hey, leftists

Let’s get out of our heads for a moment and look out the window:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/us/politics/biden-trump-times-siena-poll.html

What’s noticeable is that the working class is not very interested in the Marxist paradigm.

An alarming number of wage-earning folks are voting for the likes of Trump, Orban, Wilders, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Netanyahu, Meloni, the German AfD, etc.

Do we leftists really care about making an impact in regard to the deteriorating human condition? Can we acknowledge that it’s now 176 years (seven generations) since the publication of the Communist Manifesto and a barely significant percentage of wage-earning Americans support Marxism while a very significant percentage support what’s called “MAGA” in this country but is reflective of a worldwide phenomenon?

Do we really care about making an impact in regard to the deteriorating human condition? For the good of the socialist vision … can we squarely face what’s really going on and dare to re-think our premises?

The working class is expressing a deepening sensibility that modernity has failed them.

Marxism surely was a current of modernity … the idea of progress and development; the idea that the working-class-as-a-collective-agency can aspire to and then become the ruling class; the idea that under the right direction — of a socialist government or of workers councils or of networks of municipal assemblies — vast, opaque webs of human labor and organization, complex institutional infrastructures and mechanized networks could be democratically and rationally managed. Let’s look out the window. Can we notice that that’s not happening?

There’s a certain irony that many common folks can see the truth of “what’s going on” but many Marxists can’t. What’s going on is that modernity, whether privatized or socialized, is failing the vast majority of people. Socialist planning hasn’t worked. Social democracy has been tried now for a hundred years. Where it has somewhat succeeded it rests on a socio-economic foundation of over-exploitation of off-shored cheap labor and over-exploitation of natural resources. Yet it hasn’t succeeded all so much, anyway. Social democracy has become an expression of liberalism. The electorates get dissatisfied with the conservatives and vote in the liberals. Then the electorates get dissatisfied with the liberals and vote in the conservatives. With increasing dissatisfaction they express disgust with both status quo alternatives and with the whole modern enterprise, the whole direction things have been going in. They start turning to the iconoclasts: MAGA, etc.

It’s reactionary. It represents a reaction of despair. Eventually they will become refuseniks. A proportion of the younger generation had that sensibility during the 1960s and consciously identified as refuseniks. I was among them. We quickly found out that it’s not so easy or straightforward to build the new society within the shell of the old. Hopefully we’ve gained perspective about the process. We came to recognize that the problems have been a long time coming. The civilizational trajectories have enormous momentum. While working to de-fang the utterly ruinous capitalist system ecosocialists should be fostering the localist efforts to build the new society: decentralized and bioregional. It will be a chastened society in regard to industrial modernity. Enough of those delusions already. All of us, as people, should set about overcoming the despair, re-creating what Erich Fromm (who advocated a communitarian form of socialism) called “the sane society” … employing sustainable technologies and local participatory democracy … cultivating the direct and true satisfactions of revitalized communities.