Yes, I know this is six days old -- I have been waiting for c99% to speed up a bit. At any rate, Wolff underestimates the size of the hole in which the American public has dug itself. He wants a party "of the Left," but all the US Left really does in the US today, outside of the campaigns of Jill Stein and Butch Ware, is "hey let's support something we think sounds good," and its most productive component until 2024 has been the Green Party, a great place for ballot status but, sadly, a party of outcasts (while the rest of America oh-so-slowly figures out that Gavin Newsom is not its savior).

Its least productive component, on the other hand, has been stuff like the Ukraine Solidarity Network, the US Left's most well-publicized intervention into a bloody intra-capitalist war on the losing side. (One pauses to think that "South Vietnam" was also the losing side, and for a similar reason: "their guys" wanted it more than "our guys.") At this point the best thing that could be done for the people of Ukraine would be if the nation-state of Ukraine would simply declare itself null and void, leaving the Russians to square off against the Azov Brigade and other die-hards. The concept of revolutionary defeatism has an old lineage: for those who can't stomach reading Lenin there is Wikipedia. I'm imagining the ghost of John Lennon singing in chorus with the Biden administration's Ukraine unit: "imagine there's no Russia"... no, wait, that's not how the song goes, not at all.

So, instead of a new party of the Left, here's an alternate suggestion, one among many: how about a No Ripoffs Party? Such a party would take its name from a passage in Riley and Brenner's piece in NLR:

This new electoral structure is related to the rise of a new regime of accumulation: let us call it political capitalism. Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’.These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s CARES Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and CHIPS Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act.All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.

It would dedicate itself, first off, toward creating an intellectual (or academic, if you wish) infrastructure (think tanks and so on) dedicated to the notion that the government can do something to benefit ordinary people without prior enrichment of the already-rich. Or, more simply, toward an envisioning of the end of the ripoff. The candidates can come later. Having an infrastructure in place beforehand should make for an easier dismissal of all of the nonsense about "spoilers."

Of course, if you really want to start at the beginning, there's always one of the signs I waived at the crowd in this year's local Fourth of July parade:

It starts when individuals take responsibility for their own politics rather than offering the talking point that the Democrats or Republicans made them do it. Can Americans do this? Maybe not. You got another way through?