The USAmerican left in 2021 finds itself crippled. In the wake of a global pandemic, ongoing riots over a white supremacist police state, and two failed runs for president by the figurehead politician (Bernie Sanders) of America’s largest left organization, the DSA, the left is floundering for new ideas and new organizational models of society and what must come after.
At the moment the USAmerican left is composed of two real wings, the reformists like the DSA who’s goal broadly seems to be Sandersite social democracy with some roses and the name socialism painted over it, and the fringe far left revolutionaries/insurrectionists. These two wings, while never truly in open conflict, due to the hegemony of the reformist wing, are nevertheless irreconcilable strategically, and incompatible with goals. The far left is largely relegated to surviving unionist orgs, like the IWW or to increasingly obscure revival parties like the new Black Panthers or the American Party of Labor. What once was a thriving revolutionary landscape has been reduced, through propaganda (as during the cold war) and state action (COINTELPRO), to a minuscule fringe that has no power in numbers but immense potential to build new and creative social and economic forms to both recruit and to further the goals of the left, a new society, free of capitalism and the state.
This struggling milieu of revolutionaries and thinkers has so far failed any coalescence or practical application of their ideas to counter the post-fordist reality of neoliberalism in the imperial core, instead contenting themselves to continue their readings and speculations on old theorists, describing old conditions. A new imagination must be reached in order to shatter this active complacency on the left, to break through their reproductions and reinventions of capitalist realism in their thought and action. To paraphrase Fisher, these theorists have failed most specifically to ‘imagine a coherent alternative to capitalism’.
This crisis of imagination among the fringes should be of utmost concern, both for those dwelling in the fringes and those inhabiting the reformist mainstream. The immediate consequences are clear, there is no militant fringe loud enough to force capital to acquiesce to the demands of the reformers, and there is no mass mobilization targeting the state and capitalism as a whole. This lack of alternatives manifests heavily in the propaganda of the left, their professors and internet figureheads largely advocate market continuation, unable to imagine a world free of the firm, only of the boss. The continued failure to embrace radical new forms comes as no surprise when the culture and atmosphere of material conditions in america is analyzed though, a garbled mess of workplace competition and intense social isolation culminating in dead-eyed and efficient worker drones doing all they can to pay rent the next month and unable to think far beyond work. In fact as neoliberal conditions and capitalist realism have intensified, work has increasingly become the sole focal point of many people’s lives, leaving them little time or energy to pursue new and imaginative socio-economic forms and existences.
In order to counter this the fringe must begin to make it’s presence physical. Sniping from the corners of the internet, as we all know, is not meaningful praxis, and in fact presents as nonsensical and childish. The hegemonic discussion of “optics” is ever-present in leftist discourse but it is rarely put to real use. Our best optics are those that shock and astonish, as with the burning of the Minneapolis precinct, and not those that dumb down and commodify the spirit of the ideas and understandings we must bring forward if we wish to shake off both the reformists and the crushing weight of capitalism.
These new, imaginative forms cannot spring from the pen (or keyboard in this case) of a theorist, but must be realized in real time, new relations forged in fire and built from the ground up can only be realized once we stop asking when the revolution is coming and start working on it, creating potential for the actualization of our ideas and plans. In this we can look to the riots taking place throughout 2020 and into 2021, where new forms and relations have been built and an insurrectionary spark started in the hearts of radicals looking to achieve the abolishment of the police, a noble, if narrow, goal. these forms spring from direct action and the camaraderie of the riot, not from books and online essays or exchanges in academic journals. These are the forms we must seek out and sustain if we wish to break through our crisis of imagination.
