Through the Sixties, when I was a single-digit child, people knew that revolution was hard. Those who committed to revolutionary change understood that the elites who control the levers of power, institutional inertia and the broken spirits of those they sought to emancipate comprised barriers that were nearly impossible to overcome. They knew that for every triumphant revolution in France, Russia, China and Cuba, there were hundreds of uprisings smothered in their cribs—and that even those turned sour. As Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground put it, the path of the revolutionist leads to victory, prison or death.
Odds of victory were long. An ethical leftist would willingly shoulder the burden of class struggle nevertheless. They resolved to work tirelessly to organize at the grass roots. They took professional and legal risks and sacrificed security and respectability. They put everything on the line. Because nothing less than the future of humanity and whether our species would live as slaves or equals was at stake.
Somewhere along the way, through winning Vietnam and losing Reaganism and falling for fake big tent Democratic electoral politics, the Left got lazy. A big popular leftward shift remained a goal—but leftists gave up on revolutionary change as an objective they were determined to work toward. It became, as Martin Luther King put it, a dream. King called it a dream because he was a preacher and he was prescient enough to see that he probably wouldn’t live to see it achieved. Equality and justice for all were goals he and his followers were expected to fight like crazy to attain, not some airy what-would-I-do-if-I-won-the-lottery fantasy.
Leftists are taking comfort in wishful thinking.
This is late-stage capitalism. We don’t need revolution—the system will collapse.
We’re at Peak Oil. The ecocidal machine will run out of fuel and the earth will regenerate. We’ll move to the countryside, stock up food and watch the end from afar.
The elites are so obscenely cruel and grotesquely incompetent that the masses will turn against them. We don’t have to do anything.
Hope is their only plan.
Empty hope.
The system may indeed collapse. But total political implosion has never and likely never will lead to revolution. Revolution requires a disciplined organization able to seize power, maintain order and build a new system on the ashes of the ancien régime while there’s still infrastructure to take over. Counterrevolution—authoritarianism, reaction, oppression—typically follows collapse, as former citizens of the Soviet Union saw after 1991.
Environmental fantasies like Peak Oil are not real. We have, sadly, hundreds of years of gas and oil to pump and burn and pollute with. Energy companies now have access to oil under melting ice caps and glaciers. New technology allows deeper drilling to tap new reserves.
Popular disgust is real. People can and probably will accept the fact that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans give a damn about them or their real problems, or would be inclined to do anything to fix them even if they did. Without an organization, party and/or movement to channel their rage and energy, however, yet another violent spasm—a mass shooting or ten, a riot—is as far as anything can go.
In fairness to America’s real leftists—those to the left of the Democrats—the mountain hasn’t been this steep for at least 100 years. From the 1900s through the 1920s, America had at least one nationally viable socialist party. Militants worked within big labor from the 1930s to the 1950s. The 1960s were, well, the 1960s. Beginning in the 1970s, the Democratic Party didn’t want anything from its left flank but its votes. The Left is dead. If you’re a young leftist looking to overthrow capitalism from the ground up, there is no credible organization to join, no serious publication worth reading, no leader, no nothing, not even a few random comrades you can count upon to show up every weekend to agitate and plot and picket with in a meaningful, sustained way.
Of course young leftists feel hopeless. They’d be stupid not to.
Hopeless people crave hope more than anything else. But false hope is a trap. Leftists need to get organized. Before that can happen, they have to stop believing that something or someone else is going to do their work for them. If you’re really serious about revolution, there is no substitute for hard, thankless, almost certainly pointless work.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of ‘Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.’ Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast ‘DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.’)
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“Somewhere along the way, through winning Vietnam?”
I get that a lot of people think that the yet-to-come boomers stopped the war, man, by, like, protesting, man. But I don’t think the war ended due to the protests. Much larger protests have been held to demonstrate for or against other causes, and … well, let me put it this way: 100 protesters surveyed, top several answers on the board. “Name ANYTHING that was fixed after a large protest group marched on Washington.”
Vietnam ended because, finally, the tragic farce couldn’t be sustained anymore. It was the same thing with Iraq and Afghanistan.
For those who believe in nonviolence as a solution, I offer Robert A. Heinlein’s strawman argument from “Starship Trooper.” It may be a strawman, but brother, it sure is put together pretty well:
Student: My mother always told me that violence doesn’t solve anything.
Rasczak: Really? I wonder what the city founders of Hiroshima would have to say about that. [To other student] You.
Other Student: They wouldn’t say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed.
Rasczak: Correct. Violence has resolved more conflicts than anything else. The contrary opinion that violence doesn’t solve anything is merely wishful thinking at its worst. […] Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that, ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.
I had great hope for Gen X, but we were the first to be on the receiving end of the naked violence that was the boomers stealing literally every single solitary thing they could before setting fire to everything else that they literally or figuratively couldn’t shit on. It was simply too massive a zeitgeist shift. I gave up on the millennials when they started waxing their moustaches and sponging off their boomer parents for $4,000 single-room apartments in Brooklyn. I actually have some hope for Gen Z, as they are walking into the debris that will be left by the — finally, thank you, God — departing boomers: massive underemployment, no future, depleted environment, etc., etc.
But to continue clinging to any notion that nonviolence will achieve anything? I was born at night but not last night.
If we are doing another “generational analysis,” isn’t “the millennials” generation, by definition, the children of GenX parents, as opposed to children of the vile “boomers,” as you have described it?
Such “generational analysis” is a forerunner of “identity politics.” These are two, of many, mainstream media promulgated “social constructs” that serve ONLY to divide the population, distracting from the real issue of the class divide, thus keeping the “vast minority” in its firm, brutal and murderous (e.g.: “austerity” economics) control.
Actually, I believe it’s a split, about 60/40 in favor (quelle surprise) of the boomers.
Keep in mind, the average boomer had more money, stronger job prospects, larger connections in their careers, than Gen Xers did. This would have translated directly to spawn of both groups. A boomer’s kid would have had more access to the crucial early advantages (that first paid internship) than the Gen Xer’s kid would have (unpaid internship, so you need to find a job when you get there to support your internship, which will not turn into a job because the boomer’s kid’s parents who lined up their paid internship also made sure the kid got the job too).
It isn’t “just” that the boomers got the best of everything. The ripples are still propagating.