Category: Class (Page 1 of 24)

On an episode of Revolutionary Left Radio, Alyson and Breht review in detail the text of Marx’s 18th Brumaire.

Along the way, they point to one of Marx’s most famous quotes: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

The quote references the transition in French politics from Napoleon Bonaparte to Louis Bonaparte. But we need not concern ourselves with the details here. Suffice it to say that Napoleon stood in for tragedy – the Napoleonic Wars killed millions – and Louis for farce, as his version of the French Empire paled in comparison to the first.

I find something like this on parts of the sectarian left. Some leftists – some from democratic centralism, some Marxism-Leninism, et al. – look to the historical work of leftist figures for lessons they rigidly apply to the modern world. It’s as though Lenin (or Kautsky, or Engels) speak directly to our time, giving us the secret blueprint for how to finally build the U.S. left into a force ready to take power.

Continue reading

In a recent issue of Catalyst, William Avilés and Earlen Gutierrez take up a classic leftist topic. But it’s one that seems to have left the stage decades ago. In short, should the left organize soldiers?

The question left the stage, in part, because of a shift in the base and cultural politics of the left. As the socialist left turned away from organizing, it lost the connections with working class Americans it had built as recently as the 1950s and 1960s. And since the progressives were always grounded in a relatively wealthy and highly educated base, they never had much contact with the sorts of people who become soldiers.

So, the left removed itself from the stage. And the progressives moved in a different direction.

But let’s return to the question. I think it can bring a certain focus.

Continue reading

The contemporary left repeatedly tries to solve all the world’s problems through linguistic idealism. It’s one of the more discouraging aspects of left politics today. And almost anyone with organizing experience born before 1985 knows we can’t ‘language’ our way to a socialist world.

In the DSA, for instance, we see repeated appeals to the ‘multiracial working class‘ as a target base. And in activist spaces across the progressive and left worlds, we see pronoun introductions and attempts to get people’s pronouns right as an end in itself, rather than a means to open up further work.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with either of these things, in the abstract. We should target a working class across base racial lines. And, of course, we should get people’s pronouns right. These count as very basic background things we should do.

However, the left adopts a bizarre sort of linguistic idealism by treating these things as an end, rather than as a means. We slide into the idea that by getting the language right, we magically also fix the world.

But you don’t build a multiracial working class base just by saying you’re doing it. You build it by getting out into communities, talking with people, and inviting them to join you.

And that’s where most activists just haven’t succeeded.

Image Source