vote itself is such a narrow form of political engagement, and it’s the quantity of votes that determines the victor of the contest, election campaigns are organized around maximizing narrow engagement. A former long-time political campaign consultant commented:

[Obama for America (OFA)] organizers would often counsel campaign volunteers to stay away from engaging in discussions about specific issues and instead focus on sharing the “story of self,” the “story of us,” and the “story of now.” This methodology is intended to engage the prospective voter at an affective level much like a 12-step group speaker or a born-again Christian sharing her story of how she found Jesus…. I am critical of the manner that OFA used [this] methodology to short-circuit a perfectly legitimate way of facilitating the raising of critical consciousness (a long-term proposition) for the short-sighted aim of mobilizing the electorate for an election-night win.

The democracy-lessness of such frothy conversation has also been studied academically, as this study found that TV ads, campaign mail, and even the gold standard of door-to-door canvassing in the context of an election campaign were found to have virtually no persuasive effect on changing people’s minds about candidates or issues. The only thing it does have an effect on is the likelihood that the person will show up at the polling station on election day. This makes the dominant interface between election campaigns and citizens into a short-term transaction to get a commitment from someone that they’ll vote, just as corporations need to get you to the cash register or the Amazon check-out page. This kind of shallow interaction with complex issues as the primary form of campaign communication displaces institutional possibilities for deeper intellectual engagement with and political organizing around issues.

The other dominant form of “action” around political campaigns is the rally. Like voting, attending political rallies doesn’t involve much active participation. Whether it’s the candidate themselves or one of their surrogates who’s speaking, attendees typically sit or stand around for an hour or two while somebody talks at them. The content of the rally is typically an embellished verbalizing of the politician’s platform decorated with the occasional jab at rival candidates. This kind of event further encourages the projection of values and hopes onto an aspiring public servant who “does stuff” while the citizen-voter doesn’t have to.

The fact that electoral campaigns happen in short bursts in between long intervals of 2-4 years means that the infrastructure formed around these political candidates is fleeting and ill-suited for creating meaningful change. Furthermore, all the other groups and communities that get sucked into electioneering see their primary concerns and activities momentarily shoved aside while getting so-and-so into City Hall or the White House is prioritized.

An example from my personal experience comes from time I spent in 2013-14 in Occupy Homes Minnesota (OHMN), an anti-eviction group that used direct action to keep banks and sheriffs from forcibly taking people’s houses. When a local socialist ran for a seat on the city council and claimed to be a part of the grassroots movement, much of the paid and unpaid leadership of OHMN diverted resources away from home defense and towards neighborhood canvassing for his election, depriving the org of much of what it needed to actually fight off the banks in a tense period when eviction rates were still high. The candidate ended up losing, but that hardly mattered as the OHMN leadership’s decision to neglect its own mission and base for a few crucial months severely weakened an already struggling group. The organization collapsed and dissolved shortly after.

Politicians? Baloney

Just as the market is only one part of the economy over which corporations wield power, so are election campaigns just one stage of the life-cycle of the politician where leftist forces are systematically weakened. Even when the less shitty politician does win the election, they are immediately put under the extreme constraints of trying to govern in a capitalist society and many of their campaign promises are instantly hollowed out despite a politician’s best intentions.

While far from a radical platform, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign literature sounds surprisingly progressive with his message of expanding many social programs, reforming the health care system and making health care a “right”, and taxing the rich. A few days before Clinton’s inauguration, his chief economic advisor Robert Rubin, a former co-chairman of the board of Goldman Sachs, and Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan, a committed Ayn Rand acolyte, told Clinton that the budget deficit was too big and that the only way to avert a debt crisis was to slash government spending, causing him to temper some campaign promises and reverse others. In 2008 Obama campaigned on a popular message of getting people through the deepest economic recession in 80 years, but upon entering office he bailed out the banks and corporations while barely lifting a finger to save homeowners or aid the unemployed.

While we’ve come to expect such disappointment from Democrats, the same dynamic plays out repeatedly among socialist politicians in advanced capitalist countries. In France, Socialist Party President Francois Hollande won the presidency in 2012 on a message of anti-austerity reform, but upon entering office and even having a majority in parliament, turned around and cut corporate taxes and slashed social spending. Before him, France’s other most recent socialist president Francois Mitterand (1981-95) attempted to implement steep reforms early in his first term but then under pressure from international finance and a lagging economy he instituted a nation-wide wage-freeze, cut social spending, and came to symbolize the normalization of austerity within formerly left European political parties.

The Greek Socialist Party Syriza’s time in power from 2015-19 is perhaps the most famous illustration of the abject failure of left politics in the electoral arena, as it repeatedly caved to austerity demands of the European Union, gouging out social programs and privatizing many of Greece’s public assets. The social democracies of Northern Europe have been in retreat since the 1970s as social democratic parties make concessions to austerity and are increasingly losing parliament seats to centrist and even right-wing parties, turning their backs on the social movements that provided the pressure that led to their enviable social programs in the first place. While socialist politicians and political parties have never really controlled governments in the US to the extent they have occasionally in European countries, the evidence across the pond suggests that even if socialists were able to take over the US government, only disappointment would follow.

While the electoral contest tends to reward those who highlight style over substance, at bottom it’s not an issue of a politician’s individual moral integrity but rather of the way the whole electoral and political system is constructed to remove as far as possible the vote from actual governance in the form of determining and implementing policy. Despite good intentions, politicians have given socialism a bad name.

Political parties? Pffft

“If a politician betrays their constituents, they’ll vote them out and get someone who truly represents them.”

That sounds reasonable, but there are a number of reasons this is ineffective as a lever of meaningful democracy. First, with most terms of political office lasting 4 years, that’s a tremendously long time to wait and for politicians to have free reign before they’re “voted out next time”. Second, there’s no official way in the US for citizens to directly recall politicians. There are highly bureaucratic and lengthy methods for other politicians to unseat a particular politician, but they are very rarely used and almost always for scandals instead of the routine betrayal of the very campaign promises that got them elected in the first place. Lastly, politicians aren’t stand-alone agents but belong to political parties whose interests they are both beholden to and charged with safeguarding, and these political parties exert strong control especially within a rigid two-party system. More often than not, if one politician goes away there’s a “next-in-line” who’s not substantially different because the party is a moderating force. Think of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden coming after Obama, all of whom advocate largely the same unpopular policies, such as private health insurance.

“But people also choose which politicians stand for election through primaries and caucuses, ensuring democratic principles are maintained.”

The further one gets away from general elections and into intra-party politics, the deeper one gets into other mechanisms for choking democracy, such gatekeeping, rules-manipulation, and back-door dealing. Sure, a few committed super-citizens can go to every caucus meeting and try to out-politic the entrenched politicking careerists, but the deck is stacked here as it is at every other level of the process. It’s a lonely path as the further you go into the machine the further you get from the actual communities you live and work in.

“But this is where politics happens and so this is the necessary terrain of struggle. You have to struggle somewhere, and the deck is stacked everywhere, so why not direct our efforts at the parties that control the government?”

The labyrinth backwaters of political parties are where a certain kind of politics happens, but it’s an elite kind of politics, where functionaries compete for the approval of party funders and power-brokers. Occasionally an insurgent politician can make it through the maze and get into office, but what alternative forms of politics are sacrificed in the process?

Grassroots social movements focus their politics in the workplaces, the neighborhoods, and the streets. These are the spaces and communities where people are rooted, where their relationships are organic, and where the exercise of power is most impactful. Unions, strikes, community groups, pressure campaigns, civil disobedience, these are the forms and tactics of and for the grassroots. Yes, much of this power needs to be directed at political parties and the government, but it’s more effective to do so from the outside where grassroots movements find fertile soil rather than from inside where the toxic sludge corrodes all it touches.

Social movements? Aww man, do we have to?

“All of the good policies that have come into the world were by definition written into law by some politicians at some point, right? What was it those politicians did that we need our politicians to do today?”

That’s true. But if our purpose is to answer the bigger question of how to make the world a better place and not to confine ourselves to smaller questions of which politician to praise and vote for, then we have to re-frame things. Do politicians cause social change? They’re a part of the overall vehicle of social change, but are they a major and irreplaceable part like the engine or a minor and interchangeable part like the ashtray?

The conjuring trick here is that politicians make it look like they do most of the work that leads to policy change. When a popular policy is passed they get a photo op and put pen to paper though it was actually the hard work and struggle of thousands of community activists that actually made the policy possible. Politicians are paid fine salaries and benefits, get their own offices in fancy buildings, and receive a lion’s share of the credit when something positive happens. Grassroots organizers are often acting without being paid for it, doing so in much less glamorous settings, facing much higher risks, and are mostly nameless and faceless outside of the communities they are fighting alongside. Despite appearances, whether a politician works hard or not has negligible influence on policy outcomes compared to the vibrancy of the social movement and the communities where 99.9% of the actual important work gets done.

Consider two pivotal moments that fundamentally altered social relations in the US and led to era-defining legislation on labor unions and civil rights. The labor movement didn’t acquire rights by voting for politicians to give them rights: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1933 didn’t even mention worker rights, he supported an auto industry proposal in March 1934 that allowed company-run worker “unions”, and even refused to endorse Senator Robert Wagner’s collective bargaining legislation circulating in Congress in early 1934. Roosevelt’s labor secretary Frances Perkins said, “I’d rather get a law than organize a union” to address worker grievances and keep them from striking, preferring paternalistic government over the idea of allowing workers to have their own independent organization and power. Only after the largest sustained strike wave in US history rocked the country in mid-1934 and was threatening to go even bigger in what was already a crisis of profit of the Great Depression were major concessions granted for union rights in the National Labor Relations Act signed by Roosevelt in 1935.

It wasn’t the politicians who led the charge that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but rather a social movement of community activists in the black freedom movement. Before becoming president and signing those bills, Lyndon B. Johnson spent two decades as a reliable pro-segregationist congressman of the Southern Democratic faction and was known for using the n-word profusely. Upon entering national politics, where he’d have to appeal to a broader social base than was needed to be elected as a Texas congressman, black social movements had by then shifted the national consciousness on race to the degree that he needed to become more tolerant publicly and willing to compromise with movement demands. Even then, Johnson was constantly at odds with civil rights leaders over the timing and priorities of these pieces of legislation.

In contrast, what’s notable about the failure of European socialist politicians mentioned above in the period from the 1970s to the present is that there were not social mobilizations and uprisings comparable to earlier periods of the 1930s and 1960s. That lack of robust popular struggle independent of the state is largely responsible for the failures of European socialist politics of the last 50 years.

While it may not be uniquely the fault of socialist politicians that there weren’t ground-shaking social movements in the streets during their time in power, radical politicians have always helped foster the superstition that elections are an important and essential part of social change, thus directing away emphasis and energy from grassroots activity. Every social gain and loss can be summarized in the same broad strokes, where politicians always have played bit parts behind the lead of mass movements.

“Well, you’re just describing the worst parts of elections, but not all politicians have to use that playbook. Good politicians can run campaigns in a way that uses only the good and none of the bad.”

While political campaigns that look and feel like a McDonald's ad campaign are the norm, certainly some politicians have tried to break the mold to be a “different” and “good” politician. They try to focus on deep rather than shallow engagement, to center ideas about society and policy instead of surface-level emotional manipulation, to emphasize longer-term engagement and give people meaningful ways to participate beyond merely voting. But do these politicians ever succeed in living up to this ideal?

“But shouldn’t we keep trying til we get it right?”

That’s what a lot of people will do. But there’s an alternative. If we take the prototype of the bad electoral campaign and turn it inside-out by doing exactly the opposite of everything that’s bad about them, what we end up with is not a good political campaign but rather a grassroots social movement without the unavoidable electoral focus on elevating a single person’s ideas and character and without succumbing to the pressures placed on us by playing by the rules of pacifying state institutions.

There’s obviously a wide spectrum of opinion on how useful politicians are. Kind of like my arguments above about voting, I don’t think politicians are in themselves bad and I recognize that occasionally they can have a small effect on things. But just like many people see voting as the most important part of social change and I see it as among the least important parts of social change, so many see politicians as the most important factors of social change and I see them as among the least important factors. Despite my crankiness I’m not anti-politician in the strict sense that I think they’re bad people as individuals, I just can’t discover any historical evidence or theoretical argument to be pro-politician either.

“But can’t we combine the best elements of social movements with the best elements of political campaigns and do them together?”

Certainly politicians that want to present themselves in a progressive light will try to attach themselves to social movements and will say that they are part of the movement. But if the arguments presented here have any validity, electoral campaigns have almost nothing to add to social movements because social movements are already all the good things we want and need to create social change.

Each element of an election campaign is just a worse version of that element of a social movement: Elevating the individual politician vs. community agency; the narrow engagement of the vote vs. kinds of community engagement and collective action needed to disrupt the status quo and win demands; investing resources in political ad campaigns vs. grassroots organizational infrastructure and support; etc… No matter how much a politician tries to be the exception, there are underlying institutional pressures baked into the rules of the game for electoral campaigns that are of a fundamentally opposite nature to the best practices needed to build effective grassroots movements.

Of course, left politicians are aware of anti-electoral sentiments, and so they, without fail, will claim that they’re “community-oriented”, “a servant of the people,” “in it for the right reasons”, “committed to social movements”, and so on. Or to take a famous recent campaign slogan, “Not me, us.” Good intentions aside, that’s not how elections work. Politicians get people to give them thousands or millions of dollars for staff and campaign ads about them and ask everyone to give them access to immense state power for which there are few formal mechanisms of accountability to voters.

I’m not claiming these politicians are Machiavellian but just that by trying to squeeze the rhetoric of a social movement within an electoral campaign they end up losing all the parts of a social movement that make it meaningful and then succumb to all of the authoritarian forces that make government slimy and coercive. I can recognize that not all politicians are the same, but I can also recognize that they are all seeking entry into the same political system and are subject to all the same constraints. Social movements, on the other hand, are the dominant form that democratic politics takes outside of the state and are the major determinant of the constraints within which all politicians operate.

“But we need state power to allocate resources. That’s why we need to run politicians so that they can work the inside track while we work the outside track.”

If politicians caused good policy, this would be sensible. But just as prominent examples were noted above of supposedly better or left politicians doing bad things in office, there are plenty of examples of politicians rightly considered bad by the left being forced into doing good things. That Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s political platform in 1956 contains striking similarities with Bernie Sanders’ in 2020 is not because Eisenhower was a radical but because the social movements that created the best of the New Deal reforms, many of which remained wildly popular, circumscribed the political boundaries that all politicians had to act within. The difference between Eisenhower winning in 1956 and Bernie losing in 2020 is far less an illustration of individual political acumen or ineptitude but of the relative power of social movements in those eras.

That Richard Nixon spent his first years as president in the late 1960s trying to pass a version of universal basic income which would have been the largest redistribution of wealth to the poorest citizens in US history is not because old Dick had a big heart, but because he was staring down the largest and most militant social movements since the 1930s and needed to pander to and compromise with more radical demands. That Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency via executive order and signed the act that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is again a tribute to the grassroots activists of the 1960s and 70s and has little to do with Nixon’s personal qualities as a politician. Once again, social movements are the dominant, short-term, and long-term cause of better policy, to which politicians are not even second fiddle but perhaps the ninth or tenth.

Even though the historical examples I draw from are mostly at the federal level, it’s merely for the convenience of using widely known reference points. Against the claim that one can have more of an effect on policy by engaging elections at the local level, all of the anti-electoral arguments made here apply equally to all levels of government because, despite differences in scale, the mechanisms and elements of elections are largely the same (voter as passive consumer, politicians as corporate brands). School boards are one of the most local levels of government and the school board members in my city almost all belong to the same party and yet routinely violate their own stated principles on issues such as school privatization and unions. When local activists and groups have mobilized and shut down meetings in protest, school board members have consistently caved to grassroots pressure and reversed their votes.

Just because I don’t think leftists should focus on elections doesn’t mean there won’t always be a constantly replenishing pool of political candidates maneuvering to be the next social movement darling. If you, like me, can’t entirely erase the notion that politicians have some effect, even if very small, there’s still no reason to invest energy in politicians. Left politicians need social movements but social movements don’t need politicians. If social movements are strong, politicians will come begging for support and will consult movements for fear of incurring their wrath. Social movements don’t have to give anything up in return for this or that politician doing what social movements demand.

In summary, social movements are not only the cause of good policy, but obedient left politicians are a side-effect of strong, independent social movements anyway. Social movements should focus on building a base and moving towards collective disruptive action, and if politicians want to tag along they can but social movements shouldn’t divert any of their precious attention away from their true object.

Social Movements? Ugh, okay fine

Many people see general critiques of politicians as valid but still maintain that sometimes there are some good politicians worth supporting. As I said above, I’m not inherently anti-politician when looking at the individual themselves. But here’s the rub: leftist forces in society have a limited amount of resources to put into efforts for social change, and so the campaigns of politicians compete directly with grassroots organizations for volunteer time and donations.

While not anti-politician at an individual level, I’m anti-giving resources to election campaigns of politicians at the social level because politicians will always be less effective at creating change than social movements. This point belies the common excuse made for electoralism as a form of harm reduction. If harm reduction is supposed to have a positive net effect by decreasing the amount of bad in the world, actual harm reduction would come from engaging social movements because only they are actually effective.

I don’t consider a vote a resource at any meaningful level because voting takes so little effort, and so I’m not against voting for politicians because you think one’s better than another. But when it comes to actual resources, every donation or afternoon committed to social movements will do more to shift the balance of power in society to create change than commitment to a political campaign can do.

“But power! You’re forgetting power! If political office were so ineffectual why do politicians wield so much power?”

It may seem confusing that politicians both have lots of power and are virtually useless at creating positive social change. Why is this? Despite appearing as contradictory claims, the idea that politicians are powerful and can’t create change are two sides of the same coin. Much of what gives politicians their power is precisely the passivity with which the masses interact with the state, as described above in relation to voting, election campaigns, and political parties. Rather, those parts of society that do have influence on the state, such as the wealthy and other elites, maintain that influence because of all the active ways they engage with the state formally and informally. Such active elite practices include more above-ground methods such as campaign spending, lobbying, and corporate-politician partnership organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, but also more below-ground mechanisms such as overlapping social and professional networks, capital strikes against government initiatives, and the revolving door between corporate and political careers.

It’s not just that the elites are “doing it right” in their active engagement with the state while masses are “doing it wrong” in their passive engagement with the state. When the masses are directed to engage politics through voting and attending a political rally, while elites get round-the-clock back-door access to politicians, we can start to see how the very structures of the state that appear natural and democratic are rather manufactured and imbalanced. The state structures discussed here are not peripheral or tangential to the functioning of the state, but rather voting, elections, and politicians are the foundational and governing institutions of the state. If those institutions are shown to be vacuous or at the very least disempowering, what are we to make of pretensions to representative democracy?

Manufactured imbalance against democracy is the state, and all attempts to use the state for positive change are constricted by this stark fact. Social democratic and socialist politicians largely accept these structures of the state and seek to use them, as undemocratic as they are, for good things. But the anti-electoralism critique advanced here suggests that it isn’t possible to create positive change using undemocratic methods. Rather the deeper kind of democracy that fuels social movements through mass participation is what really harnesses popular power for social change.

In spite of the official notion that the government is a reflection of the wants and needs of its citizens, in reality it is not a neutral tool that can be applied effectively to any task that the population or elected officials seek. A screwdriver is very bad at pounding in a nail. So while the state is a very powerful tool for elites to govern in their interest, it is a very shoddy tool for trying to create a better society that benefits everyone. With some strain even a screwdriver can pound a nail partway into a board, but the limits are real and severe. The many failures of socialist politicians recently in power in Europe are illustrative.

“So how can mass-based social movements acquire influence over state resources needed for large-scale popular reforms in the short- and medium-term if the state has built into it a bias against democracy?”

A useful analogy can be made between the grassroots fight against corporate abuse and the grassroots fight against government abuse. The modern-day corporation is a nakedly anti-democratic institution where shareholders give dictatorial powers to top executives to run things while employees are expected to do what they’re told. No one suggests that the left should focus on trying to seize higher-level management positions at WalMart in order to change WalMart’s policy from the inside and from the top down. Rather, unions and direct action by workers and affected communities are correctly identified as the effective way to fight corporate harm. Similarly, the fight against harms imposed by our government is better led by grassroots social movements than by trying to install in the government higher-level managers who will fix the problems from the inside and from the top down.

Do we want our movement towards social change and the content of social transformation to be based on the idea of choosing the right leader to give executive and legislative power to, who promises to fight on our behalf? Or do we want to concentrate our forces on the base, to build a movement rooted in the self-determination and collective action of whole communities? Should we be spectators or agents in the struggle for making a better world? In the words of civil rights organizer Ella Baker, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” That quote, especially as applied to politicians, encapsulates everything this essay is trying to articulate.

“You’ve been swooning over social movements this whole time but haven’t even shown how they do all these supposedly great things.”

The good news is that learning about social movements is more exciting than scrutinizing all the ins-and-outs of why voting isn’t effective. The best place to learn about what social movements are and what they’ve accomplished is by learning about their history. While I’ve used the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s as examples, every major beneficial historical change in the US has been accomplished through social movements in some form.

It’s true that all social movements are multidimensional and have elements within them that have tended towards political elections, but all social movements have also had strong anti-electoral tendencies as well. There’s a reason why narratives about social change in the 1930s that came about from labor struggle highlight strikes and unions and not the various left and labor political parties of the day. Similarly, while some in the Civil Rights Movement, like Bayard Rustin, wanted to reorient the struggle towards working within the Democratic Party, many in the base and the leadership were resistant. Neither Martin Luther King Jr. nor Ella Baker were opposed to electoralism in the strong sense I’m advocating, but they were at pains to keep their movement independent of political parties and instead focus on mass direct action. King held a press conference in 1967 to put down rumors and push back against the pressure he faced from his more electorally-focused friends and supporters about running for president, “I have come to think of my role as one which operates outside the realm of partisan politics.”

Rather than seeing electoralism as a necessary part of social movements, it is better seen as an extraneous factor when we recognize how social movements have actually produced change. Social movements are complex and no one has the power to design them exactly to their own liking, but we can engage with and boost those parts of social movements that we find most effective.

Conclusion

Have the grumps won you over? With people so polarized on this issue, I hardly aim to change anyone’s mind. But if low approval ratings of our governing institutions and low voting rates are indicative of a popular discontent with politics as usual, maybe there’s a broad audience willing to entertain ideas about why politicians aren’t hot stuff.

We’ve looked at allegedly progressive politicians passing good reforms (FDR and labor rights, LBJ and civil rights), bad politicians passing good reforms (Eisenhower maintaining New Deal social spending, Nixon implementing the EPA and OSHA), supposedly better politicians passing bad reforms (Clinton, Obama, Mitterand, Hollande), and have just glossed over the more obvious cases of bad politicians passing bad reforms (like Trump’s tax cuts for the rich). In each case closer inspection reveals that the specific person in office had a profoundly insignificant impact on the overall trajectory of positive change compared to the size and assertiveness of social movements that existed alongside them.

Rather than continuing to buy into the myth that voting “does anything”, we’d be better off trying to make a better world by getting together with others to do something. The art of social movements obviously involves more than just “doing something”, but recognizing that “doing something” is going to be what it takes is a good first step. With actual effort and a little practice, doing something as a strategy for change might actually work. Politicians pee into the wind while social movements drop anvils from the sky.

Forcing the Vote on Medicare for All: A Proven and Imperative Strategy

[Photo credit: CNN]

By Karthik Pasupula

Republished from Michigan Specter.

14.6 million. That’s the lower estimate of the number of Americans who have lost their health insurance during this pandemic. Want to guess the number of people in the same situation in other developed countries? Zero if you live in Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Finland, Norway, etc.

You’ve probably seen the polls. More than 70% of Americans believe that the government should be responsible for insuring all Americans, with around 88% of Democrats supporting a single-payer system. Support for government healthcare has risen across the board, presumably because pandemic-induced mass unemployment has exposed the folly of employer-based insurance.

Yet, the fight for Medicare for All isn’t happening in the halls of Congress right now. And that is a huge mistake. National media is dominated by coverage of an inept administration whose will to govern has been broken by the (un)dynamic duo of Senators Manchin and Sinema. The constant ceding of ground must end. It’s time to #ForceTheVote in order to put public pressure on establishment politicians and get them on the record.

Ever since the emergence of “The Squad” in 2018, interest in Medicare for All (M4A) has soared. This is especially relevant to Michigan voters, since 16% of residents live in poverty, including one in four children and 17% of senior citizens. These problems are especially bad in Detroit where around 30.6% of people live below the poverty level — the highest among big cities. The insane grip that corporate health insurance companies have on America harms more than just America’s very poorest. One in five voters struggle to pay their medical bills and one in three fear that they won’t be able to pay for healthcare. In order to pay those bills, they have to resort to extraordinary measures: dipping into savings, borrowing money, selling jewelry, crowdsourcing, etc. This would not exist under a single-payer system.

A single-payer healthcare system would also set prices for each service. This solves one of the biggest problems of our healthcare system, which is the variety in rates for different services. An appendectomy, for example, can cost anywhere from $1,529 to $186,955. Under single-payer, that rate would be much lower and consistent across hospitals. Administrative costs for doctors and hospitals would also go way down due to the reduction of negotiation costs. As of 2017, administrative spending made up 34.2% of total health expenditures in the United States. That is more than twice what Canada spends.

But how do we win a cheaper and more efficient healthcare system? The strategic and principled move is to demand a floor vote from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. This would prompt an “on-the-record” vote on M4A from all representatives. Right now, there are 221 Democrats in the House and 211 Republicans (and three vacancies). There are more than enough progressives to threaten the stoppage of any legislation Democrats propose. And they could use that leverage to demand a vote on M4A. But one of the main arguments against a floor vote for M4A is that it would just be an immediate flop.

So? When M4A polls so well, why should we be worried about if it flops or not? The viability of a piece of legislation is in the hands of the people, and the people have spoken: they support M4A. Putting elected representatives on the spot and showing how they’re actively voting against their constituents is absolutely crucial. If the bill fails, then it immediately lets progressives know which representatives they need to primary.

Opponents of this strategy have said that we can just look at the cosponsor list to ascertain who supports M4A. Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have both cosponsored an M4A bill. But, when pressed on the issue during the Democratic presidential primary, they immediately backed down. It would be reasonable to assume many other cosponsors would do the same if forced to vote.

Moreover, a message that certain representatives argued against healthcare coverage for Americans during a pandemic would help progressives in future elections. With our healthcare system absolutely failing during this crisis, American citizens will be more open than ever to healthcare reform. With media coverage of liberal representatives voting to deny them coverage, voters will be reminded of the necessity to elect more progressives to Congress.

Historically, the president’s party tends to lose seats during midterms. Obama lost 63 House seats in 2010, the largest loss since FDR, after his Wall Street bailout. Forcing a vote on M4A would make it much easier to capitalize on dissatisfaction with the president’s party during the midterm elections. 2022 would be the perfect time to campaign against incumbent Democrats, as history shows they are weaker during midterms.

Not only that, but forcing a vote on M4A would use the exact same tactics the Tea Party used to ultimately excise former House Speaker John Boehner. The Tea Party tried to repeal Obamacare numerous times, to no avail, but they rode the enthusiasm from those failed attempts to enormous wins and quickly became a force to be reckoned with in Congress. By blocking nearly every piece of legislation, and thereby tying Boehner’s hands behind his back, the Tea Party effectively forced him to resign. In short, Boehner stepped down because the Tea Party used the leverage they had. Progressive Democrats should use similar leverage to bring Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to their knees.

If you disagree with forcing the vote, then what is your plan to bring M4A into effect? What do you think we need to do before getting a vote on M4A? How do we do this, and what is the timeline? These questions are not being answered by sitting politicians. All we have are ideologies; not action on those ideologies. Denying this strategy means denying that the Tea Party was successful in being a commanding presence, and that is verifiably false. The incremental approach that doesn’t utilize the bully pulpit is failing. Everything that Biden “compromised” with progressives on during the campaign trail is falling dead in its tracks: $15 minimum wage (God save the Parliamentarian), ICE detention facilities, $2,000 checks, foreign policy, etc. Playing nice with the establishment does not work and that has been proven time and time again.

Democrats in Congress argued that we needed to impeach Donald Trump to hold him accountable for inciting the Capitol riots. Even though they didn’t have the votes to convict, I agreed with the motivations behind impeachment because it’s a moral imperative to get every single representative and senator on the record to keep them and Trump accountable. The same reasoning applies to forcing a vote on M4A.

Even recently, vote-forcing strategies have been successful at putting pressure on establishment politicians. Senator Bernie Sanders recently forced a vote and got eight senators, all of whom caucus with the Democrats, on the record as opposing a $15 minimum wage.

At this stage, opponents of this strategy complain that there is not enough thought given to step two. However, there’s a clear plan. We get politicians on record, and then exert political pressure on a popular issue. In this way, even if the bill fails, the issue only gets heightened. Just one piece of evidence is the huge outcry and shaming of Senator Sinema for her thumbs-down vote.

And what comes after this, you ask? The ammunition to primary these corrupt individuals is readily provided on an issue that the vast majority of Americans have a solid stance on. Denying a living wage is one thing, but denying healthcare during a pandemic will carry even graver consequences for Democrats who take that stance.

Something I’m completely against is calling opponents of this strategy corrupt. AOC and other members of “The Squad” have said that they are against forcing a vote on M4A because of aforementioned counterarguments, but they aren’t corrupt like the majority of DC. Progressives do NOT take money from super PACs, and that’s the main separator. We won’t always agree on everything, but we will agree on basic, reasonable political positions.

The foundations of #ForceTheVote are both principled and strategic. It’s principled because we’re fighting for something at a time when people need it most. Even if it’s “doomed to fail,” fighting for something that you believe is right is simply the morally principled action. And it’s strategic because, even if the vote fails, it gets representatives on the record as denying basic improvements in quality of life. That sets us up well to pressure incumbents and mount serious primary challenges against them.

The 2020 election showed that anti-Trump rhetoric by itself does not work. Democrats lost seats in the House and Biden won by smaller margins in swing states than Trump did in 2016. Sticking with their tradition of strategic cluelessness, the DNC recently announced that their primary focus will be on QAnon next election cycle.

Enough of this culture war bullshit, it’s time to fight for real policy. We need to have substantive arguments and a floor vote provides us with the ammunition, especially if it fails. The failure will not fall on progressives, it will fall on Democrats who voted no and they will be punished for it through democracy. There is nothing to lose from this strategy.

Keep in mind the 14.6 million people who have lost health insurance. Keep in mind the huge number of people who were already uninsured or underinsured. Keep these things in mind while consistently calling out politicians, so we can keep them accountable when the opportunity arises.

Voting Doesn't Beat the Far Right

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

The Far Right, emboldened and egged on by Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol Building yesterday with little resistance from the police. Their occupation of the Capitol — which came while Congress was in session ratifying the electoral college vote — is a far cry from the tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests which took place during the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But, this isn’t too surprising: we’ve always known that the cops will treat the Right with kid gloves and even aid and abet them, just like we saw during last year’s anti-lockdown protests and in Charlottesville. What these mobilizations reveal is, once again, that voting and elections won’t defeat the Far Right — especially not when the alternative is the Democratic Party, a capitalist party that helped fuel its rise. 

During the 2020 presidential election, figures from Barack Obama to Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis were telling everyone who would listen that voting for Joe Biden was necessary because it would defeat the Far Right forces that Trump has been stoking for more than four years. Many members of the Left bought into this argument and voted for Biden against their better judgement because they wanted to put a stop to Trump’s authoritarian and right-wing tendencies. In some sense, this is understandable — after all, if Trump is the one emboldening this right-wing movement, why wouldn’t getting rid of him help kill it? The events that transpired over the last few days clearly show that this is mistaken thinking. Whether in the White House or out of it, Donald Trump and his far right-wing base will continue to mobilize and play a role on the political stage. In fact, a staggering 75 percent of Republicans believe that the elections were rigged, highlighting the widespread influence of Trumpism. It is naïve to believe that these folks will just go home on January 20th.

Further, the idea that elections can defeat Trumpism misses  that politicians can’t create movements in a vacuum — they tap into existing sentiments and give political expression to them. The global rise in right-wing extremism is a response to the dire conditions created by the economic crisis. The current spike is a more direct result of the decline in living conditions for ordinary Americans over the past few decades, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, which the capitalists resolved by implementing devastating austerity that robbed millions of social services, education, job opportunities, and health care. This created a deep polarization which had left- and right-wing populist expressions. 

In this context, right-wing extremism emerged because it spoke to the despair of (typically) white men. By tapping into the racism that capitalism is built on, right-wing extremism channels anger at the establishment and converts material struggles into xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism. And Donald Trump was the political expression of this right-wing polarization, strengthening, giving voice to it, and, now, mobilizing it on a larger scale. This movement rallied around Trump because it believed that he represented a challenge to the established order and, now that he has been defeated by yet another neoliberal, it is mobilizing to defend him. 

But we should be clear: this rise in right-wing radicalization is a product of the Obama years as well as the escalation in the Trump years. Given this, it is not only incorrect but deeply dangerous to think that Biden’s warmed-over neoliberalism in the midst of a devastating economic crisis will do anything but escalate the problem.

Indeed, the escalations from the right that we saw on Wednesday come less than 24 hours after the Democrats won both senate elections in Georgia and took control of Congress. Trump was defeated at the ballot box in November and then again in January, but the social base of Trumpism is emboldened, not diminished. With Trump out of office, it provides him with a bigger platform to speak to this right-wing base, not smaller, because he will no longer be held back by having to work within the established structures. The “adults in the room” are gone, and full-fledged right-wing populism can reign at Trump rallies, on Trump’s Twitter feed, and the vast network of right-wing media outlets. 

So if the solution to defeating the Right isn’t voting for the Democrats, what is? 

The way to defeat the organized Right is with an organized Left independent of all capitalist parties. There are no shortcuts, no substitutes for the organizing we need to do. We need to build powerful and militant worker organizations in our workplaces and in the streets that can resist the Far Right, all the politicians who cater to them, and the neoliberal austerity that creates them. This resistance will involve both openly confronting the Far Right in the streets but also using our power as workers to resist them. For example, workers in DC could go on strike to protest the Far Right occupation of the Capitol building, forcing the government to evict them from the streets.

Strong Left organizations are also important because they can fight back the ideological advance of the Right. Many young people are drawn to the Far Right because they believe that it offers solutions to their struggles. If there were Left organizations that were putting forward a strong message against both the Far Right and neoliberalism, it could help to prevent some of these people from being drawn into right-wing extremism, thus preventing these movements from growing. It is vital in the fight to defeat the Right that we provide a real and meaningful alternative. And for people who become fascists, we agree with Trotsky when he said, “If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.”

In this, the failure of leftist leaders like Chomsky and Davis becomes clear: not only were they wrong that defeating Trump at the polls would defeat the Far Right, but they also sewed false illusions in Biden. Chomsky and the other leftist leaders who asked us to support Biden told us that he could keep us safe from the Far Right. He can’t — and he won’t. By funneling the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement into support for Biden, these leaders intentionally or not worked to undermine what could have been the foundations of the type of mass social movement we need to protect against the Far Right. Voting for Biden got us further away from defeating the Right, not closer.

History is littered with examples of this. From Franco in Spain to Hitler in Germany, the liberals always choose to side with the fascists over the socialists because fascism is less of a threat to the capitalist order than socialism is. So we can’t be fooled when liberal politicians wring their hands about the rise of the Far Right — they aren’t on our side, and we cannot support them in their elections, even when they are running against a representative of the Far Right. Liberal victories at the voting booth will not defeat the Right — but class struggle and worker organizing will. And given the right-wing mobilization yesterday, it’s clear that we need independent organizing in the current moment. 

Dear Black America, Don't Let Them Fool You: We Cannot Vote Ourselves Out Of This Problem

By Christian Gines

Voting is not the way to solve anything for black people, oppressed people. First, reform does not work in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Every issue we hear talked about on the news, "this [issue] disproportionately affects people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, etc." This statement shouldn't be that mind-boggling. This system isn't made to benefit us in the first place, so why would a change in that system work in the first place. When a car breaks down, you put in new parts. If you continue to put new parts in a car, it will eventually break down. That is all these reformist polices are doing. If you're not abolishing the system, then you're just allowing the car to keep on going with new parts that will enable the car to run on fumes until it breaks down. Calls to abolish and defund the police are already being coopted into reformist policies to appease the ruling class. It shouldn't be that radical to call for an abolishment of a system that kills over 1,000 people a year despite being "reformed."

Second, voting is to subdue the masses to choosing between two evils and allowing them to decide what's acceptable and what's not acceptable in the realm of discussion. As Noam Chomsky eloquently put it, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that they have free thought, but the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." As a people, we have been taught and sold that voting is the only way to make a change in society. From talking to my parents, family members, and community members doing the peak of the 2020 Democratic primary, and now they are sold on voting as our only means of creating change. Saying we have to make the change within the system. Their stance on voting has been fed to them for so long that they will fight you to the grave on this, but it is so ahistorical that we need to disprove it today. Our ancestors didn't have the right to vote, and they achieved the abolition of slavery, end of segregation, right to citizenship, right to work, right to own property, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the removal of Jim Crow Legislation, the right to vote.

When you look at any change that has happened within the The US, the change has come from outside the system, not within. As James Connolly Said, "Governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class." When we vote, we are voting for whoever the ruling class has told us to vote for. Whether through endless spending with SuperPAC's or "black faces in high places," telling us who to vote for, we have no say in Democracy. As Malcolm X said, "Democracy is Hypocrisy." Voting is the way that the empire can keep us under control and keep themselves in power. The Black Panther Party couldn't vote, yet they had a Free Food, Free Housing, Free Medical Care, Free Busing, Free Clothes, and 50 other programs that we hear white liberals advocate for today. They were doing that within their community, and that's why Herbert Hoover fought to get rid of them. The BPP's initial government surveillance started because of their Free Breakfast Program. The settlers have taught us that's their way of governance is the best way, and we have fallen for that. We believe that we, the masses, and oppressed people can vote and change the system that was set up with the thought that either we weren't citizens, we weren't humans, or that we were too dumb, so there should be a safeguard.

The ruling class had a chance to maybe postpone a revolution in our lifetime with the compromise candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Sanders, running on a political revolution, had a tremendous amount of support from young people in general, but especially young black people. With his calls for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other social democratic policies, they had a chance to satisfy the short term wants of most Americans. They had an opportunity to assuage the masses for a while, as they did with FDR's candidacy. The ruling class, though, was so caught up with their money and profits that they failed to see that Bernie Sanders was offering them. They were so scared that he would tax them that they colluded against him as they did in 2016 to ensure that their establishment candidate won. Now we are stuck choosing between the lesser of two evils again. We have one person who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault, an architect of mass incarceration (who refuses to apologize for it), and full of blunders. On the other hand, we have Donald Trump. I remember when people were saying that they will vote for Joe Biden over Trump because at least we can push him left. Now, this isn't an essay on whether you should vote or not, but I will say that we have had weeks of protest worldwide, and Joe Biden has not even inched to the left. He doesn't support abolishing or defunding the police department. Even Bernie Sanders said that he doesn't support defunding the police and says that they need more funding. This was the candidate who claimed that he was for the people, and he doesn't even support our demands. The Democratic Party has sold out black people for so long that it shouldn't be controversial not to support them, but we continuously have for decades. 

The façade that we can vote our problems away is one that we cannot fall victim to today. We have tried that time and time again, and what happens? The politicians run on something, go in there and don't do anything for our community. Black and white politicians alike have sold us out time and time again. To get real change, we must stay in the streets. As you see in Minneapolis, with protesting, burning, rioting, and looting, the change will come. If you support non-violent or violent protest is your prerogative. If you support the liberation of the black community and think that we must vote to get Trump out of office, that is your choice. But one thing is for sure. We cannot vote ourselves out of this situation because if we think that is the way to solve our problems, we will end up in the same place we started.

Christian Gines is a published student writer, poet, and activist whose writings discuss race within the black community and its effect on black youth.

Joe Biden’s Iraq War Vote is Disqualifying

(Photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

By Charles Wofford

Question: What happens if you kill several pedestrians because of a driving mistake?

Answer: You lose your license, probably do a lengthy prison sentence, and pay some hefty fines.

Question: What happens if you kill hundreds of thousands of people because of a “mistake” in governance?

Answer: You get to run for president.

In 8th grade, I marched with about a thousand others in downtown Flagstaff, AZ against the impending war in Iraq pushed by the Bush Administration. I was one of many: the war in Iraq saw some of the largest anti war demonstrations in recorded history, with over 3,000 separate events from 2002 through 2003, often happening simultaneously across multiple continents. I remember enduring the petty warmongering of my school teachers, some of whom thought that we ought to also invade North Korea, unaware – or uncaring – that millions would have died. I remember being told time and again that the Iraqi people did not understand democracy and we had to teach them how civilization worked. I recall the Bush Administration declaring that it would no longer respect the sovereignty of nations, but would seek out and destroy “terrorists” (a vague label with varying definitions even within the U.S. government) wherever it found them. It was a declaration of war against the entire world. I remember how apparently respectable intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens revealed themselves as false prophets, conveniently becoming wealthier and better known in the process.

Now, as then, only the far-right fringe supported the invasion. But in 2003, those people happened to be in power. Because the war was based on a lie, everyone who died in it died in vain. American soldiers did not die supporting our freedoms or rights; they died to further the corporate interests of oil tycoons such as then-Vice President and ex-CEO of Halliburton Dick Cheney. It also means that the hundreds of thousands of slain Iraqis were not merely killed, but murdered. The foundational claim of the entire war was a lie. Therefore it was not justified, and the unjustified taking of another’s life is called murder. The United States leaders who waged that war are responsible for the murders of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The war in Iraq was an atrocity. It destroyed an entire country and cast an entire region into chaos. According to a study by The Lancet, over 600,000 Iraqis had died by the end of 2006 from both violence and infrastructure ruination caused by the war, a number which is surely much higher now in 2020. Even more horrifying, Iraq has been turned into a radioactive dump. The catastrophic effect of radiation poisoning on the population is well documented, despite attempts to cover it up. Cancer rates are significantly higher in Iraq than in any industrialized nation, and congenital birth defects are extremely common. Even American soldiers are developing cancer at elevated rates. The depleted uranium used by the U.S. military in Iraq has a half life of 4.5 billion years, which means that we can expect the sun to turn into a red giant by the time Iraq is clean again. The poisoning of a nation is an atrocity on top of the war itself, and especially so in this time of global ecological crisis. This is Hitler level destruction, and Joe Biden was right there supporting it. Now he wants to be president, because, in his own words, he “knows more than most people know,” since he’s “been around a long time.” 

How can Joe Biden say that this crime, this atrocity for which he voted, was a mistake? How can he look himself in the mirror having supported the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and just say “oops?” How can he look at this radioactive genocide and not recognize his complicity? Does not his very failure to do so add to the case that he is unfit to lead? He says he voted for the war to try and prevent a war, which makes no sense. Biden has been criticized for seeming out of touch, and people are wondering about his mental fitness. But even back in 2003, he showed an inability to make sound judgments. Moreover, at the time of his vote on the Iraq War, Biden was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an ideal spot to have a privileged view into the evidence for and against the war. His excuses do not add up; even an 8th grader had better judgment. To be a leader means to some degree to anticipate, to see further than others. Does Joe Biden see further than others?

It is one thing to make a mistake, to make a serious mistake, or even to make a mistake that hurts people. But if Joe Biden genuinely recognized any wrongdoing, he would not be running for president. Should not the magnitude of his error disqualify him from holding public office, especially the highest office in the land? Should he not at least have the decency to let someone else lead the country? This is not like using the wrong form of “there” in a high school essay, or buying decaf; this error resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and enormous ecological destruction. What is this man doing running for president at all?

Were the United States held to the standards of international law, Joe Biden would face a lengthy prison sentence, as would Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, and other senators and representatives who supported that war. The leaders and architects such as President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and others would likely have been executed. The same would be true of those generals who first put depleted uranium into U.S. weaponry starting back in the first Gulf War. After all, we put Nazis to death at Nuremberg merely on grounds of conspiring against peace. 

Having protested the Iraq Atrocity, I cannot now in good conscience vote for someone who supported it (no, I did not vote for Clinton in 2016 and I do not regret that decision). What kind of choice is it between voting for a rapist or voting for a war criminal? Who will lecture me on Donald Trump as “the most dangerous president in history” (Sanders)? Who would dare bring up “lesser evilism” when Joe Biden is party to mass murder? Who will presume to take the moral high ground when defending someone who was “tricked” by the oh-so-cunning Bush Administration into supporting an atrocity? 

Charles Wofford is pursuing a PhD in historical musicology at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Brexit: The Death Rattle of British Imperialism

By Red Fightback

The British ruling class stands at a precipice. It has now been over 3 years since the 2016 EU referendum, in which the British people are alleged to have democratically decided the country’s future. The last few months in particular have seen the British ruling class plunged into near insurmountable crisis, and exposed the superficiality of capitalist “democracy” itself. Meanwhile, the working classes, who have suffered decades of austerity under successive Tory and Labour governments, are set to face ever-worsening conditions in the context of generalised economic crisis, against a backdrop of increased police presence and a strengthening of the racist border regime.

Seen in its proper historical context, Brexit was a farcical outcome of long-standing divisions within the British ruling-class, related to broader contradictions between the global imperialist powers. Britain is among the oldest of the imperialist powers. Once the dominant imperialist force in the world, able to call almost a third of the world’s resources to its aid, it has long since found itself pushed closer and closer to the precipice of destruction. The precipice, catalysed by a new era of inter-imperialist rivalries, particularly rising contradictions between Britain and the US and EU imperialist blocs, has now taken a concrete form: Brexit. As the sun begins to set for good on the British empire, we must investigate how this has occurred, and what the outlook is for the labouring masses.

We recently published a rigorous rebuttal of Corbyn and the Labour Party’s ‘radical’ credentials, which we recommend reading first. In this article, we summarise the causes of Brexit, and demonstrate why solutions offered by both Brexiters and Remainers, and Tories and Corbynites, are fundamentally anti-working class. While the EU is an inherently imperialist and anti-working-class institution, and we recognise that membership thereof and socialism are incompatible, a “working-class Brexit” was never on the table. Many ‘socialists’, including the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain (which retains some influence in the trade union movement), think that Brexit would provide conditions for a national path of socialist development in Britain, by undermining the strength of international finance capital, mediated through the City of London. Putting aside the fact that global economic conditions couldn’t be more distant from the post-war economic boom, ‘Lexiters’ evade the fundamental question of working-class control and ownership of the state and economy, and narrowly focus on ‘the City’ as the source of Britain’s woes, while relying on misleading and euphemistic rhetoric about the “traditional” working class “left behind”.

Even before the dominance of the financial sector, the social-democratic Labour Party always took the side of capital, consistently setting the police and even troops against workers’ movements, implementing ruthless cuts at times of economic difficulty, and perpetuating bloody imperialism abroad. Many Lexiters present a dangerous myth of a pre-Thatcher ‘golden era’ to justify their total opportunistic subservience to Corbyn’s old-school Labour Party. Left Remainers too, like the Another Europe is Possible campaign, draw on a romanticised and irrelevant vision of social democracy or “democratic socialism”.

Red Fightback recognises that the only acceptable and viable solution to Britain’s political crisis is a united, revolutionary working-class movement against austerity, racism and the capitalist system of exploitation.

Britain in the post-war world order: the parasitism of British imperialism

It is important, first of all, to place Brexit in its proper historical context. Both left-wing Remainers and Brexiters draw on a misleading myth of a benevolent post-war social democracy in Britain; a golden age the country must ‘return’ to; at the same time, many see Brexit as a historical aberration that suddenly threw the country into chaos. No historical events happen outside of the inescapable interconnection they have with each other, and neither can Brexit be understood without looking back at the path British imperialism has taken in the last few decades.

What we have been able to refer to as the world order up until 2016 was brewed up in meeting rooms across the US and Europe, from 1945 onwards, as the imperialist West mapped out its journey beyond the shadows of the Second World War. The situation in Europe was dire, and the outcome of the war called for a radical rebalancing of the scales of world dominance and power. US capital forged a new dominant position for itself, as European powers battled the challenge of post-war recovery and lost their formal colonial empires. British hegemony faded as well, and the position of the world's foremost imperialist power passed onto the US, evidenced in phenomena such as the rise of the dollar as the world's primary currency.

Beyond post-war reconstruction and its war debt, the position of British imperialism was most markedly affected by the loss of its physical empire, as the long-oppressed colonised peoples of the empire fought for independence. Politically, its image as a dominating power truly began to shatter after the so-called Suez Crisis in 1956, when Britain and France engineered an Israeli invasion of Egypt, in response to Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez canal (used for oil transport). However, the transition had begun as early as 1947, with the formal independence of India. Decolonisation must also be viewed in the context of US-Soviet antagonism; as the latter supported national liberation on anti-imperialist grounds, the former encouraged a superficial decolonisation where imperialism functioned indirectly through western-aligned local elites (‘neocolonialism’). British capital navigated this period in a number of ways: it anticipated the loss of its colonial empire and strove primarily to avoid the rise of communism and place heavy neocolonial shackles on the newly-independent nations; it installed the welfare state partly as a concession after decades of intense working-class struggle, and partly as a pacification measure funded by colonial exploitation; and it set the foundation for the establishment of the City of London as the world's leading financial centre to preserve British relevance and the survival of British imperialism. As shown by political economists P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, the priority of British imperialism in the period immediately following the war was to resume the construction and development of the Sterling Area, which had begun with its formalisation in 1940 and continued with the restoration of full convertibility in 1958. After the war, Britain’s capacity to manipulate sterling balances created extremely favourable (extortionate) terms of trade with its raw material-producing colonies and neo-colonies.

The end of the gold standard and the rise of the US dollar in its place through the Bretton Woods system helped the Sterling Area survive a little longer; however, the late 1950s consolidated the awareness, among British financiers, that the Sterling Area provided less opportunity than the rest of the world. The devaluation crisis of 1967 was the final blow for sterling; by then, decolonisation was nearly complete across the former Empire. This was not a peaceful process: there was, for instance, the so-called Malaya emergency, in truth a bloody and brutal counterinsurgency operation (presided over by a Labour government) against the Malayan Communist Party, and the murderous colonial war against the Mau Mau in Kenya. Both of these, coincidentally, were later used by Britain to justify its obscene delusion that it had perfected its “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency technique, which it went on to export to occupied Ireland and lend to the US empire for use in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ‘humanitarianism’ of this technique is, of course, a lie, and the brutality of colonial violence in all of these regions proves it.

As history shows – and in direct contradiction to arguments of left-wing Brexiters that British imperialism dissolved into European imperialism – British capital continued to look out for itself as it moved through the post-1945 world order. Its relationship with the US, at times both competitive and cooperative, meant that it accepted the US dollar as the world currency, yet focused on building a solid foundation for itself as a key part of the imperialist system. The strategy, developed by the jointly operating capitalist class and political leadership – as is the habit in an imperialist state – was based on “the smooth dismantling of empire in which the City's interests were largely preserved” (White, 2000). This was both an opportunity and a response to a very real impasse. As the empire formally (but not truly!) decolonised and accepted US hegemony, it was no longer as easy for Britain to directly live off the colonial dividends of oppressed nations spread across continents. British domestic capital was unable to compete on the world market. Britain was faced with the same realisation it is facing now – what claim can a nation with diminished standing have on an honourable place among the imperialist powers? Within the geopolitical reality of the era, there arose a choice: become a junior partner to the US, or join the construction of a new imperialist bloc, led by French and German capital?

The winning move for British capital came in the form of its positioning as a bridge between Washington and Brussels – a middle-man of international capital, able to facilitate financial transactions between the world's most powerful capitalists. Using its relationship with US capital and its pre-existing influential position in the world financial market, British capital raised its crown jewel – the City of London – to the status of a global financial centre, and the lifeline of British imperialism. The City had been a central hub of international capital since the 18th century, replacing Amsterdam and becoming a crucial part in the development of industry as an irreplaceable provider of imperialist credit for British industrial capital. Its significance as a banking centre grew as the role of the banks in facilitating the movement of capital increased and their merger with industrial capital progressed. The City was soon enough an excrescence on the sickly body of the British mainland, whose manufacturing power began to vanish in favour of the unstoppable growth of London's financial sector. The turning point came in the 50s, when the Eurodollar market exploded, as Britain essentially tolerated a regulation loophole in order to reap the benefits of the competitive advantage this provided (Schenk, 1998). Contrary to the mythology invoked by left-wing Brexiters and Remainers – of a peaceful social democracy only disrupted by Thatcher’s neoliberal assault – it was “socialist” Labour that began an offensive against the working-class in response to global economic crisis. In 1975-6, Labour sought two IMF loans to reinforce the pound and save the City’s financial sector. This was accompanied with public spending cuts of £3 billion, along with wage controls during a time of price inflation. The final steps were the removal of foreign exchange controls in 1979 and the “Big Bang”, or the stock exchange deregulation seven years later in 1986, both enacted by the Thatcher government. Following the latter event, “the average daily turnover of the London Stock Exchange rose from 500 million pounds in 1986 to over $2 billion in 1995”.  This was a conscious decision to boost finance while abandoning the industrial sector, in order to build an economy based almost entirely on extracting and processing imperialist super-profits. This was accompanied by a militaristic assault on the industrial working class in the North and Midlands of Britain and Wales, firstly under Wilson’s and Callaghan’s Labour, and then Thatcher.

The UK essentially depends on its capacity to attract US and European imperialist finance, but it also still plays a directly imperialist role, predicated on financial extortion against the Global South: several years after the collapse of the USSR, ‘Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean were together paying Britain £2,493m more annually than they got in official grants, voluntary aid, export credits, bank loans and direct investments from the UK.’[3] A 2016 report showed 101 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, mostly British, collectively control over one trillion dollars’ worth of Africa’s most valuable mineral resources.

In essence, the British ruling class carved a unique and valuable position amongst global capitalists as the broker of wealth between US and EU capital. This position allowed British imperialism to limp parasitically onwards, sustained by the favourable trade and currency deals between the two giants, able to rake in dividends from both the US and the EU imperialist bloc. This is only an extension of how British imperialism survives on wealth extracted through mechanisms of neocolonialism; to put it simply, “Britain uses the financial system to gain economic privileges by appropriating value from other countries while appearing to do them a service” (Norfield, 2016). British imperialism continues to earn “a net £30bn from financial services and even larger sums from its foreign investments”. Ironically enough, British media has been decrying the imminent death of the City ever since the referendum, as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Citigroup collectively moved over $500bn of balance-sheet assets from London to Frankfurt and Dublin. Other sources show that the British financial services sector has moved nearly £1 trillion to the EU since the 2016 vote.

This parasitism has characterised the British position in the world for the last 60 years, which also gives it an enormous incentive to join the US in interfering with other countries. The capitalist system must go on unbothered. So, as Marxist economist Tony Norfield puts it, what does Britain do? How does it make a living? In his words:

Britain is extremely dependent on the revenues from financial services trading and direct investment. The British state’s promotion of the financial sector, especially from the 1980s, built on its existing advantages in the world economy, and the City of London became the broker of the world. Its financial dealings draw in the money and investment funds of the whole planet, from which it derives dealing revenues, and they provide the funds for the outflow of British direct investment to exploit higher profits from overseas.

This is the foundation of British imperialism, and its continuation is the unifying cause of British politics. It is why, despite deindustrialisation, the ruling class in Britain manages to extract enormous profits – there are over 150 billionaires living in Britain – while millions upon millions are kept in poverty and perpetual employment insecurity.

Britain and EU imperialism

This repositioning of British imperialism took place as French and German capital moved to build their new imperialist tactical alliance, and Britain did not at all forget about the EU throughout this time. While the preservation of independence was a priority for at least a fraction of British capital, integration in a Europe persistent in its mission to build a new imperialist bloc to prevent another war, and create the capacity for Europe to rival the US and the Soviet Union, was very appealing. What we now know as the EU began as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) at the beginning of the 1950s. The ECSC was founded in direct opposition to the risk of imperialist competition leading to imperialist war. Another war of redivision would have remained a risk without the minimisation of competition in key markets such as coal and steel. At the same time, the US promoted Western European integration through its Marshall Plan as a means of isolating Warsaw Pact countries and containing Soviet influence; strengthening the imperialist NATO alliance, and securing petrodollar markets.

It is important to note that this uneasy relationship between Europe and the US, which had gained tutelage over Europe and was promoting its integration, yet would come to fear its rise as an imperialist rival, was managed in part through the establishment of NATO in 1949. The treaty established US military dominance in Europe and military dependence on US forces; later, after the end of the Cold War, it consolidated itself as a vehicle of imperialist brutality, evidenced through interventions such as in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. Today, despite being “brain dead” by its’ leaders own admission, it continues to fulfil its role of “containing” Russia and ensuring that Eastern Europe is packed full of US troops, military equipment, “dark” interrogation sites, and so on.

The alliance of Franco-German capital that was to become the EU proceeded towards further cooperation in 1957, with the foundation of the European Economic Community. Britain remained reluctant with regard to European integration up until the success of Franco-German capital, powered by the EEC, convinced British capital that it would be advantageous to participate in the new European project. Ten years later, in 1967, when the Sterling Area was on its deathbed and decolonisation (or rather, recolonisation under new terms) was nearly complete, admission into the European Economic Community (EEC) and the common market was a shared goal among most British politicians. At the time, French President de Gaulle was saying no to Britain for a second time. Dissent had already made itself visible, but Labour leader Harold Wilson refused to legitimise the faction of anti-European campaigners who did oppose integration.

Britain finally joined the EEC in 1973 under the Conservative government of Edward Heath. Two years later, Labour lost a referendum aimed at overturning integration, and Britain was firmly on the path to merging with the European bloc. Labour though soon settled into Britain’ role as dual servicer of US and European finance. Also during this time, “socialist” Labour joined the EEC in propping up Portuguese fascism, as well as white supremacist rule throughout southern Africa, where Britain had extensive mining interests.

This does not mean, of course, that British capital was ever the vanguard of integration. Indeed, dissent persisted from very early on within the capitalist class, due to the inherent instability of a European project based on German leadership and French toleration. A key opponent to further integration was Margaret Thatcher herself, who famously returned a defiant “no, no, no” to President of the European Commission Jacques Delors in 1990, with regard to the latter's proposal to formalise European institutions such as the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers into the supranational decision-making bodies they are today. Aiming to preserve a level of independence, particularly with regard to currency and monetary policy, Britain always sought special terms and conditions.

A particularly devastating moment for Britain, and one that added fuel to the anti-EU fire was so-called Black Wednesday in 1992. Britain had entered the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1990. The City had unconditionally chosen the EU in order to destroy all remaining barriers on capital flow and accumulation. The ERM was in a way the precursor of the euro, and as such Britain was pushed by its financial sector into the scheme. However, the British economy was too weak to keep up with the European Currency Unit (ECU), and Britain was forced to withdraw from the ERM in September 1992. Black Wednesday triggered an ever-growing wave of anti-EU sentiment throughout the British capitalist class, and particularly in the Conservative party, which only added fuel to the fire started that same year by the Maastricht Treaty. The Treaty transformed the European Communities into the European Union, and set the stage for the creation of the euro, through clauses that sought to regulate members' fiscal policies. The so-called “Maastricht Rebels” opposed the Treaty, and they opposed John Major's government so heavily throughout the mid-90s that the split eventually cost them the 1997 election. UKIP was also born out of this schism, with the Anti-Federalist League as its predecessor. Nigel Farage also left the Tories in 1992 in disagreement with the Treaty. Another visible example of dissent was James Goldsmith's foundation of the Referendum Party in 1994 - indeed, most of its former candidates were recruited to UKIP by Farage.

It is important to be clear that the EU always was, and still is, an anti-working class and imperialist endeavour. With the capitalist counterrevolution in the former USSR, the EU imposed economic ‘shock therapy’ on Eastern Europe, slashing public jobs and gutting social security; thereby creating the conditions that have led to the rise of fascism in the region. Left Remainers rightly point out that xenophobia dominated the Brexit campaign, but hypocritically they ignore the racist reality of the EU. The ‘Fortress Europe’ policy in Western Europe has dehumanised and caused systemic violence against non-EU migrants. Western Europe refuses to take responsibility for the millions of refugees displaced by decades of imperialist interventions in the Middle East and North Africa. Recent EU bailouts have served to prop up especially German and French banks which had taken on government debt in floundering southern European countries. The bailouts were accompanied with sweeping privatizations and cuts in the debtor countries. After the Troika’s intervention, Greece’s economy collapsed by 30% while pensions and wages fell catastrophically by 40%. The rapid capitulation of Greece’s “democratic socialist” party, Syriza, to international finance should be a clear warning for those placing all their hopes in social democracy.

The two factions, pro- and anti-EU, only grew further apart during the Blair era. It is this antagonism that brewed up for almost two decades, and finally, 3 years ago, managed to overturn decades of integration (which fuelled the most shameless parasitic exploitation) and throw British imperialism into crisis. Throughout the previous 50 years, Britain had been able to fully take advantage of the favourable position it had manoeuvred itself into. With a foot in Brussels and one in Washington, but its head firmly in the City of London, the British capitalist class facilitated the movement of capital between continents and lived almost exclusively off the interest, dividends, finder's-fees, and other kickbacks it received from this arrangement. However, this favourable position for the British ruling class was always going to run out of borrowed time. For one, a country so embedded in international finance, with no solid domestic economic foundation to fall back on, will be much more vulnerable to looming future crises. Indeed, Britain is yet to recover from the 2008 financial crisis.

Secondly, with inter-imperialist rivalry once again on the horizon, the unsustainability of British parasitic imperialism is exposed for all to see. As capitalism falls deeper into crisis and the world is entirely divided between great powers, the expansion of the EU imperialist bloc has necessarily forced it into competition against the US and its dominance. Since the 2008/9 global financial crisis, contradictions within the imperialist power bloc (USA, Britain, West Europe and Japan) have been spilling over. The limits of US dominance were recently displayed by its inability to topple the Russian-backed Assad government in Syria. France and Germany are looking to increase their independence from the US, notably via the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Russia. The situation is one of geopolitical volatility, seen most recently with the flagrant assassination by the US of the leading military figure in Iran, an oil-rich country which deals with Russia, China and the EU. Britain is now forced to decide upon its favoured ally. That is to say, the contradiction in the British position has forced the hand of the British ruling class by seeing them hold a referendum that would decide, supposedly, if Britain would favour involvement in the EU bloc, or if Britain would favour greater involvement in US imperialism, as has happened with the Brexit referendum.

In reality then, far from being a new battleground in British politics (as some would claim), Brexit is a symptom of a long-standing ruling class disagreement between which would be of more benefit; greater ties with the EU, or greater ties to the US. It is not in itself the principal political battleground, which is between the capitalist class and the increasingly-squeezed working class.

The referendum: democracy for whom?

This antagonism came to a head in the few years leading up to 2016. In 2013, David Cameron, a Europhile, called a referendum on EU membership, in an opportunistic bluff calculated to win over UKIP voters and stabilise Conservative power by shattering the Eurosceptic wing of the party. As we strive to make sense of Brexit, the myths centred on a supposed democratic referendum, where the voice of the people broke through the manoeuvres of the “political elites”, must be denounced and debunked. In reality, the true character of the referendum - a factional war within the British capitalist class - shone through from the beginning, both in how the choice was presented, and in the real outcomes it presented for the working class.

While immediately, the referendum on EU membership was an expression of inter-imperialist rivalries at a time of global economic downturn, the political campaigns were largely centred on the ‘issue’ of immigration. As journalist Paul Foot observed in 1976: “Race hate and race violence does not rise and fall according to the numbers of immigrants coming to Britain. It rises and falls to the extent to which people’s prejudices are inflamed and made respectable by politicians and newspapers”.

An especially graphic moment came when Leave.EU – a UKIP-led organisation, co-founded by capitalist Arron Banks – produced a racist poster showing Middle Eastern refugees queuing at Europe’s borders. A day after this ‘Breaking Point’ billboard went up, Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered by a white supremacist connected to Britain First. In this context, the argument that Brexit lacked racist implications because much of the immigration in question is European is facile. The most striking characteristic of Brexit-related racial violence (which includes some 6,000 reported racist hate crimes in the four weeks following the referendum) was ‘the way its perpetrators made little attempt to distinguish between black and brown citizens and white European migrants – in their eyes, they were all outsiders.’[5]

Restricting the number of immigrant workers in the British economy is one of the primary objectives of Brexit; nationalistic and racist sentiments, particularly prevalent in rural and deprived areas with few immigrants, but also among the metropolitan middle classes, see foreigners as the reason for their low wages and lack of job opportunities.

Racist conspiracy theories about immigrants who “take advantage” of the British welfare system by going on benefits and not contributing to society also fuelled the Leave vote. These same conspiracy theories have been used as justification to decimate what little welfare state still remains. However, according to most research (including the government’s own reports), immigration does not push down local wages or increase unemployment. Nevertheless, this rhetoric was used by both right-wing groups and Labour. Should Brexit take place, immigrant workers will face the brunt of the effects. The deaths of 39 young Vietnamese people found in a lorry in Essex were only one especially shocking instance of the systemic violence migrants are subjected to. The “hostile environment” will undoubtedly worsen as the government further strengthens its border controls, increases deportations and places more and more restrictions on who can enter the country. Restrictive Visa requirements will lead to migrant workers accepting more and more exploitative working conditions, as a refusal to do so would mean unemployment and thus deportation. The strengthening of the border will mean increased government surveillance on migrant communities in an attempt to catch “illegal” immigrants.

Restriction of immigrant labour will not solve the problem of poverty and exploitation within Britain, as this is the nature of the capitalist economic system; therefore, as conditions continue to worsen (and the burden of this will primarily be on immigrant communities), it is likely that anti-immigrant sentiment will continue to increase. This, coupled with the government's increasing emphasis on creating hostile conditions for immigrants and the tighter restrictions on immigrant labour, will mean that the living conditions of immigrants (both from the EU and from the rest of the world) will only continue to get worse. The government will remain bound by World Trade Organization rules and free trade agreements, which all call for a reduction in barriers to trade (i.e. labour protections and rights), so the situation will remain bad for all workers in this case. No one wins; neither the ‘British’ workers, nor the immigrant workers.

Of course, it is not surprising that the ruling classes were able to use the issue of immigration to craft the Brexit narrative. Centuries of imperialist plunder have generated a certain structural white privilege, which has led some white workers to incorrectly, and short-sightedly, respond to their own hardships by seeking to narrowly defend their relative privileges – in employment, housing allocation, social security provision etc. – instead of joining with workers of colour in combating the overarching conditions of capitalist exploitation. Anti-immigrant sentiments have, however, been overwhelmingly manufactured by political elites. Bourgeois politicians have particularly sought to distract from the neoliberal assault on the entire working class, by appealing to a uniform ‘white working class’ identity – and in the process, erasing histories of multiracial proletarian solidarity, such as at the anti-fascist Battle of Cable Street, or the Grunwick film processing plant dispute led by Asian women.

Indeed, many Lexiters have responded to Corbyn’s recent election defeat by parroting euphemistic right-wing rhetoric about the “traditional” (i.e. white) working class “left behind” in the North and Midlands, whose “authentic” demands were supposedly betrayed by Labour’s call for a second referendum. This narrative has manifold problems, including the reality that the working-class poor in the metropole are equally left behind. The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) has for instance adopted the slogan ‘British workers demand Brexit’. This is disingenuous: the Brexit vote was disproportionately delivered by the ‘propertied, pensioned, well-off, white middle class based in southern England’; and the proportion of Leave voters in the lowest two social classes (the so-called precariat) was just 24%[6]. It is certainly true that many workers saw the referendum as a means to register their class-based anger towards the political establishment. For decades the working-class in former manufacturing regions have been attacked by successive Tory and Labour governments, but crucially it is the duty of socialists to foreground the pivotal issue of working-class control of the state and economy, rather than pandering to vague chauvinist sentiments, or promoting conspiratorial notions of ‘cosmopolitanism’/‘multiculturalism’. Given their lack of any strong internationalist or revolutionary perspectives, Lexiters, who often themselves adopt reactionary nationalist rhetoric, have played directly into the hands of the Right.

The notion Brexit was a working-class victory is farcical. More than half the donations made during the referendum campaign came from just ten wealthy donors. The Brexit camp, including Leave.EU and the official Vote Leave campaign led by Tory elites like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (and a sprinkling of Labour MPs), enjoyed the greater share of elite funding. The Leavers received £17.5 million of the donations – ‘almost exactly one vote for every pound given towards the Brexit campaign’ – compared to Remain’s £14.2 million. Brexit was secured by targeted advertising campaigns, stolen data, fake social media accounts and overrun spending limits. If we were to also consider those who were won over by loosely defined promises of “taking back control”, or of £350 million a week for the NHS, and compare these tall tales with the real causes of Brexit, the idea of a democratic referendum loses any kind of connection with reality.

The left-wing Remainers, however – foremost among them, the Corbynite and ex-Trotskyist Paul Mason – are no better. They believe in a “progressive” Europe; a notion based on the myth that reformist social democracy can ‘tame’ capitalism. Left Remainers point to the relative stability of the post-war economic boom period, but the conditions for this model no longer exist. Even if they did, social democracy, including “socialist” Labour, has never had any no qualms about turning on the working class at the first sign of trouble. We stand in solidarity with EU workers facing the erosion of their rights, but we cannot do so without maintaining a correct assessment of the EU as an anti-worker organisation - in fact, EU labour migration happens predominantly from its southern and eastern ‘periphery’ to its western ‘core’, being only a reflection of the wider global value extraction from South to North. This cannot be ignored, and any response by EU workers to the prospect of a hard Brexit must take into account the hostile environment faced by non-EU migrant workers for years, and forge true internationalist solidarity out of this struggle.

Neither were Left-wing Brexiters (‘Lexiters’), like the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party leader Alex Callinicos, and the Communist Party of Britain, correct in their optimistic assessment that the referendum was a working-class victory because of its supposed effect on EU imperialism. They correctly identify the imperialist and anti-working-class character of the EU, but they wrongly view imperialism as a unified bloc, and thus portray Brexit as a tactical anti-imperialist decision. The most extreme example of this line comes from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which argued that ‘the votes of the xenophobes will be what is needed to pull Britain out of the EU come the referendum on 23 June this year – which will in all probability prove disastrous for British imperialism.’ Lexiters ignore the existence of inter-imperialist divisions. Post-Brexit Britain, whether led by Johnson or a Labour government, expects to retain close relations with the US, the world’s most militaristic power. The UK is the world’s second largest arms exporter, and UK capitalists have reaped enormous profits from Middle Eastern wars, most recently in Syria and Yemen. The inability of social democracy to break with imperialism was demonstrated by the fact that Corbyn’s "democratic-socialist" Labour supported NATO and committed to increasing military spending.

It is time to call things by their name: the working class was not featured on the referendum ballot. As we will continue to make clear not only throughout this article, but through our theory and practice as applied to the tasks we face as a party, the working class will find its liberation outside of the parliamentary circus the ruling class puts on to distract us from the absence of bread.

2016-2019: the dissolution of bourgeois unity

The shock that the Leave victory sent throughout the ranks of all classes in Britain was monumental, most notably through the numerous political crises it kickstarted within the British parliamentary parties. From the moment Britain narrowly voted to leave in June 2016, up to the Tory victory in the 2019 general election, the Tory party had been riven with splits and rivalries. In 2017, prime minister Theresa May called a snap general election, aiming to strengthen her party’s hand in Brexit negotiations. But the result was a hung parliament, with the Tories losing 13 seats. A minority coalition government was negotiated, with the Conservatives gifting £1 billion to the right-wing, homophobic Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). This was also the closest Jeremy Corbyn got to power. It could be argued that the ruling class consensus regarding the amount of concessions they can still offer to the working class - in essence, barely any - regained its role as the negotiations lurched towards a conclusion.

The amount of time spent on factional conflict before a deal was even being drafted, let alone after the first Withdrawal Agreement was presented to Parliament, tells a very rich story about the scale of conflict within the ruling class. For hard-line Tory Brexiters, even the extremely limited provisions for workers’ rights presented in May’s leave deals were too much. Meanwhile, measures to keep the six occupied Irish counties within EU structures, in order to prevent a hard British border in Ireland, were rejected by the DUP. Theresa May resigned in June 2019, after a third failed attempt at getting a Brexit deal through parliament.

The Tories’ salvation came in the form of Boris Johnson  - elected leader of the Conservative Party, and thus prime minister, in July 2019. In his victory speech, he pledged to “deliver Brexit, unite the country, and defeat Jeremy Corbyn”. He faced mounting opposition from Parliament due to his primary focus on delivering a “no-deal” Brexit, which deepened the divisions within the Conservative Party. The decision of the 21 rebel Tory MPs on the 2nd of September to vote against the party whip and back the motion that lead to a law forcing a delay to Britain’s exit date - otherwise known as the Benn act - was another key event that exacerbated these divisions. The 21 MPs were consequently expelled from the party, leading to former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Amber Rudd, resigning in protest of their expulsion. She detailed in her letter that she no longer believed “leaving with a deal is the Government’s main objective” and stated “The government is expending a lot of energy to prepare for ‘no deal’ but I have not seen the same level of intensity go into our talks with the European Union”.  

Johnson’s government swiftly set about exposing the farce of bourgeois “democracy” in Britain, with the prorogation scandal. The short-lived outrage over what was shamelessly called a ‘coup’ exposes a deeper truth about the historical moment we live in: the crisis had intensified until the point where bourgeois democracy itself became an obstacle. This democracy - restricted and insufficient, being no more than a chance of the oppressed classes to elect their exploiters for the next five years - was proven to be disposable should the factional conflict within the ruling class demand it. On the 28th of August 2019, Johnson’s government was granted permission by the Queen to prorogue parliament for a five-week period, ending a few weeks before the 31st of October, when Britain was previously due to leave the European Union. This move has caused controversy in the upper echelons of bourgeois politics, as well as a backlash of outrage from citizens around the country, thousands of whom took to the streets in protest. On the 24th of September, after a much-publicised trial, the British Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s prorogation was unlawful.

What is the political significance of Johnson’s prorogation? The significance lies in Johnson’s Brexiter stance, which consequently informed his insistence on delivering Brexit on the 31st of October, whether that be with a deal or no deal. The mounting pressure this saga had placed upon Johnson lead us to his attempt to prorogue Parliament up until a few weeks shy of what was then the Brexit deadline. Practically, this would have decreased the amount of time for Parliament to discuss a Brexit deal to less than 3 weeks, thus undermining the ability of MPs to debate and ultimately stop a no-deal.

Johnson subsequently moved to expel his own MPs over their allegiance to the Benn Act, a law passed by the opposing faction of parliamentary democracy that was intended to avert a no-deal Brexit. This move laid bare the farce of "democracy" that the bourgeois class present - in his zeal to achieve Brexit, even bourgeois democracy was too much of an obstacle for him, so he lashed out at his own 'team' in anger. Johnson was always perfectly aware of the economic shockwave that Brexit would bring, and knew that it would only truly impact the working class. He, and his compatriots in the bourgeois class have only one priority: their avarice. The difference between him and the 'opposition' is merely the expression of that avarice.

Deal or no deal: the facade dissolves

Brexit has been the story of false choices. As the ‘choice’ between Leave or Remain was settled swiftly in 2016, ‘deal or no deal’ occupied much more of Britain’s political life in the past three years. And yet it remained equally false. For the working classes in Britain, the difference between Johnson’s deal and a no-deal is a matter of degrees of severity. Brexit will undoubtedly compound the existing economic crisis. Since the 2007/2008 financial crash, global trade growth has slowed massively compared to the average of 10% a year in 1949-2008: the World Trade Organisation has forecasted a 1.2% expansion for 2019. The pound reached historic lows in September 2019, and has lost 20% of its value since the 2016 EU referendum. The government has already spent billions on preparing for a no-deal outcome ahead of the first aborted Brexit deadline of March 29 and the second of October 31. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research estimate that Johnson’s present deal would cost the UK economy £70 billion over the next decade. Johnson’s new negotiated Brexit deal (yet to be ratified by parliament at the time of writing) is similar to May’s, but even more antagonistic to workers’ and environmental rights. It also contains a twist in a novel solution to the ‘Irish question’.

It must be pointed out that we can easily add 1921 to the list of years whose ghosts have been haunting Britain’s ruling class as they attempted to manoeuvre out of this crisis. The imperialist partition of Ireland, and Britain’s ongoing illegitimate occupation of the six Northern counties led to the issue of the so-called ‘Irish backstop’. This was an attempt to solve an impossible paradox: Britain must leave the customs union, Britain cannot imagine relinquishing control of the six counties, but there can be no border in Ireland. Theresa May’s proposed Irish ‘backstop’ amendment, negotiated in December 2017 and updated in November 2018, was an insurance measure to guarantee that, even if UK-EU negotiations failed, the so-called Irish border - in reality, the British border in Ireland - would remain free flowing post-Brexit. In Johnson’s new deal, Ireland’s six northern counties will remain aligned to some EU single market regulations on goods. The occupied North will also remain in the same customs area as the rest of Britain’s territory, so it will be included in future British trade deals. All necessary EU-related checks on goods will take place between Britain and the occupied six counties of Ireland. Significantly, the DUP will not be given a veto for this arrangement. Four years after Brexit, the elected representatives of the six counties would decide by simple majority whether to continue the arrangement (i.e., majorities from both nationalist and loyalist constituencies will not be required).

While, of course, we hold no sympathy for the hard-unionist homophobes in the DUP, their betrayal by the Tories could spell the possibility of a new line of struggle for Irish unity. Increased autonomy from Britain suggests a heightened possibility of future Irish reunification, and a final end to the North’s incorporation into British political structures as a subordinate entity. Demographic shifts – namely a growing Catholic population – will also play a role. In a recent poll, 51% of respondents in the north of Ireland said they would vote to join the Republic of Ireland if a referendum was held tomorrow – rising to 60% among those aged 18 to 24. Reunification would enable a much needed independent and unified path of class struggle in Ireland. In the six counties, although poverty among pensioners has fallen over the last decade, a staggering 25.12% of all children are living in poverty. There are, however, worrying rumblings from far-right loyalist groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association, and British media’s obsession with the IRA has created a dangerous amnesia about the brutality of Ulster-Protestant extremist terrorism. It is also crucial to note at this stage that Irish unity is one side of the struggle: the other is the defeat of all British imperialist influence in Ireland and the final victory of the 32-county socialist republic proclaimed in 1916.

The EU is no paragon of workers’ rights. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) prevents any EU measures to enforce minimum pay or the right to strike. The EU has done nothing to prevent the passing of dozens of anti-trade union laws in Britain. But Johnson’s proposed deal would provide the groundwork for an unprecedented strengthening of capitalists’ capacity to exploit at the expense of workers; removing legal obligations to abide by EU standards on labour rights. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research: “This deal opens the door to a decade of deregulation. It puts workers’ rights, environmental protections, and consumer standards at risk. It places the whole British economy and the NHS on the table for trade negotiations with Donald Trump.” Food standards will also be lowered. Additionally, the government’s proposal for ten ‘free ports’ post-Brexit, allowing companies to import and re-export goods outside normal tax and customs rules, would complete the transformation of Britain into an offshore haven for parasitic finance.

According to a statement by Johnson’s ally Michael Gove, a no-deal exit is also still on the table, in light of Johnson's 11-month deadline for a new trade deal. The government’s leaked Operation Yellowhammer document, officially subtitled ‘Reasonable Worst Case Planning Assumptions’, but originally described as ‘Base Case’ assumptions, outlined some likely disastrous impacts of a no-deal scenario, including widespread economic disruption due to an absence of predictability or planning; the stretching of resources at a time they are already stretched thin by winter conditions (e.g. flooding, already causing issues in swathes of northern England); medical shortages (some of which are predicted even with a negotiated deal) and fresh food shortages, as well as local fuel shortages. No wonder the document also points to the possibility of widespread rioting. None of this matters to hard Brexiters who, like many of Johnson’s friends, hope to reap enormous speculation dividends from a no-deal scenario.

As Lenin taught us to ask, who stands to gain? A deal has been the option much preferred by the predominantly EU-sympathising City; indeed, they are more likely to have switched from supporting the Tories to at least giving some consideration to the Lib Dems, who had been promising to throw Article 50 in the bin and reset the Brexit clock to before the referendum even happened. The ultimate futility of the finance sector’s wish for things to be just like they used to will no doubt become apparent with time, because, with the alliance between US and EU imperialists now starting to fall apart, London’s fence to sit on is also rapidly disintegrating. Indeed, this was the entire point of Brexit; moreover, the uncertainty around Brexit has already cost those sections of the City dependent on EU trade and investment dearly.

Meanwhile, the Brexit radicals in the Tory & Brexit parties and UKIP (at least while it still had a thin veneer of not being yet another fascistic party, which was promptly discarded in the Batten era) have been pushing the Brexit Overton window so far towards no-deal, 2016 seems almost unreal by comparison. Leaving the customs union completely was the ‘hard Brexit’ of days gone by - days we almost long for as we weigh up the choice between chlorinated chicken and no chicken at all, should food shortages become a generalised reality. However, outside of the national chauvinists earnestly hoping for British dominance to persist outside of the comfortable space between the two sides of the Atlantic, there are also those who would profit the most from a shockingly hard Brexit: financiers like Crispin Odey, also based in the City, who are hoping to gain profits from shorting the pound and betting against Britain. It is this faction that guides the political shift towards no-deal.

Indeed, while the withdrawal agreement has now passed, the Sisyphean task begins once more - the yet-to-be-negotiated trade deal looms large on the horizon, with merely months remaining to complete it. Johnson has written himself into a corner with recent law changes to prevent an extension of the transition period - given that settling merely the terms of departure took over three years, it is clear that something is amiss in Johnson’s expectation of an “epically likely” trade deal. Is this sheer bluster and bravado on the Tories’ part, or does it suggest that the choice has finally been taken, and that the British bourgeoisie are pivoting to the US sphere of influence?

What this tells us, above all else, is that there is no end to the crisis. We are rapidly heading towards the final crisis of capital, and there is no unity left to be found within any of the factions of the ruling class. It is a time for redivision and repositioning, and history teaches us that any such movements are indescribably violent for the working classes. Brexit is not in itself the real political division at play, and neither will its ‘conclusion’ spell the end of the generalised disarray experienced by the ruling classes of the world’s imperialist powers.

Conclusion: There is no working-class solution to Brexit

As we have seen, both the Brexit and Remain camps proposed anti-working-class solutions to the crisis in British imperialism. What is true is that a sizeable number of Brexiters were those workers completely abandoned by the mainstream political parties: several million who don’t usually vote but used the referendum as a protest against deteriorating social conditions. A staggering 14 million people in the UK - a fifth of the population - live in poverty. The author of a United Nations report released earlier this year stated that long-term UK government policies, some initiated by Labour, have caused “systematic immiseration”.

Brexit, which promises further deregulation, is not a solution: the prime enemy of the British working class is not the Brussels bureaucracy (though they are an enemy), but rather successive Labour and Tory leaderships. Left critics of Corbyn’s Labour have rightly noted its anti-migrant stance, and further noteworthy is Labour’s failure to tackle austerity even at the council level. Corbyn’s reformism would, in the long-term, be helpless to stem the impact of economic crisis on the working class, or counter the rise of the far right. As we outlined thoroughly in our General Election analysis, Corbynites hopelessly seek to ‘tame’ capitalism, permanently deferring the issue of true working-class control and ownership of the economy and state. A hundred years’ experience of the British Labour Party teaches us that the traditional ‘two-step model’ advocated by most self-professed ‘revolutionaries’ in Britain--that is, of electing a Labour government, then allying with the Labour “left”, and exerting ‘pressure’ to magically achieve working-class control of the state--is totally bankrupt.

The declassing of even relatively privileged white-collar workers in the wake of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, and the likelihood of a post-Brexit recession, points to the possibility – and necessity – of working-class convergence and unity. The working class, regardless of gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation/religion/disability etc., has a shared interest in ending the everyday precarity, exploitation and severe strain on mental wellbeing intrinsic to the capitalist wage-labour relation. This is not a zero-sum struggle, where a gain for one is a loss for others: battles along the way against racism, transphobia, misogyny and ableism will only temper the revolutionary edge of our movement. The working class must champion its differences, while uniting in struggle against the repressive tyranny of the racist hostile environment; the decades of income squeezes, and gutting of social security, associated with ‘austerity’; and the looming threat of environmental devastation.

*

Brexit has been many things for all classes in Britain.

The call for all communists in Britain should be clear: we must recognise Brexit as the expression of a division within the British ruling class (itself determined by wider inter-imperialist contradictions between the EU and USA); a division in which we should not be taking sides. We must expose EU imperialism, but simultaneously oppose the conspiratorial chauvinism that has characterised Lexiters’ arguments, and champion unconditional socialist internationalism at time of global far-right re-convergence. Crucially, socialists must cast aside all opportunist illusions in any reformist national path of social democracy which, as explained above, rely on dishonest and irrelevant appraisals of a post-war ‘golden era’; and acknowledge that Labour (even with Corbyn at the helm) is and always was the second capitalist party in Britain.

Analysis can and must be undertaken with a view to fully encompass all contradictions and antagonisms which drive forward the march of history, and to pick out of all the potential outcomes the one that will see the working class victorious on a world scale. For us, this means revolutionary opposition to all factions of the British bourgeoisie, be it big or small. It means preparing to defend the working class against rising imperialist rivalry which could spark a world war; participating in the formation of a new communist international against imperialism; a new united front against global fascism; and building an environmentally sound socialist revolutionary movement – for our demands, like those of James Connolly, are most moderate: we only want the Earth.

Resist imperialist war, resist the organised murder of the working class. Our day will come, but as any new world is born in agony, pushing against the dying body of the old one, it is our duty to help it emerge in the right form.

This piece was written by the RFB Theoretical Development Committee and published at Redfightback.org.

References

1. White, Nicholas J. “The Business and the Politics of Decolonization: The British Experience in the Twentieth Century.” The Economic History Review, vol. 53, no. 3, 2000, pp. 544–564.
2. Catherine Schenk, The Origins of the Eurodollar Market in London: 1955-1963, Explorations in Economic History, 1998, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 221-238
3. Arun Kundnani, The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain (Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 31.
4. Tony Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance (Verso Books, 2016)
5. Brendan McGeever and Satnam Virdee, ‘Racism, Crisis, Brexit’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41:10 (2017), p. 1808.
6. Gurminder Bhambra, “Brexit, Trump, and ‘Methodological Whiteness’: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class”, British Journal of Sociology 68/S1 (2017), p. 215.

California Values Bill SB-54: What It Is About and Why It is Important to Women

By Cherise Charleswell

California Legislation, particularly health policy and those dealing with public safety, is of great importance to the United States as a whole; and this is because California has always stood out as a leader and innovator. Other states, and even the Federal government, often look to the precedents set by California, and subsequently go on to pass the same or similar policies. As stated in a 2012 article , California sets trends in health regulation , "Some advocates tout the state as a forward-thinking vanguard in which its health and safety laws are routinely emulated by other states".

In short, California's laws shape and set standards for the rest of the country.

The California Values Bill SB-54 is often incorrectly referred to as the Sanctuary City Bill. The phrase "sanctuary city bill" is inaccurate because there is unfortunately no guarantee of sanctuary in the U.S. City officials do not have the power to outright stop the federal government from deporting people in their communities. Cities and States could merely choose to carry out a symbolic policy - which includes having local police abstain from helping federal authorities identify, detain, or deport any immigrants that entered the U.S. illegally.

What exactly is a Sanctuary City?

In 1996, the 104th U.S. Congress passed Pub. L. 104-208, also known as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act ( IIRIRA ). The IIRIRA requires local governments to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency. Despite the IIRIRA, hundreds of urban, suburban, and rural communities have resisted and outright ignored the law, instead choosing to adopt and enact sanctuary policies.

A sanctuary city is a city that limits its cooperation with the national government effort to enforce immigration law. Essentially, sanctuary cities act as a protective shield, standing in the way of federal efforts to pinpoint and deport people at random.

According to recent reports from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, California has the fourth most counties and second most cities considered to have adopted laws, policies or practices that may impede some immigration enforcement efforts. The state of Oregon has the most, with 31 counties, followed by Washington (18), Pennsylvania (16) and California (15). Massachusetts has the most cities considered to be "sanctuary," and California follows with three. However, The Los Angeles Times reported that ICE suspended the recently adopted practice of reporting cities that don't comply with federal detention efforts following error-ridden reports.

The California Values Bill entails the following:

• Prohibit state or local resources from being used to investigate, detain, detect, report or arrest persons for immigration enforcement purposes.

• Ban state and local resources from being used to facilitate the creation of a national registry based on religion.

• Prevent state agencies from collecting or sharing immigration information from individuals unless necessary to perform agency duties.

• Ensure that California schools, hospitals and courthouses remain safe and accessible to all California residents regardless of immigration status.

Why this Legislation and Protection of Sanctuary Cities Is Important to Public Health & Safety

Consider a scenario where there is a serial rapist, but his initial victims were all undocumented and thus unwilling to contact police to report the crime, and this rapist then goes on to harm others - legal citizens.

Would we now find his crime egregious? Would we now want to remove this guy off of the streets so he can no longer harm others?

The logical answer would be yes, but it does not dismiss the fact that all other subsequent rapes could have been prevented if the first victim felt safe enough to come forward. This scenario describes the importance of sanctuary cities and the California Values Bill, in terms of public health and safety. It would help to ensure that those residing in the state of California, regardless of documented status, can come forward to report crimes committed against themselves and others to law enforcement.

Why this Legislation and Protection of Sanctuary Cities Is Important to Victims of Intimate Partner Violence

For the same reasons as described as above. Furthermore, abusers use the threat of reporting undocumented victims or even members of their families who may be undocumented, as a means to (1) ensure that they conceal the abuse and not report them to the police, (2) force them to return to abusive situations. And the end result of this may be continued abuse and even death at the hands of their abusers.

A civilized society should simply not allow members of their communities to be forced to remain in abusive situations.

Why this Legislation and Protection of Sanctuary Cities Is Important to Victims of Human Sex Trafficking

For transnational victims of sex traffickers (including those who were trafficked here against their own will), the threat of deportation and/or criminalization is used as a tool to keep them silent, subservient, and in bondage. Traffickers make every effort to discourage them from contacting law enforcement, who along with other first responders are among the people who are the first to come in contact with victims of trafficking, while they are still in captivity. Having this population live in fear of exposing their undocumented status simply helps to perpetuate human trafficking.

The following testimony and passage was included in the 2009 US Department of Health's Study of HHS Programs Serving Human Trafficking Victims:

"Fear of law enforcement and fear of retaliation. Next, respondents noted that fear is a significant deterrent to foreign-born victims coming forward and being identified, specifically fear of law enforcement and fear of retaliation from the trafficker. In most cases, it was reported that victims were taught to fear law enforcement, either as a result of experiences with corrupt governments and law enforcement in their countries of origin or as a result of the traffickers telling the victims that if they are caught, law enforcement will arrest them and deport them. The trafficker paints a picture of the victim as the criminal in the eyes of law enforcement. Additionally, the trafficker uses the threat of harm against the victim and/or his or her family as a means of control and a compelling reason for the victim to remain hidden. In some cases, these fears were in fact the ultimate reality for the victim. Service providers gave several examples of clients being placed into deportation hearings after coming forward to law enforcement."

So, why do we say "victims" of sex trafficking?

Well this has to do with various factors, including the fact that the domestic entry age is 12-14 years. When one is that young, surely they are unable to consent or engage in any decision-making regarding sexual activity. Further, no one is granted their freedom simply because they have had an 18th birthday. For this reason, victims can be held in captivity and exploited for many years, well into adulthood.

And each year involved in trafficking makes it more difficult to get out. These victims are dealing with stunted development, lack of education and job skills training, drug abuse and mental illness related to the complex trauma that they have endured, and threats of violence and death for even trying to escape. There is nothing sex positive about these circumstances, and those who are the most vulnerable are people of color, LGBTQ folks (especially transgender women who engage in survival sex), low-income individuals, and of course immigrants. The "Pretty Woman" fantasy does not apply here.

One has to keep in mind that, due to socio-cultural reasons and the effects of exploitation, victims of all forms of human trafficking do not readily identify as victims.

Traffickers use the following methods to recruit:

Traffickers and/or pimps rely on various methods of recruitment, and they include:

• Psychological manipulation - making a woman/girl fall in love

• Debt

• Drugs and drug addiction

• "Gorilla" Pimping - utilization of force, kidnapping, and physical harm to achieve a victim's submission

• Working with Those in Positions of Authority - parents, guardian, older siblings, foster parent, or an authoritarian figure who forces a victim into bondage.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 actually defines severe forms of trafficking in persons as that which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery (22 U.S.C. § 7102).

What Next?

Whether you are a resident of California or not, you should contact California legislators and encourage them to support this Bill.

A list of California legislators can be found here .

For more insights and tips, see the guide H ow To Lobby The California State Legislature: A Guide To Participation .

The Working Class, the Election, and Trump: An Interview with Sean Posey

By Brenan Daniels

Given the talk of the role of the white working class in the recent election I decided to do an interview with Hampton's Urban Issues Chair Sean Posey on the white working class, seeing as how he is from such an area. In it, we discuss the media, the Democratic Party's relation to the white working class, and end with what the left can do from here.

There is constant talk of how the Democrats lost the white working class. What do you think of this narrative? It seems especially strange when the media rarely if ever brings up the working class and especially the white working class.

It's true. As the New York Times put it, "In the end, the bastions of industrial-era Democratic strength among white working-class voters fell to Mr. Trump." Basically, voters in the Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania allowed Trump to breech Clinton's "blue wall" and win the election.

But yes, it's interesting that working class voters-white working class voters, anyway-were a significant part of the media's presidential coverage for the first time in many years. The media's focus on the white working class is predominately because of Trump and the kind of campaign he chose to run.

Trump honed in on what he called "forgotten Americans," largely working class people in "flyover country," as it's often derisively called. Somehow Trump understood the enormous malaise that exists in wide swaths of America where local economies-and cultures-have disintegrated. He tapped a vein of populist rage and channeled it back into his campaign. It seemingly took everyone by surprise, especially the media and the political elite.

It's important to remember how concentrated the media is now-mostly on the coasts around Washington, New York City, Boston, places like that. So it comes as no surprise that many journalists are deeply puzzled by Trump's rise. It's far less surprising to those of us rooted in what you might call "Trump Country."

Although poorly covered by the media, white working class support buoyed Obama in 2008 and 2012. As the New York Times put it, Obama's "key support often came in the places where you would least expect it. He did better than John Kerry and Al Gore among white voters across the Northern United States, despite exit poll results to the contrary. Over all, 34 percent of Mr. Obama's voters were whites without a college degree - larger in number than black voters, Hispanic voters or well-educated whites."

There are those that argue that those who voted for Trump are all racists/sexists? Now, it would be foolish to say that racism and sexism didn't play a role, however, how true would you say these accusations are, being from an area that voted for Trump?

As you mention, it's foolish to discount the importance of race-and racial appeals-along with sexism. However, those who attempt to reduce Trump's win to matters of race and gender alone are kidding themselves. Whites actually lost a net total of 700,000 jobs in the aftermath of the Great Recession-the only racial/ethnic group to experience such losses. White workers aged 25 to 54 lost nearly 6.5 million jobs during those nine years, while Asian, Latino and black workers in the same age bracket gained millions of jobs.

And there are now almost nine million more jobs than in November 2007.

According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, during the primary, Trump won 89 of the 100 counties most affected by trade with China. And most disturbingly, life expectancy for whites, predominately in the working class, is actually declining. There's nothing similar in the West to compare it to. It's no wonder that so many found Trump's appeals, which aside from race, centered on trade, jobs, national and cultural renewal.

My home state of Ohio suffered immensely after China's entry into the WTO; that's in addition to the deindustrialization that began in the 1970s. The inability or unwillingness of the Democrats to address the pain of the "hollowed out American Heartland," as I call it, brought them disaster on November 8. Trump won HALF the union vote in Ohio. That's unprecedented for a Republican candidate.

Some would say that those who voted for Trump are getting exactly what they deserve, as they voted Republican. While understandable, isn't that line of thinking a bit of a problem seeing as how these very same people didn't really have any other options besides Republicans or neoliberal Democrats, both of which would have damned them?

Those who say that Trump voters get what they deserve are actually feeding into the Trump movement. It's important to understand where many of these people are coming from. Now, I'm not talking about the Alt-Right or the Klan elements, but I'd clearly place them in the minority. If we write off a huge chunk of the working class, how are we ever going to build a movement of working people?

In his book, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? Thomas Franks dissects the decades-long movement of the Democrats into the neoliberal camp. The Democratic Party is America's left party; it's why the party exists. Yet Democrats increasingly represent a tiny fraction of Americans, not the top 1 percent, but the top 10 percent. Unions, industrial workers, service workers, etc., have no place left to turn. Many ran to Trump's campaign. Condemning those voters as completely stupid or as a "basket of deplorables" will simply give us eight years of Donald Trump. Liberals would do much better by looking in the mirror.

There seems to be something of a stereotype of poor whites who voted for Trump as these dumb, backwards people who can't figure out their own interests, which doesn't seem true, as Washington Post reported in November that people voted for Trump as they saw him as vital to securing their economic interests . Seeing as how you are from an area that voted for Trump, how would you characterize the people there?

The Washington Post article you mentioned gets to the heart of it. Obama actually carried Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin-twice. The idea that Hillary couldn't win these states is pretty laughable. Trump is the first Republican candidate in 30 years to be really competitive here in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, and he became competitive by running a populist campaign. By contrast, Clinton couldn't even elucidate a reason why she wanted to be president, other than the fact that she wanted to be president. The deindustrialized communities of the Rust Belt voted for disruption. Why? They've clearly gained little from the status quo. Perhaps the Democrats should listen…

What are your thoughts on the attempt by Jill Stein and others to engage in a vote recount or try to pressure the electoral college to vote for Clinton?

Stein's recount effort proved to be a waste of time and resources. It represents one of several misguided efforts (such as the attempt to influence electoral voters to defy Trump) to derail the Trump Train. I see it as one more effort to avoid building a real movement for change. Say what you want about the right, but they understand how to organize and influence power. Liberals and progressives? Not so much.

There is large amounts of anger and frustration at the election of Trump, however, it seems to be being put into marching and backing other Democratic candidates, some of whom such as Bernie Sanders, have said they would work with Trump. Why do you think that people are still pushing for the same old solutions, when those clearly have not worked?

The left is badly fractured and demoralized. The failure of the Democratic Party and the failure of movements such as Occupy have left many on the left confused and bewildered. For decades, communism served as the one great unifier for many leftist movements, but communism is dead. No coherent competing philosophy has emerged to counter capitalism and neoliberalism. You can see this in Europe where nationalism and right-wing populism are on the rise. The left across the West is perplexed about how to deal with it.

What is to be done? No one seems to know at this point, and we don't have time much time left to figure it out.

From Solidarity to Trump: White Working-Class Culture in the Rust Belt

By Michael McQuarrie

Before embarking on my current career, I worked as a labor organizer, mostly in West Virginia and Ohio. In the course of doing that work, I probably did two thousand "housevisits" with people I was attempting to organize. The purpose of these meetings was to understand people's motivations and interests in order to assess how they would vote in a union recognition election (as the union president once said to the organizers: "I don't care if you lose, I care if you can't count") and assess their leadership potential for either the union's organizing committee or for management's anti-union efforts.

The work entailed a never-ending confrontation with the slow social death of a region. Proud people-who once possessed the social honor that came with hard work, supporting a family, and meeting one's civic responsibilities-were confronting the fact that their skills, their values, and their mores were not only no longer valued, but had become an object of ridicule. This is on my mind these days as I look at my RSS feed, awash as it is in horror that populist revolt, which has already claimed Brexit, Poland, and Austria, will soon claim the American presidency.

I sympathized, and I understood the people I visited. Not all of it, of course; not the racism, misogyny, or jingoism-all often coded in the language of merit and worthiness. What was refreshing about it was that it amounted to a rejection of the material calculus that dominates in so much of our political culture and in academic theories of action. In school I learned that politics was about delivering material incentives to people in order to win their support. Democrats win because they deliver the welfare state. When they vote for Republicans, people are being fundamentally stupid in a way that warrants intrepid journalistic explorations of how it is that people can have motivations they do (what's the matter with Kansas?). But of course, Republicans have much to offer too: assertive nationalism, moral righteousness, and validations of white privilege and heteronormativity, to name a few.

The working class of the Rust Belt has been in its death throes for decades. Deindustrialization first began to take hold with the "Southern Strategy" of American manufacturers who moved to the southern United States where "right to work" laws ensure an environment that is hostile to unions. But Japanese competition accelerated the problem. Then there was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who abandoned the working-class base of the party in his pursuit of free trade agreements. Companies received tax breaks for moving jobs overseas. Then there were the tax preferences for financial investment over manufacturing investment, practically guaranteeing that money would flow out of the industrial economy. In a valiant defense of their social order, workers in Youngstown and Wheeling tried to stem the tide by purchasing their plants and hoping that they would remain viable if only profit could be subordinated as a motive. The plants closed anyway.

Wages stagnated and even shrank for many. It was open season on unions not just because of deindustrialization, but aggressive union-busting. Today, the United Mine Workers, which once had 800,000 members and the fortitude to strike in the middle of World War Two, now has 60,000 members. My partner, also a former union organizer, recalls the elderly retired miner she met on a housevisit who bragged about happily paying union assessments to cover John L. Lewis's legal fees when Roosevelt had him thrown in jail. Lewis, unlike many labor leaders today, was happy to fight a losing battle in the name of a principled defense of working-class autonomy and dignity. His combativeness earned loyalty. But West Virginia workers don't have unions anymore to help them fight the decline of their communities.

With income stagnation the norm in the 1990s and 2000s, Democratic policy often focused on helping people maintain their standard of living through the possession of assets. Policy encouraged homeownership and investment in securities. Predictably, people lost their pensions or retirement savings in the tech bubble, and then lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis. The Democratic President, Barack Obama, chose to bail out bondholders while leaving homeowners to rot. He then pursued more free trade policies, expanding the number of countries that American workers would have to compete with. Cities like Cleveland had a windfall in their stock of postindustrial porn. In addition to rusting plants they now had naked and rotting houses. Suburban houses lost as much as 75% of their value in postindustrial Ohio. They were never worth anything to start with in West Virginia. Since that time, the problems of disinvesment and unemployment have been compounded by drug addiction. These are problems that, thanks to scholars like William Julius Wilson, we once associated with the urban black working class. They are now the problems of white, small-town America too. It turns out race isn't the relevant variable for explaining the crisis of the family.

Young people are rare in many of these communities. Nursing homes have replaced mines and mills. Working as a nurse's aide is a young person's work, but not in this part of the country, especially in rural areas. The nursing homes I encountered were staffed by women who went back to work when their partner lost his job as a miner or a steelworker. Back then it wasn't surprising to encounter a forty year-old nurses' aide working two jobs, "one for the bills and one for health insurance." Not only is the structural decay of towns a constant reminder of the demise of a way of life, but the decay of the people themselves is as well. It is hard to sustain optimism when the young people most imbued with the characteristic are gone.

Men lose their breadwinning jobs, making the justification for their authority in the household precarious. Women return to work. I was organizing at a moment when women carried with them an attitude towards bosses and unions that their husbands had learned in decades of struggle in their workplaces. This wasn't all good, workers had plenty of fights with their union representatives too. But it did sustain a culture of combativeness and solidarity that was possible to transfer into healthcare, with modifications, of course. Patients had a different significance for healthcare workers than rivets did for autoworkers. Healthcare workers wanted to use unions to defend their patients against the depredations of the profit motive, though they probably didn't mind the health insurance and wages they won in the name of patient care. As for the men, pride and combativeness can easily become authoritarianism and misogyny when they're dependent on a female breadwinner. A shibboleth in the local I worked for recounts ex-UMW members opposing the unionization of their wives and girlfriends: "We know that if you teach them to fight the boss at work, they'll know how to fight the boss at home," they said.

In order to stave off the indignity of dependence on their wives and girlfriends, some men would go to extreme lengths that illustrate the value of white working-class identity for people who haven't known anything else. I'll never forget the autoworker I encountered on a housevisit to his wife, a nurse at a local hospital. He liked unions and what they stood for. He told me about the notorious Lordstown Strike against GM in 1971. He participated in the torching of a motel that was housing strikebreakers. He didn't seem to regret it. When I met him he was still working as an autoworker. His UAW contract meant he could bid on jobs in other plants with seniority rights. Laid off at Lordstown, three times per week he would carpool with friends for the five-hour drive to another plant in order to maintain his income and, one had the sense, his working-class identity. Other men figured out that staying at home and maintaining their income meant a switch to healthcare and nursing, but that work didn't confer status in the same way as manufacturing work did, it was "women's work." A Youngstown-area hospital I was organizing had a huge number of male nurses (nationally, about 12% of nurses are men, in Youngstown back then it was more like 25%). Obviously for them, the money was worth more than working-class pride.

The serial destruction that has faced the Rust Belt has not occurred without a struggle. "Fighting the good fight" was extremely important to many Rust Belt workers, as if it were a matter of social honor and recognition. And fight they did, often enough anyway. Why did they fight? Was it for material gains as so many assume? Sometimes. There is always the nurse that will throw some Randian entrepreneurial freedom stuff at you (workers read too), but that particular ideology wasn't that common, despite the assumptions of economists, pundits, and union busters.

Union busters use a kit, a sort of paint-by-numbers sequence of things to talk about and do in the run-up to a recognition election. One standard item is the checks. This is a mock-up of a check with the worker's name and current weekly pay. Next to it will be a comparison check with the costs of a strike deducted. How do workers react? Certainly some were influenced. People have different economic circumstances and different reactions to them. But often enough the response was something like: "that's a small price to pay to tell the boss to fuck off." And there it is. The value that many workers place on being able to express their opinion or fight just for a chance to speak is an awful lot higher than many expect. Workers stage sit-down strikes, even though they are completely illegal and could result in the bankruptcy of the union. Transit workers did this in New York in 2006, but nursing home workers were doing it in Ohio too.

Perhaps such a fight is worth a few dollars, but surely there is an underlying material instrumentality, isn't there? Union staff often told the story of a contract fight for county mental health workers in Mentor, Ohio. The county had told the workers that if they refused to accept the contract the county would simply stop funding mental health altogether, costing all of the workers their jobs. As the votes were counted, it became clear that the workers had placed more value on their right to protest the behavior of their employer than they did on their own job. They ratified the contract, told the boss what they thought of his threats, and, presumably, headed for the unemployment line.

In 1998, I found myself on a picket line in front of a prison in Lima, Ohio. We represented the social service professionals who worked for the state: doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers. That year the union representing the non-professionals negotiated a concessionary contract with the state. We could either also accept the concessionary contract or fight it despite having very little workplace power. But our members and our president wanted to fight, not least to show everyone what cowards the other union was. Our picket had signs like: "Grandmas shouldn't have to strike." Prisoners were jokingly shouting "we want a contract too!" out their cell windows. We won. The threat wasn't because our workers were off the job, and it certainly wasn't because the guards respected the picket (though a few did). But the prisoners rioted. State troopers had to be called in to quell riots, including one at the notorious Lucasville Prison. It turns out representing nurses isn't such a weak hand after all, at least when you're striking a prison. The culture of solidarity reaches far in the Rust Belt, especially when people choose to fight the boss.

I have long thought that the workers of the Rust Belt and their communities were an underutilized political resource. Unions once did important work holding white workers in the Democratic coalition, despite the fact that Democrats have been ignoring them for three decades. But unions have mostly been destroyed in the Rust Belt. Michigan, the birthplace of the UAW and Industrial Unionism, became a Right to Work state two years ago, joining Wisconsin and soon to be followed by West Virginia. States which once had 40% of their workforces represented by unions now have 10-11%. As a result, the populist outrage of the white working class is available to both the Right and the Left. Over the years various Democratic candidates, Tom Harkin, John Edwards, and Bernie Sanders among them, have attempted to recapture white workers for the Democratic Party and, in the process, reorient the Party away from its deference to finance capital. These efforts have failed. The Democratic coalition is a party of free trade, finance, and tech with a diverse base recruited on the basis of social liberalism and fluency with identity politics. This is not a party of the working class and is especially not a party of the white working class.

Trump has stepped into this political vacuum and it has served him well, enabling him to trounce establishment and Tea Party Republicans in the primaries. Trump seems to be furious at the establishment politicians that long ago wrote off the Rust Belt. He is combative, he doesn't defer to the political correctness that is sensitive to the feelings of everyone other than the white poor and working class. Trump's performance emphasizes action as much as words and ideas, which exasperates the educated, but appeals to Rust Belt workers. Ideas and rational consistency are not, academic dispositions aside, particularly important to people without Ph.Ds. Trump performs the combativeness of Rust Belt culture, the lack of deference to odds or the focus-grouped lowest common denominator. He seems as lost playing the politically-coded game of pandering and recognition that people in Portsmouth, Ohio, are. He is a manifestation of the "fuck you" id of the Rust Belt that leads workers to fight their bosses even when they will probably lose. And sure, it isn't exactly about the working class, but if Trump has been consistent on any issue, it has been trade. He promises to rip up the trade agreements that forced workers to make a choice between their dignity and their jobs, and that forced them onto an unfair playing field against workers with government health insurance or lower housing and food costs. He promises to protect them from immigrants that are somehow simultaneously competing for their jobs and sucking state coffers dry.

Hillary Clinton had a word for the Rust Belt in her convention speech, just like she did for every other constituency in the Democratic coalition. She pointed out that Donald Trump's merchandise is made overseas. My first thought was that it was a good opener, but that was it. No policy, no recognition, just "That guy is a liar". Now, granted, Rust Belt workers do get pissed off about stuff like that. For years the draw for the Central Labor Council annual picnic in Dayton, Ohio, was the destruction of a Japanese car with a wrecking ball. Watching a crane destroy a perfectly good automobile is exciting, but it's downright cathartic when that car represents an existential threat to your existence and an offense to your patriotism. But I fully expect that Rust Belt voters, many of whom are pretty familiar with the dynamics of these issues (thanks unions!) would hear that and think: "ok, she's taking us for suckers… again". Just because that stuff worked with patrician Romney (and it did) in no way means that it will work with combative, disrespectful, trade-deal trashing, and immigrant-deporting Trump. Clinton's move was calculated and condescending. She volunteered for an authenticity fight with Donald Trump, a fight she will lose.

Trump has nailed down populism for the Right. Sanders made a bid to win it back for the Left, but no one named Obama or Clinton is going to win it back for Democrats. Now pundits and Trump's campaign are plotting a path to the presidency through the Rust Belt. Trump's (former) campaign manager has said that victory depends upon winning Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania . Trump has talked about extending the map to Michigan and Wisconsin which, after all, are enthusiastic enough about Republicans to vote them into power in every branch of government and watch them pass Right to Work laws and create punitive social welfare regimes. The electoral map might be realigning to situate Democrats as the representatives of the New Economy and Republicans as the champions of Smokestack industries and their workers. Trump has made it clear that this potential political opposition is real.

But the anxiety and the worry is misplaced. There is no Brexit majority here. The path through the Rust Belt is actually a cul-de-sac, not because Trump lacks appeal with white workers, but because there are so few of them left. Cities aren't filled with factories and working-class neighborhoods anymore; they're filled with artist studios, tech startups, coffee bars, and criminalized hyper-ghettos. Latinos have been moving to Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, but they sure aren't voting for Trump. White people have been leaving many of these states which has increased the minority share of potential voters. Trump polled at 0% among African-Americans in Ohio during the Republican Convention. The Rust Belt economy has been diversifying. Unemployment in Ohio and Pennsylvania has mostly been below the national average since the financial crisis. Ann Arbor, Madison, Grand Rapids, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati, Lansing and others have been increasing in importance. These towns are hubs for tech and pharmaceutical startups, advanced manufacturing, and software engineering. They have concentrations of educated people who are less likely to vote for Trump.

The work of economic transformation has already been done in the Rust Belt and the demographic results are real. Trump missed the window for exploiting the alienation of the Rust Belt as a path to national office. White workers were angrier, more numerous, more combative, and more motivated twenty years ago when they were smashing Japanese cars at picnics. But back then unions had more capacity to hold white workers in the Democratic coalition. Unmoored from unions, racism and terrorism can be exploited to harvest white votes. Trump's combativeness is the ideal vehicle for effective exploitation, but the harvest is getting smaller every year. Trump can tap into the dispositions of the white working class, and speak to the issues of Rust Belt workers, but it is doubtful that he can overcome the demographically- and economically-determined fact of their declining relevance.

This was originally published at New Politics .

Michael McQuarrie is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a labor organizer in West Virginia, Ohio, and New York and as a community organizer in the South Bronx.