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.’)
