I think most leftists can understand that our crucial task is to build popular support , which we lack, for a mass movement based on class solidarity. But here's a radical notion that American leftists often forget: That movement has to be built with the working-class we have, not the one we wish for. Which means the axis of solidarity around which it's built has to be material interest, not like-mindedness.
For socialists, solidarity is not a matter of prior agreement. You don't have to agree with me for me to defend your interests.
This is bedrock socialism, historical materialist as opposed to idealist politics, communism 101: to demonstrate your support of people whose material interests place them in the working class, no matter what ideas they have in their heads (or what kind of hat they wear on them).
We're not in advanced stage of struggle for and with those who already agree with us, but in an early stage of struggle for and we hope with those who are always, unjustly, being crushed by the wealth they create--whether they agree with us at the moment or not. Agreement doesn't precede solidarity; it results from it.
You get popular support by defending and fighting for the people's material interests , not by looking for people who have the same ideas as you, and attacking those who don't.
It all proceeds from there, or it doesn't proceed at all. There's no running this film backwards.
Why? Because most people in a capitalist society with a capitalist educational and media and cultural apparatus are going to have a lot of fucked-up ideas in their heads. Shark Tank, Bling-Bling, and all. Everybody in capitalist society has been "taught wrong on purpose."
It's not that the stupid ideas don't matter, and it's not that those who are staunchly committed reactionaries can't be targeted differently than those going along casually. It's certainly not that reactionary and socially-destructive actions motivated by stupid ideas shouldn't be firmly opposed with necessary force. It's that 1) Making no distinction between casual followers and staunch leaders on the right both takes for granted and encourages the solidarity between the two--precisely what we should be working to challenge and disrupt, and 2) demonstrating solidarity based on material interest is the way you get people to listen to you and start maybe changing their ideas--whatever fucked-up ideas they've been deliberately taught.
Riddle me this: For revolutionary socialists, if there are a lot of people attracted to right-wing ideas--and there are, especially right-wing socio-economic ideas--whose fault is that? Is our job to punish them for it?
A right-wing populist movement (if there is one) won't be defeated by sucker-punching; It will only be defeated by creating a left-wing populist movement that draws the majority of people to it. Our job, it seems to me, is to figure out how to build that.
It's not very difficult to imagine a better way than antifa. How about, instead of a punch-fest, while the alt-right is marching around a Confederate statue for "Blood and Soil," the left is converging on the municipal/state/federal government offices--with whatever militance it can muster--demanding jobs, pensions, and healthcare. Who wins that fight? Politically? TKO, at least.
Consider the historic and contemporary civil-rights movements, the fights for racial equality and justice that continue against the New Jim Crow of racialized urban policing and mass incarceration: Are these based on the premise that all, or even most, African-Americans carry around only righteously progressive ideas in their heads? That we should start fights with those who don't, to punish them for their violence-equivalent wrong thinking? (Which is exactly what antifa did in April in Berkeley, by the way, where there were African-American Trump supporters.)
No leftist, let alone a socialist-communist leftist, would think anything so ridiculous. Yet somehow, a working-class guy or gal, white or black, with a MAGA hat is a target to punch, never a potential comrade to address. Wrong hat on, wrong ideas in, head. Must punch.
Well, wearing a MAGA hat should not disqualify one from being addressed as a potential comrade any more than should wearing a Nation of Islam hat. I think Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam is based on a reactionary and bizarre religious theory of the world and human nature. So? What's the basis of solidarity with black people? What's the basis of solidarity with working-class people of all races?
Aretha spelled it out.
No one in the working class should be beaten just for expressing half-assed ideas.
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