Image: Maurice Sorrell
In an effort to revive the spirit of Joseph McCarthy (which very much still lives, by the way), right along with J. Edgar Hoover and Henry Kissinger), Trump has declared November 1-7 ‘Anti-Communism Week.
This declaration is a clear dependence on the fact that there’s still a general confusion around what communism actually is; and that while capitalism isn’t exactly looked upon favorably at this point, there’s still some fleeting hope that it could be repaired. It certainly doesn’t help that Abdul El Sayed was not able to define it either, when speaking with Vic Mensa, during a campaign trail podcast interview.
Mensa asked El Sayed about his self-description as a capitalist (hint- he’s not, unless they’re hiding information about the numerous factories, and the billions in capital he owns). El Sayed is emphatic that he’s not a socialist (which should dispel the myth that ‘progressive’ = ‘socialist’), but a “capitalist who understands capitalism.” It’s imperative we understand that owning a business does not make one a capitalist. Most people who run businesses do not own the facilities which make the products they sell; and most people rent the buildings in which the shop resides. Most people do not have the capital to start businesses and have to take out loans.
Capitalism is a very malignant force (since its very characteristic is defined by the accumulation of profits in the hands of the few and the wealth which gets built around it, at the expense of the masses)- Mensa even alludes to this in his view that capitalism is analogous to “a cell that grows with no limit, even to the point at times of destroying the body that houses it.” He continues, “Capitalism is a system based on this infinite expansion, regardless of the health of the host.” While nothing materially based on earth is limitless, i understood his point, which he then walked back in a way by attempting to get El Sayed to describe a “capitalism that is not malignant.” El Sayed brings up a somewhat baffling analogy around car engines, and describes capitalism as “the idea that you use supply and demand to allocate resources in the market.”
This is literally one of the worst misinterpretations of capitalism i’ve ever heard in my life. It’s clear he’s not a capitalist, nor does he understand it. Supply and demand don’t occur autonomously; they are constructed by the scarcity model propped up by capitalist interests. Who benefits most from a market-based economy? Those invested most in a capitalist model, that’s who. El Sayed sounds more like a neoliberal than a progressive.
(It is interesting that in another part of the interview, El Sayed brings up an(other) analogy regarding the “moral standard” when a Muslim shopkeeper sells alcohol, but doesn’t hold capitalism with the same suspicion or levels of accountability, as a Muslim. Ironically, in the same portion of this interview Mensa, while discussing this “moral standard” perfectly describes capitalism: A “zero sum idea that in order for one to succeed, another one must suffer.”)
____________________________________________________________________________
Back to this ‘declaration’: It should be obvious that while it looks like it was written in haste, it was waiting in the wings to be pulled out, because despite said theoretical, linguistical or ideological inconsistencies or confusion, the masses wielded a ginormous disdain for this current administration and its policies. With this, Trump is flippantly considering everything in opposition to undying love for him (in particular), his administration and its policies to be ‘Communism’, despite there being absolutely no communists elected to office. At best, you have people aligned with Democratic Socialism (which is NOT Communism); in many cases, you have social democrats who were elected (whom are different than democratic socialists), and the most obvious elements being elected are liberals (whom are ‘establishment’/anti-people’s class, and not radical in any way, shape or form. Hakeem Sekou Jeffries (newly-elected Speaker of the House whom, according to Open Secrets has received upwards of $1,741,230 from the pro-Israel lobby) is one of the biggest examples of this).
As in any typical election in the US, those who vote tend to do so based on fear (or in outright opposition to a particular party or president), but not with the objective of dismantling the system which is the root of the tree which bore the fruits of the systemic injustices people are voting against. As a matter of fact, within the past 40 years in particular, anyone who votes for candidates outside of the two capitalist/imperialist parties (in order to meet the objectives of dismantlement) tends to get a ton of grief for doing so, being told that it’s ‘not the time’ to be ‘idealistic’, for ‘we need to get the republicans out of office’.
It’s clear this sentiment is shifting, given more fervent support for candidates outside of the binary; my guess is that Zohran Mamdani was the litmus test to see if it was safe to emerge from the shelter of conflict avoidance, election style. While Mamdani is far from the face of revolutionary praxis (as he, for example, chose to keep zionist anti-protest police commissioner Jessica Tisch on despite varying protests), he is seen as a beacon of hope for the elections process, since he defeated establishment Democrat Andrew Cuomo.
Voting for me is not an examination in purity- as long as we have the system which is currently in existence, we are never going to have a truly democratic elections process, with people’s congresses (as opposed to a system where it’s expected that a candidate fulfills some semblance of the people’s wishes). The issue i have with voting in the U.S. is that far too many who do it are not organizing, and are primarily dependent on electoral politics to do the job that historically the masses have done, to see any substantive changes. The ‘I Voted’ sticker people wear essentially reads for many as, ‘I did my job.’ There is a constant conversation about pushing these candidates ‘to the left’ once they get in, and they are then met with (unsurprising) disappointment, when the candidate they voted for doesn’t act in their best interests.
That said, i am cautiously optimistic by what has occurred in the past couple of days, because the masses ARE beginning to understand the primary contradiction of the system which is, again, at the root of the material injustices and inequities we face- even if they don’t have the language down. Being exposed to a genocide (from the perspective of the people it’s happening to, versus being reported by sources funded by entities profiting off of it) while diesel and unleaded gas prices have tripled is going to inform people of how they’re going to vote. The occupying force of ICE (in ways people either formally ignored or were not exposed to), millions of job losses, the increased use of AI to replace those who lost jobs, the struggle to pay rent, the high cost of groceries, the loss of access to comprehensive health care (and so much more), have informed people of how they’re going to vote, as opposed to listening to incoherent rants about trans people, or the ‘dangers of communism’.
J.D Vance (on Twitter- His mama called him Twitter, so I’ma call him Twitter) appeared to agree on some level:
“There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
Change our relationship to Israel
End the war
Focus on cost of living/inflation
Put America First”
The larger irony in all of this is, as narcissistic as the current administration is, there was a level of self-awareness and self-criticism here that did not appear with the Harris camp after their loss, until one of several autopsies.
___________________________________________________________________________
At this point, there is an understanding that the ‘Alpha Male’ fallacy is just that- a fallacy. L. David Mech, author of The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, wrote the book based on wolf populations under captivity, and has worked for years to dispel the myth surrounding his findings.
Where we critique those who continue to adhere to the ‘Alpha Male’ fallacy; we also lose sight of our own lack of critique regarding the fallacy of ‘the human nature of social hierarchies’. Those who live under the sociopolitical and economic captivity of capitalism have a tendency to view every society (past and present) under this lens, and assume every place around the world practices similar levels of domination, based on these hierarchies. You’ve heard this argument, and may have even said it yourself: “Anyone who gets power, they are gonna want to rule over everyone else.” It’s an extremely ahistorical position to take.
It also ignores that societies and governments around the world which utilized socialist, nationalist (not in the same way it’s practiced in the west) or anti-imperialist models were destabilized or outright destroyed via coups, sanctions, blockades, disappearances, torture and/or assassinations- Iran, Chile, Nicaragua, Libya, Cuba, Venezuela, and many more. We are conditioned to understand (through the propaganda wing of the entity which destroyed said societies and governments) that those countries were/are led by ‘dictators’… and we are trained to repeat this without examination.
What is CURRENTLY happening though, is the dialectics of having an administration which contains the equivalent of consistent meme shitposting, called a cabinet. Those who never felt this kind of wrath or personal discomfort are perhaps beginning to feel only less than a modicum of what many of us in marginalized communities have felt since the foundation of this cesspool. What many of us have been saying for years is that the pain was going to eventually hit everyone, but so many have told us they’d be okay with staving off the pain for a little longer, by voting Democrat- not understanding that the SAME pains were still coming to again, the most marginalized among our communities.
The ‘every person for themselves’ philosophy which has been a primary personality trait for the voting process is not sustainable, and it never was. The damage doled out by the current administration is proof of this. Voting is a tactic, but it is not a strategy; and an individual vote affects not only the local community, but the globe.
Whenever people talk about voting as a duty, i think about ancestors Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker. Hamer was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well as a founder of the Freedom Farm Cooperative and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Baker was a member of the Young Negroes Cooperative League, the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She was a co-founder of SNCC, and the MFDP.
These women didn’t advocate for voting as a means of maintaining personal comfort, having access to a seat at the table, or ‘harm reduction’. They utilized voting as a tool of displacement of the system that was currently in existence. They didn’t just vote; they organized so as to ensure that displacement was realized. Ella Baker understood this when she said: “(H)ow do you reach people if they aren’t already conscious of this right (“to participate in all the decisions that affect their lives”)? You start with people where they are. For example, the burning question after the 1954 Supreme Court school decision in an urban center like New York, had to do with breaking down de facto segregation. You begin by organizing people around that issue in terms of their level of understanding. Then you try to reach from one level of understanding to another.”
____________________________________________________________________________
While CoINTELPRO and McCarthyist tactics have never laid dormant in this country, the current enforcers of these tactics have encountered a public who is much more amenable to the possibilities of socialism (the real kind, not the Scandinavian ‘mixed economy’ model) due to abysmal material conditions and inequities currently in existence for them. ‘Red scare’ tactics are not working in ways they’d hoped, so they continue to force more sanctions, push harder on blockades, and declare a ‘Week against Communism’. They will continue to push for ‘progressive spoonful of sugar’ candidates like El Sayed, to uphold the deception that capitalism can be beneficial, if regulated- while at the same time, publicly calling him an enemy.
But again, unlike Vic Mensa’s assertion, nothing lasts forever- and this includes capitalism, and all empires.
