Chapter 2: What's "Left?" Part III

Letting the mafia don off the hook because of a technicality is liberalism. Going full Boondock Saints and shooting the mafia don in the courtroom because justice must be served is the will to power, and it's our third concept. The liberals don't understand it, and call it "totalitarianism" because the idea of a person giving their total selves over to anything besides market forces is anathema to them.

Fascists in every era have little difficulty manipulating liberals to their own ends. This is because, like socialists, fascists hold the will to power as a core value. The very term "will to power" is derived from Adolf Hitler's demented manifesto. Fascists don't believe in free speech, but they know that liberals do. So they manipulate liberals into defending them in public by hiding their carping for genocide behind the concept of "free speech," and for the most part liberals fall for it hook, line and sinker, to the point you'd think they were working together on purpose until class analysis tells you that, on some level, they are. The ACLU has Heather Heyer's blood on its hands, because it went to court to fight for the Nazis' right to march through Charlottesville. Every liberal pundit regurgitating this nauseating "well, actually" in the mainstream media also has her blood on their hands.

Because of the will to power, the fascists will always beat the liberals. But because of the corrosive individualism and alienation of capitalism, fascists cannot sustain their power for long, especially when confronted with the socialists, who can unite and organize democratically yet also understand the will to power. If liberalism is paper, fascism is scissors; if fascism is scissors, socialism is a rock.

Unfortunately, to extend the rock/paper/scissors analogy, liberal paper usually covers the rock of socialism. The most dedicated opponents of socialism of our recent presidents is not Dubya or Trump, but Clinton and Obama. Obama neutered not only Medicare for All, but even a public option, sucking all the energy he could from the left and redirecting it behind his political operation. This is why the Democrats lost a thousand races under him. Similarly, Clintonite triangulation is why he depended on Ross Perot to help him squeak through both times with a plurality of the electorate. If it took a Nixon to go to China, it took a Clinton to sell out the left.

And to continue that analogy, liberals have covered over the rock of socialism with literal paper - the mainstream media through which they peddle their false consciousness. Working-class liberals could easily fail to recognize the "liberal media" that the conservatives saw until Bernie Sanders almost won the Democratic nomination, and then the Washington Post literally regurgitated dozens of anti-Bernie articles in a 24-hour period and all the bougie pundits turned against him thereafter in a way they never turned against a conservative. Even Trump got a better reception than Bernie from the liberal media, because Bernie threatens them more than Trump ever could.

This is why, in every period of extreme inequality, it requires the emergence of the fascist scissors to cut the liberal paper before the socialist rock can smash the scissors. The fascists cut down the only force that can stop socialism, only to get smashed in turn. The most obvious example is the emergence of Hitler before he was crushed by Stalin, but it also applies to every other example of progress in history. Before a Lincoln could emerge to destroy the political power of the plantations, a Buchanan had to allow the Slave Power to run amok and scare the country towards abolitionism. Before FDR could launch the New Deal (and, to be accurate, FDR was not a socialist and the New Deal was not socialism, but he did enjoy support from many democratic socialists at the time and was on the correct side of WWII), America had to endure four years of Herbert Hoover and absolute reaction, as well as a nascent fascist coup thwarted by Smedley Butler. Before we get a socialist president, we must have a President Trump. Liberalism must be discredited by its collapse towards fascism before socialism can rise in its place.

It is for this reason that some Marxist-Leninist theoreticians, such as Slavoj Zizek, advocate a policy called "accelerationism." The argument goes that because liberalism must be discredited and capitalism's contradictions inevitably lead to the fascism that destroys liberalism, it is a socialist's duty to accelerate these events and deliberately lean into capitalism and fascism in order to emerge into a socialist period more quickly. This may make sense on a tactical level, but it misses the ethical duties of the socialist. Un-radicalized workers observing socialists deliberately making their lives worse will not be inclined towards Marxism-Leninism, but will reject us in the same breath as they reject the fascists. Furthermore, it is always uncertain just how much fascist reaction is necessary before a society will overcome its capitalist impulses, and so the accelerationists might step on the gas just to find themselves still short of the end of capitalism. Finally, in a late capitalist period like the one we find ourselves in, there will be no shortage of capitalist dupes and fascists willing to do the work of accelerationism without a socialist lifting a finger. This is well and good, because in these periods a socialist should be busying themselves not by fanning the flames of the dumpster fire, but by organizing a fire department to one day put it out. Instead of goading on the Trump '16s or Biden '20s of the world, we should be organizing direct action to help workers survive this period in order to win them to our cause that we may prevail in the next period. (Yes, I did just assert that Biden was the accelerationist option in 2020; more on this later.)

Continue reading Part IV