How Sweet It Isn’t: “What’s Left?” November 2017, MRR #414

It’s called “sweetening.”

It’s a certain type of background music and ambient sound for films and TV shows meant to enhance mood and emotion. It’s also called juicing, but it’s intended to be subtle, behind the scenes, muted. Sweetening is not supposed to be too obvious. For instance, when a live audience is recorded anywhere, a laugh track/canned heat track is frequently blended into the live audience track to amplify its effect, whether of laughter, clapping, booing, whatever.

The term has its origin in old-time radio, when sound effects like horses galloping, doors opening and closing, characters walking, gunshots, etc. were used to paint visual detail in a non-visual medium. Again, it’s not all dramatic sound effects. In films and TV shows, it’s not the sound of violent explosions or roaring monsters. The sweetening is in the sense of foreboding portended in the background music, or in the subsonic infrasound used to generate apprehension in the audience prior to some climactic scene. So while “sweetening” comes off good and positive, it might as well be called “shadowing” or “darkening,” depending on what effect the sound is intended to enhance.

As for political sweetening, two recent examples come to mind. The Tea Party ended up sweetening the Republican Party from the right, as did Bernie Sander’s “political revolution” the Democratic Party from the left. Both movements started as popular revolts against their respective party establishments and their mainstream politics, both helped rewrite their respective party platforms, and both moved the politics of those parties respectively to the right and left. Both threatened to break away to form independent third party efforts, both were blamed for the potential demise of their respective political parties, but both ultimately succumbed to political opportunism, cooptation, and marginalization. Or at least the Tea Party succumbed and wound up faking a hard-times protest movement, spawning affiliated get-rich-quick cottage industries, and successfully rebranding the GOP. Bernie’s “political revolution” has blended nicely into the much broader anti-Trump protest movement, so it remains vibrant and very much in the streets. Ideally, this popular resistance needs to avoid opportunism, cooptation, and marginalization, but that’s very difficult to do if the Tea Party is any indication.

What doesn’t count as political sweetening was Occupy Wall Street. OWS doesn’t count for much at all now, despite initially being praised by authors, artists, celebrities, politicians, and pundits as the greatest thing since sliced bread. I’ve never hidden my disdain for OWS. It may have personally changed lives like the bad brown acid circulating at a mediocre rock concert, but it was just a flash in the pan that changed little politically. So unless the inane consensus hand signals and annoying human microphone are included, no innovation of any consequence arose from OWS. That also covers the communizing “occupy everything, demand nothing” campus activism that emerged among protesting California students in 2011.

OWS ran with the franchise activism common nowadays, where an indistinct idea was widely disseminated and then taken up by local activists who made it their own through locally flavored community actions. The movement’s core idea, embodied in its name, was so nebulous in fact that it produced both the anarcho/ultraleft, black bloc, streetfighting Occupy Oakland, California, and the virulently antisemitic, conspiracy-theorist, ultraright Occupy Tallinn, Estonia, with every political combination in between. So while the majority of OWS-affiliated actions tended leftwing, liberal, and even anarchist, there was considerable involvement by rightwing, conservative, and even fascist elements. In this way, OWS displayed troubling Left/Right crossover politics similar to the anti-globalization movement which preceded it. This was not by chance but by design, given the decentralized, all-are-welcome nature of the movement’s organizing message. This was complemented by the ambiguous categories employed by OWS, most prominent being “the 99%” versus “the 1%.” This promoted an uncritical populism that studiously avoided any class-based analysis, but it denied any identity-based analysis as well, instead encouraging an amorphous, dumbed-down, Hardt/Negri-style notion of “the multitude.”

When finance capital comes to the fore, capitalism itself is in decline. Capitalism has abandoned industrial production for financial circulation, meaning that its profit-making comes not from surplus value transformed into capital but from mere exchange. For OWS then to focus its vague critique of capitalism on Wall Street and finance capital was to target a decaying economic system as if it were still robust, misinterpreting capitalism’s retreat as a faux advance. To see the enemy as attacking rather than as withdrawing was a delusion that badly skewed the tactics and strategy required to take on and defeat that enemy. If nothing else, this falsely portrayed finance capital as stronger and more powerful than it actually is, reinforcing the rightwing trope that “international bankers” rule the world. Excuse me, “banksters.” From this, it’s a half-step to the “international Jewish conspiracy for world domination” that is the ultra-right’s favorite meme.

Spencer Sunshine has written a detailed survey called “20 On The Right In Occupy” through the Political Research Associates think tank which provides thumbnail summaries of anti-Federal Reserve, antisemitic, white nationalist, fascist, and neo-Nazi individuals and groups involved in OWS. These strange right and left bedfellows in OWS are not so odd once we realize that antisemitism is also on the rise on the Left. Case in point, the post-Situ Adbusters Magazine from which the original OWS call came. From Kalle Lasn’s Adbuster article discussing fifty influential neoconservatives under the title “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” to Adbuster tweets that took up the alt.right’s outing of twitter users as Jewish by surrounding their names with parentheses, Left/Right crossover politics abound. Not that Adbuster’s leftist politics aren’t sketchy in so many other ways, what with their support of Israeli antisemite Gilad Atzmon and Italian conspiracy theorist Beppe Grillo. They do act as a political transition to the hard Left’s anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist ideologies, which too easily and too often become outright Left antisemitism.

Back to my point earlier, there are people who are not at all happy that Bernie’s “political revolution” has blended nicely into the much broader anti-Trump protest movement. These folks are the mainstream Democratic Party establishment liberals who blame Sanders and his “BernieBros” for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Salon executive editor Andrew O’Hehir had a wonderfully sarcastic takedown of their status quo recalcitrance awhile back:

But another running theme in Democratic Party apologetics informs all that, which is the ingrained desire to blame the left-wing resistance for anything that goes wrong — and to insist that it isn’t actually the left at all but sort of, kind of, the right. Hence Wolcott’s argument that the DudeBros and ‘purity progressives’ of the ‘alt-left’ are in some undisclosed manner closely related to the rebranded white supremacists of the alt-right. Or maybe it’s just that he doesn’t like either of them.

To return to our central premise: The DudeBros ruined everything. Their workings are malicious, and marvelous. They are simultaneously clueless, puritanical and all-powerful. In between Ultimate Frisbee tournaments and Vampire Weekend marathons, they elected Donald Trump, wiped out the Democratic Party between the coasts, rioted against Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley and/or defected to the alt-right en masse. They develop apps whose functions remain mysterious, and that most of us don’t know how to use. Unforgivably, they made the Phish reunion possible, and now it will never stop.

Hence, conflating “terrorist” James Hodgkinson with “crazy” Jeremy Christian, or antifa “alt-left” with fascist alt-right.

The Democratic Party establishment wants the anti-Trump resistance to be a leftwing Tea Party, the energy, individuals, and organizations of which the party can exploit to win future elections, while ultimately domesticating, coopting, and marginalizing that resistance. They want the Left’s resistance to be the Democratic Party’s sweetening. This is exactly what we don’t want to happen if we want the anti-Trump resistance not to suffer the same fate as the Tea Party.

Of course, it’s much more complicated than “Bernie or Bust” versus the Democratic Party. Politics to the left of the Democratic Party also includes progressives, democratic socialists and social democrats, Leninists, and the black bloc anarcho/ultraleft. But it’s never been an equal playing field with the Democratic Party vis-à-vis the rest of the American Left. The Democrats are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Even decimated, at their lowest point in fifty years, the Democrats continue to wield vast power and influence. Which is why we need to prevent the vilification of the black bloc or the BernieBros or Jill Stein’s Greens or anyone else as a convenient scapegoat for the Democratic Party’s mistakes and woes. I’m not so naïve as to think what we need is a united or popular front; some mystical kumbaya circle jerk of leftist unity. But we don’t need the Democratic Party and its liberals running the show either.

A Fool and His Vote Are Soon Parted: “What’s Left?” October 2016, MRR #401

Because of you Bernie is going to have to campaign for Hillary every day until election day and he shouldn’t have to do that. One, because he hates her. It’s just unlike you he’s adult enough to pretend he doesn’t

― Seth Meyers, “Hey,” Late Night Show

I was “Clean for Gene” in 1968 even before I could vote. I canvassed for George McGovern in 1972. In 1996, I voted for Ralph Nader on the Green Party and attended a couple of rallies, but not much else. Same with Bernie Sanders in 2016. I put up his poster and voted for him, but that was about it. Over the decades, I’ve gradually distanced myself from the electoral mania that seems de rigueur for such progressive/third party efforts. This time around I’m definitely feeling my age and getting quite vexed over those Sandernistas for reinventing the wheel of naïveté under the guise of youthful idealism.

By Sandernistas, I’m not referring to those third party stalwarts or vanguardists who jumped onto the Bernie bandwagon, only to return to their respective political folds once Bernie lost. I criticized them and their sectarianism in MRR #397 after tackling the viability of independent third party politics in general in MRR #396. Sandernistas are those young, politically unaffiliated, OWS types who were swept up in the frenzy of Bernie’s “political revolution,” but who now feel bitterly betrayed by his defeat and capitulation to Clinton and the Democratic Party. Those other progressives, social democrats, and Leninists might all be delusional about the importance and promise of their respective third parties, pre-party formations, or social movements, but they cannot be considered naïve by any means in that they fully understand that the electoral system is rigged and that American politics-as-usual are a dead end.

Not so the Sandernistas, who are credulous in three important ways, the first being their belief that genuine revolution can be won electorally through the Democratic Party. Personally, I don’t think significant social change can be had outside of taking to the streets, but I’d be happy if a dual role were possible for electoral politics and street action simultaneously, with a vibrant social movement mediating between the two. The youngsters inspired by Bernie’s call for an electoral revolution are idealistic to a fault, in that they think they can storm the bastion of capitalist power that is the Democratic Party without firing a shot.

Which brings me to the gullibility of Bernie’s followers when they proclaimed they were shocked, shocked they tell us, over the Wikileaks dump of DNC emails revealing that prominent party Democrats had it in for the Sanders campaign. “But they’re not playing fair,” they wailed, as if playing fair has anything to do with politics, or for that matter life. I fully expected the Sandernistas to demand that Debbie Wasserman Schultz be given a “time out” for her anti-Sanders partisanship. I mean, this is the party of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who won election in 1948 by stuffing ballot box 13 with votes from deceased Texans.

Finally, there’s the overwhelming personal sense of betrayal that many Sanders followers expressed when Bernie lost the primary and endorsed Clinton. Seth Meyers commented that “Look, I know you’re ‘Bernie or Bust’ but the results are in. ‘Bust’ won,” but his sarcasm fell on deaf ears. The weeping and gnashing of teeth continues, and it’s as if Hillary or Bernie or the Democratic Party personally slapped them in the face or ran over their dog. I mean, get over yourselves and take Joe Hill’s advice “don’t mourn, organize” to heart. But that would be too much work and way too adult, so I stand by my conclusion that they are naïve beyond belief.

For those of you who felt that a political revolution in the Democratic Party was possible, that you were being treated unfairly by the Democrats, and that Bernie’s primary defeat and subsequent endorsement of Clinton were bitter betrayals, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. It’s a beautiful suspension bridge painted orange, and it even produces its own income. But I really don’t have the time to further disabuse the Sandernistas of all their other misconceptions, which are legion. The idea that all you have to do is occupy a park or a square OWS-style and voilà, instant movement, is ludicrous. Or the Manichaean good-vs-evil notion that the struggle is between political purity and choosing between the lesser of two evils, which is also bullshit. Even contrasting idealism with pragmatism is a false dichotomy in that it ignores the need to think strategically and dialectically. My pet peeve has been the canard that if I vote for Hillary, or for that matter Trump, I’ve completely sold out and legitimized the entire capitalist-statist-racist-patriarchal-fascist-imperialist system under which we live. Part of the simplistic belief that voting is the be-all-and-end-all to all politics, it’s also part of the idiocy that one vote, my vote, changes everything. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a vote is just a vote.

I’ve pointed out before that I live and vote in California, a state that Clinton is sure to win come November. So whether I vote for Hillary or Trump or write in Bernie Sanders is irrelevant. I could write in Mickey Mouse or self-righteously abstain from voting entirely and it will make no difference. Of course, there’s so much more to electoral politics, third parties, movement building, or fomenting revolution. I’m just sick and tired of political naïveté masquerading as youthful idealism or worse, serious revolutionary activity.

Now, get the fuck off my lawn!

***

There is another approach to Bernie’s “political revolution,” aside from the cynical opportunism of third party/vanguardist hacks and the naïve enthusiasm of the youthful Sandernistas. My peeps, the ultraleft, push the political form of the revolutionary organization that does not strive to be either a mass-based, quasi-democratic, parliamentary bourgeois party or a professional, democratic-centralist Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. Ostensibly a cadre party as “hard as steel, clear as glass,” the ultraleft revolutionary organization leads by example, intervening at pivotal historical moments or in crucial social movements to clarify social and political contradictions in order to push the working class into actualizing itself as a class, and eventually into social revolution. Luxemburg, Bordiga and the original Council Communists saw Lenin and the Bolsheviks as fulfilling that role during the Russian 1917 revolution up through at least the October Revolution, although some subsequent ultraleftists have not been as kind to either Communist icon. In my humble analysis, that’s not what Lenin or the Bolshevik party actually did, and no ultraleft cadre party organization has managed to win a successful social revolution using this strategy. Certainly no one intervened in the Sanders campaign to show the Sandernistas the error of their ways. Hence my cantankerousness.

***

For those of you keeping score, it’s 2 to 1. I was correct that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination and that the “Dump Trump/Never Trump” movement would not succeed. Similarly, I was right that Hillary Clinton would get the Democratic nomination and that the “Bernie or Bust” movement would be all bark but not much bite. And that they were, loudly, inside and outside the DNC in Philadelphia. Their activities did help Bernie to negotiate a slightly more leftist party platform while not actually playing much havoc with the convention proper. There was far more raucous protest and disruption at the Democratic convention however than at the Republican one, which brings me to my prediction that Cleveland 2016 would make Chicago 1968 look like a pink tea. I was wrong. Aside from acrimonious behind-the-scenes politicking in the RNC’s rules committee and Ted Cruz’s reviled non-endorsement speech on stage, the convention itself was remarkably disciplined and on-point. The streets of Cleveland were low-key and often empty, with nary a riot in sight. Some of that had to do with so many of us predicting, with a certain amount of glee and bloodlust, just the opposite and thus scaring the bejeesus out of the public. But I think there’s a deeper reason here. The young and the restless realized where the center of action was and gravitated toward where history was being made. Nothing could be done inside or outside the RNC to change things. Not so the DNC where there was at least the perception that protest might change the course of history. That’s why there was more shit happening in Philadelphia where even the Green Party’s Jill Stein hoped to woo disaffected Sandernistas.

***

I finished my second novel. It’s all edited, rewritten, and copy edited. Now, it’s in the hands my book designer, and ultimately, IngramSpark.

It’s called 1% Free, and it’s near-future speculative fiction/science fiction political thriller with a dash of noir. Aside from the genre tropes, it’s also dystopian and utopian fiction, but I’ll let you figure out which is which. It’s 2042, and America’s second civil war rages. Besides the collapse of the United States into racialized warfare, there are revolutionary social movements that combine red, black, and green politics; wild-assed youth countercultures; and meditations on science, cartography, technology, and extinction. There’s also a lot of prognostication via fictionalization, much like my first novel End Time in which I predicted the rise of Zapatistas in southern Mexico. The accuracy and desirability of the future I predict is also up to you to decide.

I have a book launch for 1% Free at 6 pm on Thursday, November 3 at the Book Passage bookstore at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. I’m putting together some swag now.

“Democracy is so overrated:” “What’s Left?” September 2016, MRR #400

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

― Winston S. Churchill

If a majority voted for you to jump off a bridge—would you?

— CrimethInc., “From Democracy to Freedom”

I set the table by covering it with a dark cloth and placing a lit candelabra on it. I position my Ouija board and planchette on the table in front of the chair before I sit down. I’m ready to prognosticate.

As I write this column, it’s the first week of July and both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions are happening later in the month. I predict Hillary will win the DNC and Trump the RNC. Neither party or electoral base is exactly keen on their respective nominees, but the “Bernie or Bust” or “Never Trump” crowds won’t prevail. Further, I predict that Hillary will win against Trump, but it will be a close election, uncomfortably so. My final and last prediction is that the surprising surge in votes for the Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson will be to the Trump campaign what Ralph Nader was to Al Gore. Oh yeah, and there will be rioting in Cleveland in 2016 to rival Chicago 1968.

That’s four predictions, four pretty obvious political forecasts on which you as the reader can score me, starting with the August issue and running through the November elections. Also, there’s four months to fill commenting on the elections, tap dancing on air if you will. Because by the time my comments on what’s happening right now, at this moment, reach your eyes they’re already past their prime. Outdated. And as I’ve hinted at above, I’m not a soothsayer by any means.

One of my major annoyances with American politics is its unrelenting pettiness. Hardcore Republicans for instance purposefully call their opponents the Democrat Party, not the Democratic Party. Their rationale is that the Democratic Party is far from democratic in operation and intent, but it’s clear when Republicans use Democrat Party in partisan debates they’re really intending to needle and provoke their opponents. It’s such elementary schoolyard antics; the wannabe tough kid insisting on calling another kid surnamed Wankel “Wanker” all the time. Far from entertaining the rest of us with clever puns, this mean-spirited sparring is debasing our language and degrading our political discourse.

The deepening clusterfuck that is Brexit follows closely behind in terms of politically humbling experiences. Who would have thought that Britain’s two main political parties—the Tories and Labor—as well as the political geography encompassed by the names Great Britain and United Kingdom would be destroyed by a simple non-binding referendum of whether or not Britain should leave the European Union? As David Van Reybrouck commented in The Guardian: “Never before has such a drastic decision been taken through so primitive a procedure – a one-round referendum based on a simple majority. Never before has the fate of a country – of an entire continent, in fact – been changed by the single swing of such a blunt axe, wielded by disenchanted and poorly informed citizens.” (“Why Elections are Bad for Democracy,” 6-29-16) As the political edifice of the United Kingdom continues to crumble, threatening the EU in the process, the efficacy of elections and liberal democracy are in serious doubt.

Let’s start with the word democracy. The term comes from the ancient Athenian practice of the adult males of the city-state (the demos) gathering in assembly to directly vote on all civic matters and leadership. Right away we understand the qualified nature of the word because the right to vote did not apply to women, children or slaves, a limitation shared by that other classical political system from which the West draws its inspiration: the practice of the Roman republic. The complex property-based system in ancient Rome (collective voting for magistrates and tribunes) provided for an indirect, representative form of government where the franchise continued to expand as Rome itself grew, encompassing allies and conquered peoples, until the original republic mutated into an empire ruled by Caesars. The more geographically prescribed scope of Athenian democracy did not prevent that city-state from acquiring an empire however, nor from devolving into oligarchy under decades of war.

For America’s founding political elite steeped in Enlightenment liberalism, there was a sharp distinction between a democracy and a republic. Pure democracy always ran the risk of despotism and imperialism, of mob rule where “51% of the people could vote to take away the tooth brushes of the other 49%” as a John Bircher once told me. By contrast, republicanism intended to contain such problems with territorially small, constitutionally-limited, mixed representative government, which was a central principle of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison further argued in the Federalist Papers that the necessary limitations of a small constitutional republic could be transcended by the judicious application of legal checks-and-balances within a physically expanding domain of ever-multiplying, contending factions. Thanks to this political reformulation, the spread of the American republic across the continent and beyond was never in contradiction to or in conflict with oligarchy or empire.

But these political distinctions have been muddled and mongrelized to the point where we now think that democracy and republicanism are just the names of two different political parties, not two distinct political systems. We are told constantly “we live in a democracy,” we pledge allegiance “to the Republic for which it stands,” and we believe like Candide’s Professor Pangloss that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Rather than remain befuddled however, let’s simplify matters by saying that the West’s ideal is for representative democracy in the context of a national state.

“[I]n an election, you may cast your vote, but you are also casting it away for the next few years.” David Van Reybrouck of The Guardian writes. “This system of delegation to an elected representative may have been necessary in the past – when communication was slow and information was limited – but it is completely out of touch with the way citizens interact with each other today.” We tend to fetishize elections, according to Reybrouck, while demonizing the subject of that voting, resulting in an almost universal distrust of governments, political parties, and politicians while increasing calls for a strong leader “who does not have to bother with parliament and elections.” He concludes that “Democracy is not the problem. Voting is the problem.”

Oh, really?

Representative democracy, from Roman republicanism to Western liberalism, doesn’t seem to be the solution for nationalist extremism, capitalist exploitation, oligarchic despotism, colonial conquest, or imperialist appropriation. If we switch out the word nationalist for patriotic and capitalist for commercial this is true for direct democracy, from ancient Greece to the cantons of Switzerland. Ah, but what we need is more democracy; real democracy, radical democracy, participatory democracy. We need decentralized, participatory decision-making with easily recallable elected representatives, rights for minorities, rotating offices, ad hoc organizing, impermanent institutions, even consensus process.

“And how do you insure democratic control of industry?” Marvin Garson once asked rhetorically, spelling out a kind of radical democratic ultra-leftism called Council Communism. “Why, by setting up workers’ councils in each industry which operate with full respect for all the normal democratic procedures—especially the right to establish caucuses and factions, and the right to strike. The economy, in short, will be run the way a government is SUPPOSED to be run; it will be like a gigantic New Left convention—impeccably democratic and a stone drag.” (“Going Beyond Democracy,” 1968)

Such a tedious scenario is in no way enlivened by the absurdity of consensus process, which is nothing more than tyranny by the minority if not the individual, as CrimethInc well grasps as the myth of unanimous rule in its provocative essay “From Democracy to Freedom.” The group also understands that democracy is institutionalizing governance and state-production by its very nature. But CrimethInc’s attempt to substitute autonomy for democracy and to insist on the permanence of the revolutionary moment is pure sophistry. “Thousands of us flood into the streets, finding each other in new formations that offer an unfamiliar and exhilarating sense of agency. Suddenly everything intersects: words and deeds, ideas and sensations, personal stories and world events. Certainty—finally, we feel at home—and uncertainty: finally, an open horizon. Together, we discover ourselves capable of things we never imagined.” This is Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution on MDMA, and much like some fantasy of permanent orgasm this raises the question: what do we do after the revolution when we once again have to make mundane decisions. Do we make decisions by lottery or drawing straws, by rotating onerous tasks or making each individual boss-for-a-day, even by adapting Reybrouck’s concept of sortition in which a representative sampling of the population makes decisions for the whole? Let me return to Marvin Garson again.

“Every industry has its own inchoate underground of people who take pride in doing good work, who aren’t in it just for the money, who get angry when their employers make them sacrifice quality for the sake of profit. Let that underground get together and suddenly a real alternative to corporate capitalism will exist. […] Perhaps it’s impossible to run a steel mill or an electric power plant in a free and creative way. In that case, run it automatically.”

I’ve made the argument that, even at its best, democracy is a stone drag by quoting Garson before. By next column, I should have plenty to say about the dueling circuses of the RNC and DNC.