Chapter 5: K Tho, What Is To Be Done About It? Part II

It does not matter what their platform says; they will quickly discover that reality has a well-known communist bias, and winning the war will be their paramount objective. Communist policy will directly help them win that war, and like Lincoln they will only resist doing what they really want to do and what helps them win for so long in the name of bipartisanship before just plowing ahead and doing it anyway. They will be a mealy-mouthed reformist; they have to be to win election in the first place. But the needs of a shooting war will drag them across the divide towards a revolutionary break with our previous economics all the same.

This is the most realistic hope for victory socialism has on the North American continent. Moreover, it is something we can organize for openly and honestly, without fear of the cops. The Second Amendment provides for gun rights for "well-regulated militias." I'm calling right now for communists to form such "well-regulated militias" for the highly likely possibility that we will have to defend the American constitution from its domestic enemies, and to put down a bourgeois rebellion. That is not only legal in this country, it's a strongly-encouraged patriotic activity. The FBI can monitor us all it likes, but those closet white supremacists will only find law-abiding loyal Americans doing their patriotic duty.

Such organization is the real political work of Marxist-Leninists in our current material conditions. Instead of fixating on what Trump broke this week like the liberals do, or fighting for our favorite hopeless communist with ballot access to miraculously win election before we've built an organization capable of carrying them to victory, our hope lies in organizing working people along these Marxist-Leninist, or better to call it Marxist-Lincolnist, lines.

As to wartime strategy, I don't want to delve too much into this because it's almost certain to change depending on the immediate material conditions of the day, which is hard to predict. Very likely there won't be state constitutional conventions like there were last time; there will be the declaration of a military coup either by a President immediately after losing an election or by military officials close to them, and several governors will declare that they (and more to the point, their state's National Guard) recognize the coup plotters as the legitimate government. Or perhaps the Democrats will try Trump's praxis of pretending he didn't lose the election, but much more competently. And to demonstrate how hard to predict this all is, I initially wrote this paragraph with Trump and the Republicans in the probable role of reactionary bad guys, but Bernie's defeat has led me to conclude that the next civil war will be like the last, with the Republicans as the good guys, and so the historical analogy we must follow to get our socialist revolution is the conservatives after FDR.

The conservatives spent a long time in the political wilderness after the New Deal. They had to detoxify themselves by nominating a war hero, Eisenhower, to lead a relatively moderate administration that left the New Deal intact but advanced no further. Then they had to state their purposes and figure out a strategy for victory through the resounding defeat of Barry Goldwater, who created the Southern strategy of dogwhistling to racists. Nixon then blew those dogwhistles all the way to victory, but was still constrained by liberal ideological hegemony into being the last real New Deal President. Once the hippies-cum-professionals took over during the Carter administration, Reagan was free to win and govern on the basis of the conservative Southern strategy, establishing a realignment in American politics that Bill Clinton was forced to ratify by declaring that "the era of big government is over."

The conservatives won power back in American society not by compromising, or giving up their ideals. They won by applying the dialectic; by repeatedly confronting their antithesis without having changed themselves to make a synthesis out of our politics that looked more and more like their foundational principles with every iteration. They won not only by making the liberals compromise, but by rejecting those compromises under Obama. They held fast to their dogma until the end to build their movement's power, and that is what we will have to do.

It's not like we won't have plenty of material to work with. The moment Bernie's movement starts trying to govern, the neoliberals will force compromise upon compromise on them. They may well wind up getting less done for us than Obama did, and the blowback over the #ForceTheVote issue is demonstrating that this is already true. There will be many disillusioned demsoc voters, and that will only increase as time goes on. By refusing to compromise with the liberals, we can offer the only consistently anti-liberal politics in America. It won't be difficult to apply the mass line and frame Marxism-Lincolnism in such a way as to be appealing to conservatives, although it only seems that way because nobody's tried since 1860. But we can speak approvingly of gun rights, of our disdain of liberal Democrats, the liberal media, the hopeless utopianism of democratic (er, excuse me, Democrat) socialism, et cetera.

Continue on to Part III