Time Is Accelerating And Overdetermined, Keep Your Eyes On The Prize

By Carl Davidson

LeftLinks Weekly, Oct 18, 2024

Our review of the week has an amazing array of tragedies, farces, and other dramatic events. As Election Day approaches, time accelerates. To borrow from Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Start with Israel’s confirmation of its having killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, in Gaza. Vice President Kamala Harris and many others voiced hopes for an immediate ceasefire, aid to Gazans, respect for Palestinians and a ‘peace process.’

We agree with the sentiment and have been demanding it for some time. But don’t hold your breath. The longtime backhanded partner of Hamas, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and his Likud party are on a roll. Bibi has also decimated the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon and killed the top Iranian military leader with an airstrike in Iraq last April. Now we see the gallows humor is Israel’s frequent claim that has no one with which it can negotiate any settlement.

While not our main point, this raises the underlying question of the wisdom of Sinwar’s ‘Flood’ incursion into Israel back in October 2023, killing 1200 Israelis and taking 230 hostages. Given the price paid in 42,000 Gazans dead, and the ongoing genocidal leveling of Gaza, and now the more strategic weakening of all the allies of Hamas in the region, it’s a matter worth pondering, especially for any of those who praised Hamas as ‘the leader of the resistance.’

To be sure, we are making no defense of Israel or its bipartisan U.S. backers. We would urge two things. First, pay attention only to what Israel does, not what it says, especially under the Likkud. What it is doing is carrying out what we can call ‘the Andrew Jackson solution of the Trail of Tears,’ the killing or mass transfer of Palestinians out of Palestine. That ‘transfer’ is also elastic. There is a reason Israel has no defined borders. The Likkud certainly has in mind as the IDF military actions draw new ‘borders’ that expand into a ‘Greater Israel’ that includes more of Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt’s Sinai. Thus our second key point is simple. If you want change in Israel, cut off the money. All of it. Senator Bernie Sanders has started on this with his new measure in the Senate to cut Israel's military funds. Support it.

Other events of the week included the bizarre and the dynamic. On the bizarre, we have never seen Donald Trump as one playing with a full deck. From the start. he openly displayed a profound narcissism warping any social and objective sense of reality. Obviously, having a strong sense of oneself is a requirement for anyone running for president. However, Trump’s sense of self is rooted in weakness, not strength. It’s displayed in his compulsive obsession with crowd sizes, among others. Now, with this week’s cancelations of major interviews and 30 minutes swaying to the music onstage as a Q&A substitute, we are justified in seeing a mental decline. 

Over decades Trump armored his character structure with another obsession, infatuation with powerful autocrats, especially Russia’s Putin and Hungary’s Orban. In the past year, his speeches also took more and more vile phrases from the propaganda of Hitler and Mussolini, along with a defense of the former Confederate States of America and their modern advocates. Retired General Mark Milley, Trump’s former Joint Chiefs of Staff, summed him up as ‘dangerous’ and ‘fascist to the core.’

Milley’s poignant remark bring us to a related dynamic factor. Readers of LeftLinks know that we have been making the case for Trump and his party as an immediate and growing fascist danger since our beginning. Together with Bill Fletcher and Jerry Harris, we also initiated a deep study of rightwing populism and ‘Christian’ nationalism even earlier. At first, we had few allies within the left on the matter, and certainly none in the upper political class. Eventually, growing numbers in the media and a few in Congress would use ‘autocratic’ as a bland alternative. Bit by bit, however, we began to see the ‘F-Word’ being used by wiser elements. But this week, with General Milley’s permission slip, the floodgates are open, Nearly everyone outside the Trump silo has discovered the clear and present fascist danger. 

No matter. Latecomers and early birds are both welcome. Today our critics on the matter have been largely reduced to a handful of prisoners of old Trotskyist dogma. Now we have a far more interesting and urgent fight: what is the role of the left in the common anti-MAGA project? What good stands might AOC’s Justice Democrats take?

In a backhanded way, we can take several cues from Kamala’s speeches. First, as an alternative to her embrace of the ill-fated and long-standing unconditional U.S. alliance with Israel in the Middle East, we should demand recognition and compliance with all UN resolutions of the matter reaching back to 1967, along with compliance with the International Criminal Court’s findings and directives. 

Second, Harris’s ‘Opportunity Economy,’ which includes a strong emphasis for ‘Black capitalism’ in African American communities (she does not use this term) has some positive aspects. These include entrepreneurial solutions in all distressed areas, along with her pledges of assistance for families in growing intergenerational wealth.

We should argue that her Opportunity Economy is too fragmented and narrow. On livelihoods, we need to raise the floor for all, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, roughly $20 an hour. We need Medicare for All, not the piecemeal improvement of Obamacare. To improve her proposals, we need to pair them with a Solidarity Economy, which would include state public banks (like the Bank of North Dakota), widespread worker-owned cooperatives, inclusive high-road manufacturing projects, and other forms of local participatory ownership and planning.

Third, especially in these last weeks, we see Harris and some other Democrats arguing for a rebirth of the traditional Republican Party. This is off base. It’s one thing to welcome anti-Trump GOPers into the common project to defeat MAGA. It’s quite another to assist in conservative party-building. That’s their task, not the task of Democrats. But for our part, along with keeping focused on the main task, we should be doing some party-building of our own, especially the aforementioned Justice Democrats and their allies at the base, like the Working Families Party and Progressive Democrats of America, along with other local IPOs.  

Finally, in times of insurgency and upheaval like today, hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened organizers against the fascist danger will be looking for something more, something smarter and stronger, even if initially smaller. In short, we need a revolutionary organization of socialism ‘with American characteristics,’ one seeking to unite other socialists in building a new instrument greater than the sum of its parts. Seek them out where you are, and join them.