The Possibility of a Transition to New Domestic and International Democracy

We are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s June 24, 2023 session on The Possibility of a Transition to New Domestic and International Democracy. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube.

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Good morning everybody. It’s not news to anyone that the U.S. is a declining power, that the decline of a nation bent upon hegemony and global domination has world consequences. 

At the end of the day we’re looking at a double crisis, one could even say a double existential crisis, an international crisis of a changing world order and a domestic crisis where the rule of the current ruling elite is in question. What is seldom talked about is that the current crisis is a manifestation of internal contradictions of the system of capitalism itself, especially as it was reconstituted after World War II, and of the global system that was set up, designed to resolve the internal contradictions of capitalism—what had often been called the export of contradictions to the global economy. 

The globalization and financialization of capitalism has nearly globalized the contradictions of capitalism rather than making them go away. But we’re now of course at a turning point in history. It is not enough to declare, as almost everybody does these days, that the sky is falling and America is in a crisis of decline. 

What, besides gloom-and-doom, do we say to our people? Many people would define themselves as being Left merely based upon the fact that they have a pessimistic narrative to declare to the people. 

And what do we say, that is the Free School, relative to uniting the strategically decisive elements in our society to bring about the change towards a new people’s democracy in this country? If all we have to say is that the sky is falling, it is an admission of our—and when I say “our” I’m not talking about us in particular—but about the Left’s failure of vision and courage. Because the narrative of “the sky is falling” becomes a justification for doing nothing and retreating from struggle, because along with the narrative of “the sky is falling” is the assumption that the American people do not have the capacity to do anything about it.

Furthermore most of those who shout the loudest about “the sky is falling” see the problems of the moment as being produced by working people, the poor and the lower middle classes. Again this is sheer cowardice on their part because they do not mention any type of scientific analysis of the capacity of the people. And here when we say a scientific analysis of the capacity of the people, we’re talking, or at least I’m talking about that type of sociology which is most associated with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. 

Literally a phenomenology of the collectivities of large groups of people. And this is a very important question: what can we know about our people and their capacity? And how do we study that capacity? And that is not not to say because we acknowledge the capacity of the American people that we are predicting a victory for the people. That is yet to be determined. But at the end of the day, without a way to study the sociology of the people, which I’ve also called the phenomenology of large collectives—phenomenology again is a concept which means the study of that which we experience and perceive. 

And most of what passes for a sociology or phenomenology of the people turns out to be journalistic and commentary rather than scientific analysis. And when we say scientific, I’m not speaking in a way of saying that the social sciences or sociology is only scientific if it imitates the natural sciences, be they physics, biology, chemistry—that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the specific and unique ways of studying human beings. And I associate that not exclusively but in a large way with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois because what he did was not just proclaim the need for science, but he conducted scientific studies especially of the American people and especially of the African American people. So that’s what I am talking about.

But the unscientific—in fact pretty much anti-scientific when it comes to the study of society—approach of most of the Left turns out to indeed be a move towards political counter-revolution, which is to say, I’m not saying that the Left is marching down the street or calling for consolidation of the ruling elite. They don’t do that. But I’m saying that objectively, the stances that they take are so aligned with the ideological and political objectives of the ruling elite that a good part of the Left turns out to be a part of the counter-revolutionary or counter-insurgency, counter-rebellion movement that currently exists among the people.

Again, this unscientific and indeed counter-revolutionary stance is associated with certain theories which come and go so quickly that you don’t even have time to explore them before they’re no longer relevant, or you don’t hear them any more. And among them is the 1619 Project—when have you heard about that lately? Settler colonialism. Well, is it still a viable theory? Various iterations of wokeness and identity politics, which again seems to be taking its last breaths. Afro-centrism. Afro-pessimism. Afro-futurism. And the “Afro” means that it is addressing African Americans. That’s why they put “Afro” in front of pessimism or futurism or centrism, a claim that I would challenge by the way.

All of these “Afros” never address the central socio-political category among African Americans and that is the black proletariat. And without that, all of the talk of “Afro” this and “Afro” that is empty and hollow word making and not scientific analysis. Along with these are liberal reformists, often calling themselves socialist and left. I include here Bernie Sanders, AOC, hopefully not Cornel West [laughs] but we’ll explore that a little more. But all of this is a distraction, or distractions, and that’s why they keep coming at us or at the people so regularly. One ceases to get traction and here comes something else. That doesn’t get traction and then there’s something new.

But they are distractions and they are designed by those who promote them, if not by those who come up with the theories themselves, to turn the strategic forces that are capable of being decisive in democratic and revolutionary change, to turn those forces on each other and against each other. In other words, every theory that I have mentioned objectively disunites the people and especially the strategic forces. Not one of them—and think about it—take any, take Afro-pessimism, take Afro-centrism, take settler colonialism. None of them have called for a unity of the forces capable of changing the society from an autocracy and an oligarchy, that’s our political situation, to a new people’s democracy. In fact concepts like democracy and people’s democracy never come out of the mouths of the proponents of these various theories, which is so interesting—a way of studying these theories is to study what is absent in their narratives.

What is absent in their theoretical constructions. And by seeing what is absent we get a better sense of what these theories are actually designed to do, or how they function in a moment of political crisis.

Martin Wolf, the influential columnist in the Financial Times and perhaps one of the most reliable and clearest of writers in Anglo-American bourgeois journalism wrote an essay—I think it appeared about a week ago—entitled “America is feeling buyer’s remorse at the world it built.”  Buyer’s remorse, you know, if you go to the department store and you buy a new suit or a new dress and it looks nice in the store but when you get home and you put it on, it doesn’t look quite that way on you, buyer’s remorse is what you feel. 

And what Wolf is saying is that the United States which built the post-WWII capitalist order, which is probably one of the most, if not the most powerful global order to sustain a system based upon the centrality of one hegemon which constitutes an empire itself.

Let me restate that. What the United States built after World War II, the destruction of Europe and a good part of Asia, was a system centered upon U.S. economic and military hegemony and the assumption that to hold the global capitalist order together, there not only had to be a single hegemon, but the single hegemon had to constitute itself as an empire, financially, economically, and militarily. That’s why you end up with at least 800—some people say a thousand—U.S. military bases on foreign soil around the world. That is why the dollar had to be the global instrument of investment, finance, trade. And it had to be unchallenged, and on and on and on. That is why all of the institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the general agreement on trade and tariffs, you know. All of these mechanisms and institutions were centered upon a special and dominant role for the United States.

And if you look at the IMF, if you look at the World Bank, these global instruments of finance and neocolonialism, you can see the United States is one nation but it has 25 or 26% of the voting power, literal veto power over what the rest of the nations would do. Even as we move forward to the 1990s and the World Trade Organization, this neoliberal reconfiguration of an earlier, you know, right after World War II form of organizing the global economy and trade, the World Trade Organization became a neoliberalization of that, a reconfiguration of a previous organization of the global economy. However the World Trade Organization comes at a time when not only the United States is more powerful in the global economy than ever before, and not only—and this is key—when the United States and by extension Europe felt that they could tame China and that China would become like Europe and America and something close to being a liberal democracy, but not a competitor and challenge to the domination of the major centers of world capitalism, in particular the United States, Japan and Europe.

And so the U.S. felt, the U.S. elite felt that they would get a tighter grip and be in a more manageable position vis-à-vis the world and the world economy through the World Trade Organization, which is more a set of agreements and treaties between the nations of the world than it is just an organization. But the World Trade Organization was seen as a way to deepen the control of U.S. finance over the world economy.

Now, like [James] Baldwin talks about the price of the ticket—his way of talking about how every action has a reaction, every intention has a consequence and all the consequences are not intended. There are many unintended consequences. But intentionally, this new financial order was predicated upon the deindustrialization of the United States, setting off processes of economic inequality, poverty and the subduing and undermining of the power of the working class, either through their unions, through other organizations, the working class’s expression and power.

In other words, the new financial order, in contrast to what came after World War II, was predicated upon the deindustrialization especially of the United States. This is something that we have been studying here in Philadelphia and the deindustrialization, I’ve compared it or analogized it to the defeat of Reconstruction and its consequences. And if you want an immediate explanation for all that we see around us, including the Kensingtons of the world here in Philadelphia and all around the country by the way—the growing poverty, the fact that government statistics are not telling even half of the truth about employment, unemployment, poverty and so on. The fact that millions of Americans have literally disappeared, are not counted in unemployment figures, labor force participation figures, education, or anything else.

All of this is a consequence of this new configuration that is crystallized in the World Trade Organization and all of its agreements. Part of the conflict that the U.S. is provoking with China is the fact that China is not cooperating with the United States especially in upholding the dollar and upholding the relationships of hegemony and subordination. That China is not satisfied with playing second fiddle and that China is actively constructing new relationships both among Asians, what some people call the Eurasian continent, but also most importantly, what we call an Afro-Asiatic reconfiguration, a re-centering of human civilization and re-centering of the centers of democracy and world economic power.

I think that Wolf is very important in this article. He says, and I’m quoting, “More narrowly, the administration sees itself as confronting four huge challenges: the hollowing out of the industrial base –” by the way, this is why I like Martin Wolf. A clarity and honesty that you don’t get from the economic writers in The New York Times including Paul Krugman—I don’t know how they gave him a Nobel Prize for anything but he did get one. 

Secondly, “the rise of a geopolitical and security competitor” meaning China. Third, “The accelerating climate crisis.” And fourth, and I wish to underline, “The impact of rising inequality on democracy itself.” 

So rather than saying “the rebellion”, what we’re calling a political rebellion of the people against the elites, the elite narrative in this country is that it’s all Trump and his fascist followers. But what Martin Wolf says, accurately, is that the rebellion of the people is rooted in the economic inequality that just went wild and it’s being metastasized or spread from the 1990s till today.

Never has the United States experienced such vast inequality as we are experiencing now. Even at the height of the Great Depression of the 1930s, I don’t believe that the inequality was as great as it is today. I would just add to this growing inequality, that the inequality is a signature, a measure of growing poverty among the working class. That the working class is poorer today than it has been in maybe fifty years or even more. Sometimes these things are hard to measure, the government statistics are unreliable. So one has to rely upon what in sociology we call ethnography or experience, or also we call it participant observation: living, talking, breathing, and seeing the people’s actual lives.

So Wolf says that these four challenges—and I think Wolf says as he concludes the article that not only will these be difficult challenges for the ruling elite in the United States to meet, but he is pessimistic about whether or not the current ruling elite will be capable of addressing these four challenges. If you don’t mind me saying, you know, we have taken many tours around Philadelphia over the last few years. I’m saying we as the Free School, and we’ve looked at the conditions of the people, we’ve looked at the deindustrialization in Philadelphia—the undoing of the manufacturing base, be it in garment production, be it in shipbuilding, be it in transportation and the export and import of goods in and out of the country, the riverfront, the longshoremen’s industry.

And I’m certain that if people did these same kinds of ethnographies in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, the undermining of the steel industry—huge. And how the decline of the standard of living of the working class is correlated with deindustrialization. And deindustrialization—there’s technological change that means that less labor can do more things, more work, produce more things. But then there’s intentional deindustrialization where you uproot the whole manufacturing base of your country. And re-establish it in parts of the world where labor is very cheap. 

And that’s what they did. They did it behind the backs of ordinary workers and often with the collusion of labor leaders. This was not [just] the Republicans. It was the Republicans and the Democrats, but more than anything the permanent state, the permanent government, the unelected government of elites that control power in this country.

I would say in dialectical terms, the contradictions already present in 1945 have matured. They have become systemically threatening. In other words, often contradictions that define a phenomenon or a system can mature to the point where those contradictions become an existential threat to the system as it exists. In evolutionary biological terms, it’s what the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould calls punctuated equilibrium: that moment when small changes become huge ones and what are incremental changes and small crises—such as, one might say the recession of 2008, the Great Recession—can eventuate in a certain moment, under certain circumstances, into an existential crisis that can only be resolved by changing the nature of the social and political relations of a society.

I think it is fair to say we are at the moment of punctuated equilibrium. Another way to talk about the same thing is in the language of Antonio Gramsci, we talk about him all the time. Where the old is dying, where the contradictions of the system call out to be resolved in a radical way. The old is dying, but what Gramsci saw in the 1930s: the new could not yet be born. There’s somewhere in between “the new cannot be born” and “the new being born.”

And it leaves one often with a sense of uncertainty. One can well imagine, we who do this all the time, almost as a profession. And it still is shocking and anxiety-producing. One can imagine for people who do not have the opportunity to do what we do, what the world must look like. And the fear and anxiety. The emotional and mental illness, the drug addiction. All and varied attempts to escape from this reality become so much a part of the life world of many millions of people.

I think to understand that and to then see its opposite in the rise of movements of political rebellion is what we are looking at and I will return to that in a moment. So the ruling elite felt that by reducing the standard of living and wages and salaries of workers in the United States, which they successfully did with the deindustrialization, with new forms of neo-colonialism, with the rise of global poverty including in the United States the most advanced, or the largest we are told, economy in the world, vast poverty and the rise of unheard of inequality—is all a part of the same cloth. 

And there can be no discussion of this moment without discussing these factors. And I think Martin Wolf is honest enough to say that the threat to democracy is not a single man or the Proud Boys or the Boogalo Boys or whatever small group of “white nationalists” that you can point to, but something deeper and something systemic and that is this vast and growing inequality. The system is unstable. It is in a state of disequilibrium and uncertainty.

The elites, and you hear this when you hear them talk about the stock market and investment and what, as they say the markets are doing, by which they mean the stock markets and money markets. The thing that they most wish to avoid is disequilibrium. They want a system where it settles into a state of equilibrium which means not too much inflation, not too much unemployment, and as a consequence of equilibrium, certainty relative to investments and the future.

However they cannot assume any of that at this point. I’m talking about the elite—the financial and the political elite. They cannot assume stability, they cannot assume equilibrium and they cannot assume certainty. The best bet if you are betting people is towards instability, disequilibrium, and uncertainty. And at its core, the central question before the U.S. people in the 2024 elections, especially for the presidency is—and this is what is difficult for a lot of people to see, especially on the Left, which we’ll come back to—the central question before the American people is a question of whether or not the ruling elite has any legitimacy.

This election will be decided on the basis of political questions about whether or not the ruling elite should continue to rule the country. The last time we came close to such a reckoning in the political history of the United States was the 1860 election, which led to the election of Lincoln and in 1861 a movement of southern slave and Confederate states out of the Union and thus the Civil War.

I find it hard to analogize that situation with the current one that we have and I won’t do it. I think we’re looking at something qualitatively or fundamentally different today. However the overriding question on the table for the American people is whether or not they will vote to continue the rule of the current ruling elite. And if, you know, you just listen on Twitter or Facebook or on cable news, reading in the newspaper and you pull the veil back or the layers on the onion back, you hear it so clearly. They all are saying whether or not “democracy”—and which means their rule—when the elite talk about “democracy” they’re not talking about the people, they’re talking about their rule that advantages them—whether their ‘democracy’ will continue or whether the people in 2024 will reject them.

No other major country in the world faces such a reckoning. Nowhere in Europe, in spite of the mass marches around the system of retirement, or the yellow vest movement a couple of years ago, or even in France again, the student youth movement against the killing of the young North African. Nowhere in the capitalist world is the political question put before the people in an election so direct and so stark as is the case in the United States. The question before the American people is, “Will we be able, on our terms, to find a way out of the political crisis?”

On terms generated from the people. Richard Hass, retiring president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in a recent interview with The New York Times, about a week ago said, and again, he’s dealing with foreign affairs, international relations. He made the statement that the greatest threat to America’s security is not from any foreign competitor nation like China, like Russia, like the whole new configuration of nations not beholden to the West. He said that that’s not the greatest threat to the United States and “our democracy.” The greatest threat is domestic. You can’t say it any clearer than that.

The greatest threat to the rule of the current elite is the political rebellion and challenge to their rule. Anything close to this has not been seen in the United States since the 1860s. Nothing approaching a challenge to the ruling elite has occurred since 1945 and the configuration of this new American-dominated system of economics, politics, and military relationships. Nothing close to this. We are in a unique and uncharted territory.

Even as Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the Treasury and to a lesser extent—and I don’t know fully how to take his speech—Jake Sullivan’s speech about a foreign policy for the middle class. I guess my first reaction was to fall on the floor laughing. I mean, even if that’s what you wanted to do it’s too late in the game. You’ve taken the nation down the road of war and austerity and now you want to win the working class back by saying well, “This foreign policy of military bases is really a foreign policy for the middle class.” Well I don’t think the middle class—by which they mean working class, middle-income people—I don’t think the working class believes anything that Jake Sullivan is saying. But Janet Yellen, in her recent trip to the People’s Republic of China—and she was going very humbly. Not using the insulting language of Joe Biden. Now the question is, is he saying these things intentionally, that is that Xi Jinping is a dictator, which means since he’s a dictator and since the United States is upholding global democracy, we the United States have a right to bring him down. And I don’t think the Chinese misunderstand what that language means.

A lot of people say, well it’s because Joe Biden is beyond early stages of Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know what he’s saying most of the time. Some would say it was an intentional statement where he wanted the Chinese to know that the next time a person like Anthony Blinken goes to China, don’t you Chinese insult him, which they literally did—I wouldn’t call it insulting, they just read the Riot Act to him. 

But anyway, Hass says that China is not our greatest problem. The greatest problem is the internal political rebellion and until the internal political rebellion is addressed and some type of compromise, at least from the standpoint of the ruling class—until that occurs, any dream of a capitalist reset is just that: a dream. And a dream that will not be realized until the nightmare of the current moment is resolved. 

Always, I think in moments like this, especially where the ideological struggle becomes paramount—those who think that you can forge a way forward out of this crisis without dealing with the multiple and varied ideas and their connection to the interests of the dominant elites and to the rising masses of people, until that is fully fleshed out it is very difficult to talk about a way forward. In other words ideology plays a huge role at this time, more than at any time in my life and I’m certain at any time in your lifetimes. 

But I think history has spoken. It is too late to remake the capitalist system upon the foundations that it was remade in 1945 and in the 1980s and 1990s. In the last 80 years as Martin Wolf has insisted, a system of capitalism, imperialism, neocolonialism, anti-democracy financialization of economic processes, deindustrialization, poverty, and inequality have all reached an end moment, an endpoint.

This way of doing things cannot go forward. This way of doing things must be radically changed and the political rebellion that we are experiencing in this country in one or another way is making that point. We’ll come back to that. 

But the other side of this, and you see it in the flailing and contradictory statements and wild proposals and war talk about wars that they will not and cannot win but nonetheless they keep threatening it. All of that indicates that the intellectual and political forces that constructed the capitalist order coming out of 1945 and being reconfigured in the 1990s—those forces have no answers for the crisis of this moment.

For us in the Free School—and we have tried to think scientifically but also to see a positive way out for the people, and why not? Is it our function to “convince the people the sky is falling and nothing can be done, and it’s your fault that we’re in the state that we’re in”? Is that what we should be doing? I don’t think so. Our vision, our imaginary is based upon the possibility of a human future of domestic and global democracy, of rebuilding human civilization and rebuilding the economy of this country not from the standpoint of the financial oligarchy and the military-industrial complex but to build a new economy, which I like to call a peace industrial economy.

And I’d like to underline both “peace” and “industrial”. To reverse the deindustrialization. Reverse the militarization of the economy. Reverse the financialization of the economy and build an economy which is rooted in the needs and interests of the people—a democratic economy, a peace industrial economy. We have proceeded from three conceptualizations—I’d like to restate them. One, in the struggle to achieve a new people’s democracy, a new people will be born and from this, new possibilities. The idea of a new American people. Yes, we are in a crisis, but every crisis presents the opportunity of creating something new. 

Secondly, along with the new American people, an Afro-Asiatic reconfiguration of the planet and of world human relationships. Now, people who deal with international relations don’t like to talk in the terms that we’re talking in. They prefer to talk in terms of “great power this” and “this nation that” and “great power competition” which helps to understand some things but I don’t think gets at the essence of what is happening. 

To put it another way, we’re not just looking at the replacement of one powerful nation by another, i.e. replacing U.S. global hegemony by Chinese global hegemony. That is not the essence of what we’re seeing. It is a deeper civilizational reconfiguration. Some people talk of the South-South relation. Well yes, that’s going on. But what I think is more significant is this idea of an Afro-Asiatic reconfiguration—which does not negate Europe, and it sees Latin America as part of Afro-Asia. As it really is, in fact. Civilizationally. 

The Afro-Asiatic reconfiguration comes out of our understanding of the Bandung Conference, of the vision of Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. And of the need of a democratic world order  which would also be a part of making democracy a more realizable project here in the United States. 

The third one is our slogan that, “With W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King we march to achieve our nation.” I think all three of these can resonate with people. They can be understood by people. It is a positive imaginary, which people are searching for. The content of each can be enhanced and developed by people themselves, and will be. Our experiences in the Free School, with various churches and religious movements and communities and individual people, suggest that there is something resonant, something that resonates with ordinary people with these ideas and these formulations.

We have insisted that the black proletariat in their vast millions, both as working people and as poor people, has throughout American history played a central role in the fight for democracy from the time of slavery through Reconstruction up to the Third American Revolution which we call often the Civil Rights Movement. The strategy of the Free School, I like to talk about as a whole people strategy, a strategy of the whole people. A strategy to hopefully unite the people in this moment of political rebellion. That is why for the U.S., the 2024 election and the movements emerging from this election is a moment of very high significance. 

A moment like this and possibilities and dangers like this, none of us have experienced in our lifetimes. Just to what we’d like to call the triad of opposition—and this is when they say, things get real. Not so much the theoretical, ideological but the concrete expression of all of this and movements, campaigns, candidacies, and important individuals.

First of all, objectively, the triad, which we say is Trump, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Cornel West, are a reflection not of themselves but of what is going on among the people. The depth of anger, discontent and alienation—I say it over and over again—of the people.

Trump could not be Trump were he not speaking to the dissatisfaction of something close to 75 million people, probably more at this point. The fact that he leads in all polls in terms of the Republican nomination, but in most polls is leading Biden in the presidential race at this point. And frankly it can only get worse for Biden, which leads me to the conclusion that he will not be the candidate in 2024 for all kinds of reasons.

However the triad of opposition up to this point is mainly a triad opposing the existing order. Its weakness on all sides is a viable positive program for the people, such as a proposal for a peace economy, a peace industrial economy, a democratic economy, a new democratic dispensation where power is wrested from the elites and redistributed among the people. None of them have yet spoken of a vast anti-poverty program. Indeed you will hear the slogan “Medicare for All” especially from Cornel—nothing wrong with that by the way. But “Medicare for All” does not resolve the crisis of the people. It must go along with a peace economy and an anti-poverty program as serious as the program to wipe out extreme poverty in China was.

However, and I think, you know we talked about this quite a bit—of the three, Cornel remains the weakest voice. The least focused upon the task of this time and the most ambiguous and contradictory in his statements. This does not in any way diminish the importance of what he does, but for it to rise to its potential Cornel must rise to the challenge of the fight for democracy. 

Now, I have learned from [Free School member] Emily [Dong]—well I get this from Emily, that the contradictions that we see in Cornel West are really a manifestation, a reflection of the contradictions of the Left itself. It is clear that Cornel West’s movement so quickly from the People’s Party, that had drafted him to the Green Party was I think not because the People’s Party is beset by contradictions. Because I think the Green Party might be beset with even deeper contradictions which might even undermine Cornel West’s ability to get the nomination. I’m certain in the Green Party there are longtime Green Party people who would challenge Cornel. So the Green Party is filled with contradictions. 

What is said, the Green Party has ballot access in a number of states, it’s not clear how many. That’s an advantage if the goal of Cornel’s run is to get votes rather than to change minds. I think that Cornel has to be clear—and sometimes I don’t think he is good enough about this—that what he is doing is throwing himself and his capacity—he has a tremendous ability to think, to talk, to formulate, to address people. 

He must see what he is doing as a part of building a vast movement for democracy, something that neither Trump nor RFK can do quite like he can do. So it is not a matter of getting votes. In fact, he has to understand that he can get a whole lot of votes and lose the people. And he could get hardly any votes and win the people. And when Cornel says he’s influenced by the radical Christianity of Martin Luther King, I think he has to understand what Martin Luther King was doing. Martin Luther King changed the country without ever having been elected to any political office, or having even run for political office.

And I think we need a Martin Luther King-type person that Cornel West could be at this time. But it means dislodging himself from a good part of the Left which he thinks he has to appeal to in order to have any relevance—and I don’t think that is the case. I think there are millions of people out there who want to hear what a person like Cornel West has to say, as there are millions of people—and they’re always coming out to these Trump rallies in the tens of thousands—who want to hear what Trump has to say. The millions who want to hear what RFK has to say. People want to hear oppositional narratives that clarify what the real situation is.

Again, I just wish to repeat something that I said last week— with the Russian Revolution and the end of World War I, what had been identified for close to 70 years as the revolutionary Left in Europe was what was called democratic socialism. In fact the leading party in Germany and in Europe was the German Social Democratic Party, the party out of which Lenin comes, was known as the Social Democratic Labor Party. In Germany, the party of the revolutionary left. Rosa Luxemburg, Carl Leibnig and others whose names I don’t remember right off the top— they were members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. They broke with it over the question of the Social Democratic Party supporting war funding for World War I.

Ultimately they formed something called the Spartacus League which led to the Communist Party in Germany and the Russian Revolution. In the Russian Revolution they renamed the Bolsheviks the Communist Party and hence the formation of an international movement called the World Communist Movement.

So we went from social democracy as the expression of radical and revolutionary change to Communism as the expression of radical and revolutionary change. We are in such a moment now. 

So there is not a need to mourn the passing of a Left that has outlived its historical usefulness. And by that I’m talking about Bernie Sanders-kind of social democracy, the AOCs, the Democratic Socialists of America, the CPUSA—and I would include, by the way, the PSL—and that whole network of nonprofit institutions and organizations that parade as movement organizations and as left organizations. Among that complex is the army of left intellectuals, podcasters, online journals, and left commentators.

None of them thus far have demonstrated the capacity to rise to the level of the political rebellion that the American people are now engaged in. I’ll just end here. It is not enough to say that things are bad. The question is, what will we do? What are our answers? 

And just because we have a way of thinking about the crisis and the way forward does not mean that either things will go as we think they will or want them to go, or that we have it right. I think we do, I think we’re closer to having it right than most people are. But all of this will ultimately be decided in life and on the great chessboard of history. 

And in that great chessboard, the ruling elite are trying to avoid checkmate. How they will maneuver, what moves they will make, we don’t know. War is always a trump card for that. War as a political maneuver to consolidate power. So war is always on the table, how far they will go with this Ukraine debacle—and they are losing—will the United States openly, along with what they call a coalition of the willing: Poland, Lithuania, the United States, maybe some other countries, Moldova. Will they go militarily, put boots on the ground—American troops in Ukraine, which would mean a direct U.S.-Russia war?

Will they up the stakes in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits? Are they prepared to threaten China with nuclear weapons? All of this has to be considered. So while their hand is weak, they still have pieces to play on this chessboard and their actions will have to be addressed by counteractions of the American people.