New Socialist Movement: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?” April 2021

 

Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy
—Polish proverb

It wasn’t my scene.

I attended Stuart Shuffman’s book release party for Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco sometime in November, 2007. Stuart initially xeroxed his zine at Kinko’s and personally distributed it to stores and shops around the city. His handmade publication was about to become a conventional paperback travel guide produced by a now-defunct independent publishing company that would offer a New York City edition the next year. His Guide to Living Cheaply combined two of my favorite things—zines and cheap eats—under the imprimatur “you are young, broke and beautiful” but the raucous release event wasn’t for me.

Trump’s workers’ party debunked: “What’s Left?” January 2021

It pisses me off.

In 2015 Breitbart ran a story by Lisa De Pasquale entitled “Political Punks” that détourned the famous 1976 Ramones record cover by superimposing the heads of rightwingers Greg Gutfeld, Clint Eastwood, Ann Coulter and Gavin McInnes over the four original band members.

Blasphemy!

Reform or revolution, pt. 1: “What’s Left?” June 2020 (MRR #445)

Legislative reform and revolution are not different methods of historic development that can be picked out at the pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. Legislative reform and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other, and are at the same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and proletariat.

—Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution

 

I talk a good game.

Popularize and politicize social discontent. Encourage bottom up insurrection. Communize everything.

I’m switching out my usual Marxist jargon for the postmodern lingo the kids these days are into. But you get my drift. Communism now, communism tomorrow, communism forever.

Punk politics, personal politics and post-political politics: “What’s Left?” December 2019 (MRR #439)

The guy who helped the most in the campaign was like one of the big anarchists in San Diego.
Bob Beyerle, interview, MRR #102

“Hello, I’m with the Bob Beyerle for Mayor Campaign,” I say to the over sixty-year-old Latino man standing hesitantly in the front door of his house. “I’d like to talk to you about the horrible job Chula Vista’s City Council is doing. Not only are they subsidizing the construction of a bayfront yacht club, a luxury fourteen hundred room hotel, fourteen hundred condominiums and twenty-eight hundred exclusive housing units in a bayside tourist mecca, they’re rapidly expanding the city east of Interstate 805 with gated, guarded upscale housing developments like Eastlake, Rancho del Rey and Otay Ranch. Meanwhile, the city west of 805 is deteriorating. Eastlake is using a million gallons of water for a scenic lake that you’re not even allowed to use unless you live in this exclusive community while the rest of us are forced to live with between 20% and 50% water cutbacks. The City Council is catering to the wealthy when what we need is more funding for public services and new affordable housing developments with parks, schools, and emergency services. Bob Beyerle is for controlled growth and the environment, promoting local business and curtailing big business, and encouraging citizen involvement. Please vote Bob Beyerle for mayor on election day.”

I’m average height but the man barely reaches my shoulder. His more diminutive wife hovers behind him, clearly concerned. Both are suspicious as I hand them some campaign literature. Bob and I are precinct walking for his mayoral campaign in a sweltering May afternoon in 1991. I’m wearing a bright orange “Pedro Loves You” t-shirt while Bob Beyerle (aka Bob Barley of Vinyl Communications fame), wearing a sports coat and dress shirt, is talking local politics a few houses down the block. As the front man for the punk band Neighborhood Watch whose signature song is “We Fuck Sheep,” Bob goes on to do press interviews, candidate forums and house parties.

Socialist In Name Only: “What’s Left?” October 2015, MRR #389

I press the hermitically sealed white envelope to my forehead and say: “The Republican Party.” I rip the #10 at one end, blow open the envelope, extract a card and read: “The greatest spectator sport of 2015/16.”

It doesn’t take an Amazing Kreskin, or Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent, to predict that the real entertainment, the real show in American politics in the next year will be the GOP. I believe the Republicans are in the process of self-destructing, flying apart, having a nervous breakdown, with the real possibility that they will split up into warring factions during the next presidential election. Used to be that the GOP would target the Democratic Party with their vitriol, calling them Loonie Lefties, barking moonbats, or simply just the Democrat Party while forswearing to “never speak ill of a fellow Republican.” Now, having limited their ideological base by driving out most moderate Rockefeller Republicans, conservative Republicans reserve their harshest epithets for each other, escalating from Republican In Name Only (RINO), through the self-evident Squish, to the racially charged cuckservative.

A portmanteau of cuckold and conservative used by rightwing traditionalists, identitarians and neoreactionaries, cuckservative unfavorably compares mainstream Republican conservatives to a porn fetish in which old white males watch as their “wives/girlfriends” [read: America] have sex with young, often black men. Already torn by the division between Establishment Republicans and Tea Party types, the GOP has something like seventeen official presidential candidates and dozens of factions ranging from libertarians through evangelicals to white supremacists each vying to be “more conservative than thou.” The GOP has always had not-so-silent white racists and reactionaries on its fringes. What is clear from the use of cuckservative is that the loudmouthed mainstream candidacy of Donald Trump has given them new life. Only Trump also threatens to mount a third party campaign for the presidency if he is not nominated. Like Ross Perot before him, this may very well splinter the Republicans beyond repair as well as lose them the election.

[Trump has since toned down the circus by promising not to bolt the Republican party if he is not nominated.]

Now, I spend all of fifteen minutes every two years voting. That’s the extent of my involvement with electoral politics. I don’t support particular political candidates or parties or issues or campaigns. So my main interest is in being entertained by this country’s periodic Democratic/Republican donnybrooks. I like a good, old-fashioned name-calling session; a real, bare-knuckled insult fest with graphic mudslinging and ad hominem attacks. But while the Republicans have gotten off to a rollicking start, the Democrats are staid and sadly conventional by comparison.

Aside from prosaic insults like racist, sexist, reactionary or fascist, Democrats have rarely anything more colorful than rightwing wingnut as an aspersion against their Republican rivals. As for internal conflicts, the old disparagements of Dixiecrat or Blue Dog Democrat for conservative Democrats has settled down to the all-inclusive DINO, for Democrat In Name Only, even as the entire Democratic Party has moved decidedly to the right since the heyday of JFK/LBJ liberalism. And when a self-avowed socialist candidate like Bernie Sanders takes on Hillary Clinton’s establishment Democratic Party campaign from the left, he is summarily dismissed as a Socialist In Name Only, or SINO.

Fredrik deBoer, a writer for Jacobin Magazine, frets about the love-hate relationship between his fellow socialists and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in a recent Politico essay. At one end of the range, he quotes Bruce A. Dixon that: “Bernie Sanders is this election’s Democratic sheepdog. … Sheepdogs are herders, and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party.” At the other end of the range, he quotes Bhaskar Sunkara who sidesteps the issue of Bernie’s socialist credentials by contending that “Sanders is moving the discussion to the left, and mobilizing an absurdly high number of people” and then answers the question of whether Sanders can win: “Yes, definitely. Just not the primary or the presidency. Barry Goldwater didn’t win until a couple decades after he ran.” This ambivalence toward the Sanders campaign is emblematic of the Left in general and of how, when asked to constitute a firing squad, the Left often forms a circle, guns aimed inward.

Gerard Di Trolio, also a writer for Jacobin, argues that the Socialist International and its member social democratic parties are SINO. Me and my left commie pals, we tolerate our anarcho cousins, but we regularly call out both social democrats and Leninists as SINO. I’m sure they return the favor every chance they get, when they’re not putting each other down as SINO. And, on the truism that we are frequently most antagonistic toward those we are closest to ideologically, ultraleftists denounce fellow ultraleftists, anarchists denounce fellow anarchists, social democrats denounce fellow social democrats, and Leninists denounce fellow Leninists as SINO, all on the basis of a fraction of a degree of separation in ideology between them. Call it sectarianism, or call it human nature, but the SINO insult is alive and kicking on the Left. As I write this column, members of Black Lives Matter in Seattle shut down a Bernie Sanders rally, later stating: “The problem with Sanders’, and with white Seattle progressives in general, is that they are utterly and totally useless (when not outright harmful) in terms of the fight for Black lives. … White progressive Seattle and Bernie Sanders cannot call themselves liberals while they participate in the racist system that claims Black lives. Bernie Sanders will not continue to call himself a man of the people [read: Socialist], while ignoring the plight of Black people.”

Okay, so, I’ve been a tad disingenuous by about ten minutes with regard to my involvement in electoral politics this year. I got our Bernie Sanders for President poster hanging up. Cool “power to the people” red-white-and-blue glossy placard that can be seen from the street. A neighbor asked about it and, this being San Francisco, he now has his own Bernie poster on display. No doubt I will be criticized for even minimally supporting a long-shot presidential candidate residing as I do in a blue state like California where Democrats dominate and where I can afford to waste my vote making a statement. It’s not like supporting Bernie Sanders in a red state like Texas, where my sign could get my house egged or worse, or campaigning for him in a swing state like Florida where my vote might cause another Gore/Bush/Nader meltdown. Of course, there is always the argument that, in running, Bernie Sanders helps to move Hillary Clinton to the left in that Sanders himself has no intention of bolting the Democratic Party. But deBoer hopes that the “Sanders campaign [could] potentially do more than pull the inevitable nominee to the left, and actually make a run at the nomination.” And, of course, there’s that snowball’s chance in hell that Bernie might actually win, not just the nomination but the presidency.

That’s my purely pragmatic take on American electoral politics. I’ll get to commenting in future columns on American electoral politics generally, how European politics compare, theoretical discussions of electoral participation and the like, while the crazy season for the 2016 elections cranks up.