On the occasion of the death of "the leading left communist in the United States"

Their left communism and ours: in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, an individual sometimes described as “the leading left communist in the United States” initiated a series of meetings of some supposed ultra-left Marxists in Berkeley. I took part. My understanding was that we would act fast, come up with an analysis of the 9/11 events, and make our analysis public in a high-profile way. 9/11 was the first major battle of the twenty-first century, it was the first time that US government-style mass civilian casualty attacks had been inflicted on civilians in the US, and it was a horrific consequence of decades of malignant antics by the United States in Afghanistan. My memory is that the normally voluble San Francisco Bay Area protest ghetto was uniformly and uncharacteristically silent - people were understandably too floored to say anything. It was a unique moment in history - and it was a unique historical opportunity.

Politics is about communication. It was time to communicate. My preferred low-budget mass communications method takes the form of posters on walls - this may be a function of the limits of my imagination but posters had been very effective in the recent past. With this in mind I acquired a paperback book with a color image of Ronald Reagan and his jack-o’-lantern grin on its cover. A recent cover of Time or Newsweek had a photo-shopped image of both World Trade Center towers going up in explosive flames, and my thought was to do 11 x 17-inch color posters of Reagan’s smiling visage in front of the burning and collapsing buildings, captioned in big yellow letters with red lines around them: ‘If you want to find the man responsible for 9/11, go to Bel Air and wake him from his nap!’ - highlighting the fact that the 9/11 attacks were blowback from Reagan and Jimmy Carter’s efforts to get armed Islamic fundamentalism up and running in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s. It was just a gesture and since it said nothing about capitalist exploitation and working-class self-activity it was not terribly radical, but it was simple, it could be done quickly, and it was very much to the point. If anyone had come up with anything better we could have gone with that instead. Time was of the essence in this matter - we had to act fast.

The group met and talked. We talked and met. In compulsively inadequate ultra-left Marxist style we met and talked some more. Nothing happened. Grad student pedantry and incapacity were in a neck-and-neck race here. Our talk had drifted to plans for a Capital reading group by the time I stopped attending the meetings; apparently those who can, do, and those who can’t form Capital reading groups. Even this inwardly directed proposal went nowhere. The group folded. A unique historical moment had come and gone and with it a significant opportunity was squandered. This failure to act is consistent with all experiences I have ever had with people who like to call themselves ultra-left Marxists in the US going back to the beginning of the Reagan era.

In my encounters with “the leading left communist in the United States” I was struck less by this individual’s voluminous abstract erudition than I was by his complete lack of the practical political smarts that we are forced to develop when we assert unusual ideas in the complex world outside of our comfort zone. This fellow had been a left communist for 30-plus years and all he had to show for it was a collection of his writings that are equally unreadable in seven languages on a website. In the 20-plus years since our 9/11 group’s belly button fingering sessions he has continued to dabble in his hobby in the form of a website called Insurgent Notes, whose identity with a nebulous “revolutionary left,” clarion calls for “building a radical left in the age of Trump” and paucity of accounts of sustained real-world action add up to a politics of Lite Rock Trotskyism. A few fiery ultra-left “positions” on unions, nationalism and the Bolsheviks after Brest-Litovsk don’t elevate Insurgent Notes out of and away from the harmless left fringe of academia. These putative ultra-leftists don’t even appear to be decisively opposed to electoral politics, in the country that leads the industrialized world in mass abstention from voting and where mass abstention is in effect the number one vote-getter in every Presidential election.

Revolutionary extremism is what it does: if it does nothing, it is nothing. It must be readily visible in the larger society around us. A measure of its credibility is that it will be taken seriously by friend and foe alike. Ultra-left Marxism is supposedly an intransigent form of revolutionary analysis - and ongoing collective public action - focused on class conflict in advanced capitalist societies. Outside of the United States it sometimes is. The efforts of somewhat related to ultra-left Marxism workers’ inquiry tendencies like Wildcat in Germany, people associated with them in China and India, and comrades I’ve met in Europe and South America are the real deal. But in the United States ultra-left Marxism only attracts café militants who should have become tenured professors and who missed their life’s true calling and hobbyists who expect the world to accommodate their timidity and incapacity. There are the Planck-scale expression of a global archipelago of socially maladroit pedants who lack the vision and nerve to establish a readily visible public presence for what they claim to be about.

Many Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist militants I have known, in particular Trotskyists, offer a striking contrast to this. Members of the “smash-ist-and-fascist,” Stalinist group Progressive Labor and militants of various Trot organizations often get jobs in strategic sectors, as transit system operators, longshore or hospital employees, and spend decades asserting their perspectives among co-workers. They structure their lives around the fight for what they believe in. Their politics are no good, but the long-term personal commitment they display in fighting for their convictions is superb. Far from being “alienated” this “militant attitude” is a wholly admirable and necessary thing. There is no reason that people with better politics than Stalinism and Trotskyism can’t do this as well.

People attracted to ultra-left Marxism in the contemporary United States are incapable of asserting what they claim to be about outside of airless small spaces. Ultra-left Marxist fanboys will hold a meeting, at which they may decide to hold another meeting, and if by that point they haven’t completely run out of energy they may courageously decide to hold another meeting. They and their passively held opinions add up to nothing.

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…”

A vast gulf separates passive spectators from the implacable minority who are hell-bent on imposing their will on the world. What we need requires commitment. It takes nerve. It means taking risks. It requires patience. It takes time. It means trying something new because there is no credible opposition now and new measures are required to build one. People who holler about boredom are bores. Mankind does not seek entertainment - only the American does. The revolutionary struggle can be exhilarating. It can bring us companionship, laughs and joy - but these are fleeting collateral benefits of what must for the most part be ardent effort in the face of setbacks. Thomas Mann defines a fanatic as an individual who, on recognizing the impossibility of his cause, redoubles his efforts. Mann may have a point. An ability to dust yourself off and keep going in the face of endless setbacks may also be the hallmark of a disinterested public spirit; you do what you do not for kicks or to accrue subcultural capital but because you know it must be done.