A Dilemma Far Simpler Than Doctrine
By now we should know about the Bernie Sanders/ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "Fighting Oligarchy" rallies. People are clearly desperate, and the notion of two members of the political class, Congress, claiming to "fight oligarchy" would seem to be an indicator of that desperation. Note that I am not saying that there is anything wrong with members of Congress holding rallies. It's probably better on balance than unrestrained rule of the public mind by the mainstream media. We don't want CNN and FOX deciding our world. (Of course, if Trump were to hold a rally tomorrow, I can imagine it not working out so well. Economic ruin doesn't sell even if it's backed up by good-sounding lies.)
But yeah, what we really want for the present-day USA is a regime of dual power, more or less what the Russians had after the February Revolution, and this is something Bernie and AOC cannot deliver. The best Bernie and AOC can deliver is maybe a slim Democratic majority in one house of Congress in twenty months. It's so tough to think of the long term when none of your intimate friends are doing it.
At any rate, we have a ray of sunshine here from a traditional Marxist, courtesy of PopularResistance.org:
Exposing The Bernie/AOC ‘Fight Oligarchy’ Tour De Farce
What I liked most about this piece is the author's observation that Sanders and AOC are not really fighting oligarchy. I tried to get one of the standard American bourgeois "leftists" on Facebook to admit this fact, and the end-result of our discussion was that said "leftist" issued up 1) a defense of Martin Luther King Jr. as a "vote Blue no matter who" voter and 2) the usual "but the Republicans are worse!" complaint. Perhaps there was some justification of the second premise. But neither of these sallies suggested that said standard American bourgeois "leftist" was the least bit interested in fighting oligarchy.
Perhaps the problem with the Bernie/ AOC rallies is that their promoters have dishonestly set the bar too high. They should be called the "maybe we'll get a house of Congress back in awhile" rallies. At any rate, the author of Exposing The Bernie/AOC ‘Fight Oligarchy’ Tour De Farce goes on to make this elaborate assertion that Bernie and AOC are the Karl Kautsky of our times, with explicit reference to Lenin's critique of Kautsky.
The history related in "Exposing The Bernie/AOC ‘Fight Oligarchy’ Tour De Farce" is incomplete. Lenin may have critiqued Kautsky, but so also did Rosa Luxemburg, and Luxemburg most interestingly also critiqued Lenin. So there's no holy truth to be found in this stuff, no "true tenets of Marxism" to be found in the world. Karl Kautsky was a good friend of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's BFF, whom Engels trusted to carry the banner of "Marxism." He, Kautsky, overstated the case for Marx as someone who had a system which covered everything. _This_ critique of Kautsky's thinking is laid out in Sven-Eric Liedman's biography of Marx, "A World to Win." At any rate, what remains out of all of this history is the revolutionary task-at-hand, and the ongoing inquiry into how the revolution is to be done.
At any rate, if we are to measure intellectual caliber, neither Bernie nor AOC hold the dimmest of candles to Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, or for that matter any of the other revolutionaries of the early 20th century. This is true even though they failed and even though the theories of these people appear obsolete today, and though the whole conceptual apparatus, granting Luxemburg a pass, was debunked by Cornelius Castoriadis in his essay "The Pulverization of Marxism-Leninism" thirty-four years ago. But this is not surprising. Today's American politics is a politics of small, petty thinkers held aloft by an enormous apparatus of power. In this regard, the revolutionary spirit of today, as opposed to the spirit of a hundred years ago, might be best carried by a far simpler doctrine than the Marxisms of that time. Here is what I would suggest: to resist oligarchy, we must actually resist oligarchy, rather than merely pretending to do so. There it is, folks! A doctrine for our times. It's about as much as we want liberal Democrats to think.
We are too busy pretending that America is a democracy and that we have some sort of magical power over the proceedings of its political class when what we really ought to be doing is improving the quality of our friendships. Workers Strike Back looks like a friend maybe. At any rate, we can do better than Bernie Sanders, for instance, whose imaginary "good friend" was Joe Biden. Wish us luck.
Comments
Great Post!
A huge percentage of the "news," regardless of platform, is evaluating "public opinion." Trump's poll ratings are reported loudly on Fox and the rest of wingnut media when they "demonstrate" growing "support" for him. Identical chortling comes from CNN and MSNBC when the numbers move the other way. This of course reinforces the base line presumption that voting decides everything.
The primary tool of the Oligarchy is that hilarious presumption.
Clarity on this is a predicate for any serious effort to resist the status quo.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Here's some recent Trump polling:
Trump Gets Dire Warning About Tanking Approval Poll Numbers
Not that it matters. Resistance must actually resist.
At any rate, thank you. The reason I wrote it this way is because the people I saw commenting on all this were behaving like know-it-alls. My response was: really? Tell us about it.
"The thing that's so striking is this tremendous failure of imagination in the West." -- Douglas MacGregor
Norman Soloman recognizes the Fighting Oligarchy rallies.
It's in Scheerpost:
What’s Preventing a United Front Against the Trump Regime?
Here is the important paragraph:
All of this is fine and good. But, of course, Solomon, like the rest of them, engages labyrinthine complexities because his mind is not focused. Here's how he continues:
Dude, your fantasy agenda has yet to take the first step, and you're out there proclaiming a "dialectical approach." Let's go back to my initial premise. To resist oligarchy, we must actually resist oligarchy, rather than merely pretending to do so. Ask yourself this question: How would we do this?
"The thing that's so striking is this tremendous failure of imagination in the West." -- Douglas MacGregor
What will it take?
A shooting war in our streets.
Too many MAGA types are loving life, watching the libs get owned. 20% of the people love Trump, 20% hate him, 59% simply don't give a shit- and won't, until the chance of getting dead in their own home gets likely enough to wake them up.
Voting won't fix it, astroturfed protests won't fix it, the courts won't fix it. The media will continue to keep the general population anethesized, at the the behest of the monied Owners. Nothing will fix it, except for large-scale bloodshed. The country is at its end. Sorry if that causes any inconvenience.
https://archive.ph/cmeIX
https://archive.ph/fVNUH
And, on edit- this is an amusing piece, food for thought, and perhaps a bit less doom-and-gloom. Naive, but less doom-and-gloom. Worth a read.
https://archive.ph/xUDpF
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
We'll see.
No disagreement about your prognostication. Just saying that I don't plan on surrendering without putting up some sort of resistance. And there is no rational point in giving up if they are going to screw us over any way.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Some random thoughts. Are oligarchs (de)centralized?
It seems to me that there is no hierarchical central group of oligarchs. Not like something out of an old fashioned mafia movie. Which ones are the important ones to work on? Maybe we should think not of oligarchs but take as our model of the ruling elites and classes the idea of Afghan warlords. Each with their own sphere of corruption and control.
We think of oligarchs are someone like Bezos, or the Facebook guys. But there are other warlords. Like the people who stole the monies for CA high speed rail. McKenzie being one of them. How did Oregon spend half a billion and had no functioning online interface for Obamacare. Billions spent on the homeless in CA with apparently no results. Was just watching some independent journalist in Boston area on the interlocking and highly paid administrators of migrant shelters, food contracts, etc. These people while not as wealthy a few oligarchs still wield huge amounts of money and thus power.
Just a word about DOGE. For years the anti-imperialist Left was exposing USAID as a CIA and deep state cut out. Of course the powerful took no heed, as well, they were getting paid off by the warlords around this agency. What DOGE did was remove the funding for these warlords. One result is the color revolution organizations organized around the world are going down the proverbial drain. Democratic party warlords also are losing their funds and losing their personal power as they got it from corruption. It is absolutely stunning how many phony NGOs have been funded by our government. And taking away our choices as a free people. Those people are all or were warlords and without retiring them out somehow, they will be a powerful force against the interests of citizens.
Are they connected to any of these agencies?
the World Economic Forum
the Trilateral Commission
the Council on Foreign Relations
??
And then you have the alphabet agencies, the Bohemian Grove, the Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale, the Bilderberg Group, and so on. More generally you have the Pentagon, the Fortune 500 (or maybe we could just say the people identified in Peter Phillips' Giants), the Ivy League and its feeder prep schools, the foundations, the think tanks, the mass media.
Sure, the oligarchy is decentralized. But it is identifiable! And it can be fought, if only the nice liberals with their big egos could commit some small portion of their brains to figuring out how they could actually fight it instead of merely pretending to do so, after, for instance, attending Bernie/ AOC rallies.
PS what has DOGE actually done? Trump is so much PR bullsh^t I don't know where to begin.
"The thing that's so striking is this tremendous failure of imagination in the West." -- Douglas MacGregor
the allowed exposure
to the evils of systemic corruption
may be one thing but the reactions
are all over the map for distraction purposes?
Zionism is a social disease
warlords is a good analogy to the us system
of mis-governance
them that's got govern
the ones that not
think you are correct in that
non-hierarchical make up
the stupids are very easily led astray
with the compounding of power
Zionism is a social disease
I like the Sanders/AOC show more than not
If Sanders were made king with authority to do any and everything he wanted I'd be pretty happy on the economic front. Perfect? No. Consistently pretty good, yup. AOC I'm a lot less impressed with.
I don't think either of them are resonating with the working class. Sure some union reps show up, just because the kittens are born in the oven doesn't make them biscuits.
List of some oligarchs who are the biggest donors to AIPAC
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/03/18/744658/bankrolling-genocide-big...
1. Jan Koum
2. Miriam Adelson
3. Jonathon Jacobson
4. Bernard Marcus and family
5. David Zalik
6. Paul Singer
7. Haim Saban
8. Helaine Lerner
These are some of the people both Trump and everyone in Congress except Thomas Massie are working for. If Elon Musk is the
TinLithium Woodsman, these folks are collectively the real-life Wizard of Oz, the little man behind the curtain controlling the smoke and mirrors, the lawsuits and wars, the words that pour forth from each larger-than-life figure’s mouth.The oligarchy, to be sure, knows how to fight us.
Do we know how to fight back?
"The thing that's so striking is this tremendous failure of imagination in the West." -- Douglas MacGregor
The boycott of particular products or services
would be a decisive tool if upwards of 50 million people can hold together for months on end.
The hardest part is picking a strategic target that all our folks will refuse to buy from. Organizing is tedious work and our country has never seen that kind of organized agitation.
Just putting one enterprise out of business does not cut the mustard. We have to be able to say with 50 million unified voices: "Who wants to be next?" When your opponents realize that you can and will knock the shit out of any megabuck corporation, they will find a away to work things out with you.
If this shit were easy, we'd be fat and sassy and happy right now.
There are other ways of throwing sand in the gears apart from and/or in addition to boycotting. The trick is getting tens of millions of people to join in the fun.
It is so much easier to vote.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.