The death of Andrea Dworkin didn’t even make the small print news in Russia. Feminism, at least the feminism of the kind Westerners take for granted, never caught on. Patronizing Westerners often see that as a sign that Russians are culturally too primitive. Russians, particularly Russian women — and particularly the Russian female intelligentsia — literally laugh and roll their eyes when you mention feminism of the American or West European brand. The reason is fairly simple: Russians haven’t quite learned the Western art of sloganeering for radical philosophy without meaning a word of what they say. A Russian woman would assume that if you’re a feminist, you’d actually have to live out the philosophy. In that sense, Andrea Dworkin was, in her own way, the only “Russian” feminist in America — and that is why she was so hated.

There was a strange undertone of smug satisfaction in the obituaries for Andrea Dworkin. The fact that she died relatively young, at 58, got a lot of space, followed by long descriptions of her obesity and the medical problems that supposedly resulted from it. In other words, she was fat, fat, fat. Case closed.

Then there were her stories of rape and abuse, which the London Times called “probability-defying.” American papers were more sly and cowardly, of course, but managed to imply that she was crazy as well as fat.

Feminists more comfortable in the meanstream had some very strange comments on her. Elaine Showalter, a sleek Princeton gender commissar, said, “I don’t wish Andrea Dworkin any harm, but I doubt that many women will get up at 4 am to watch her funeral.”

If you know anything about the verbal habits of upper-echelon academics, this is easy to translate: “Die, you bitch! Shut up and die so I can dance on your XL grave!”

I can’t recall so much barely-concealed delight in a celebrity death since Sam Kinison was wiped out by a couple of drunken kids in a pickup. He had it coming, the papers of record informed us; he too was fat and crazy and said things you’re not supposed to say about women.

Dworkin’s fatness and madness hardly disqualify her from intellectual distinction. If we excluded the fat and/or crazy from recent intellectual history, we’d be left with a very bland, Clinton-style consensus. And that, of course, is the goal, the point of these non sequiturs. They’re great for dismissing loud, unbroken voices. American academics have a habit of skipping to the slur with disconcerting speed, as I found out a couple of years ago when I mentioned my love for Wallace Stevens’ poetry to a Film professor. She winced, then said, “Wasn’t he a racist?”

She didn’t really know or care whether Stevens was a racist. As I realized later, that wince meant that she hadn’t read Stevens, didn’t want to be shown up and so had simply reached for the nearest available non sequitur. The notion that Stevens might be a racist AND a great poet, just as Dworkin might be a fat loon AND a crucial figure in feminist intellectual history, is simply beyond our Beige compatriots.

The habit has sifted so far down it’s affected the dialogue of disaster films, as I noticed while watching a bunch of unconvincingly attractive pseudo-nerds try to survive the fastest Ice Age ever in theDay After Tomorrow. There’s a great scene where a male and female nerd, stranded in the NYC Public Library, are arguing about whether to burn Beyond Good and Evil for warmth. The guy says, “Nietzsche was the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century!” The woman replies, “Nietzsche was a chauvinist who was in love with his sister!” It gave me a nightmare vision of what Lite Beer Super Bowl ads will be like in a few years, after everybody and their dog has been to grad school.

In the mating rituals of healthy people — that is, people who aren’t like Andrea Dworkin — these stylized collisions about ideology, usually personified by clashes about an historical figure, are usually no more than flirtation. That’s literally true in Day After Tomorrow; in the last scene of the movie, the male and female nerd are holding hands in the rescue helicopter, their Nietzsche dispute remembered, if at all, as the first scene of a third-hand screwball comedy they’re using as their romance template.

We’re supposed to know that you don’t take it seriously — you don’t live as you speak. What I revere about Dworkin is that she never realized that. Dworkin is hated so intensely simply because she accepted first-wave feminism fully. She blurted naively the implications of that ideology. And that appalled and embarrassed millions of smoother women, who liked the cool, fashionable tune feminism gave their bitching but had never had any intention of letting it get in the way of their romantic career plans.

I remember, ladies. I was there — at Berkeley in the 70s. And I was like Dworkin, a naive loser from a family which actually lived the ideology it claimed. Hers was the classic east-coast Jewish progressive tradition; mine was the most severe, self-flagellating brand of Irish Catholicism. The common denominator was the lack of compromise. Dworkin had a great line on this: “I don’t find compromise unacceptable, I find it incomprehensible.”

When she came of age, feminists like Steinem were speaking in the rhetoric of third-world national-liberation movements. Their case was simple and unassailable: women were oppressed, the biggest and most deeply, ubiquitously abused ‘minority’ on the planet. It was a view so simple that an intellect as subhuman as Yoko Ono was capable of absorbing it and translating it into “Woman is the nigger of the world.”

The difference is that Yoko would never have dreamed of letting her revelation get in the way of her relationship with that mangy meal ticket of hers, John. He was the reason she was able to get her 20-minute yodels on wax, baby. No way was she going to ditch him. Being the ultimate groupie, trading sex (let’s just move right along rather than get into what “sex” meant for John and Yoko) for money and fame had nothing to do with that line about women as niggers.

But there were people like me who’d been raised all wrong, who didn’t know any better, who actually believed that Steinem’s essays, which we had to read in our Norton Anthology, implied a code of conduct. And above all, that meant that man/woman mixing was going to come to a grinding halt. It was, according to the national-liberation model, fraternizing with the enemy. People were garroted for that kind of thing in places like Algeria, and Frantz Fanon had told us all how glorious it was that revolutionary piano wire was used to enforce this Spartan revolutionary separatism.

In my book Pleasant Hell I describe at length how I drifted sadly around the Berkeley campus in the 70s, convinced that everyone there was as bitterly lonely as I, and that this was simple historical necessity. And how shocked I was, happening to walk across campus at a later hour one night, to realize that men and women still fraternized with a vengeance once the sun went down. This may sound silly, but it was the biggest surprise of my life, and my introduction to the sleazy agility with which normal Americans dodge the inconvenient implications of the ideologies they mouth during the day.

Dworkin took the same Norton Anthology truisms to their obvious, clear, unbearable conclusions. If women were an oppressed group on the model of Fanon’s Algerians, Ho’s Vietnamese or Yoko’s “niggers,” then the steps to a revolutionary cleansing were simple:

1. The oppressed minority must re-learn history and re-evaluate society in order to see the horrors beneath the facade of normalcy.

In 70s campus feminism, this meant getting excited about footbinding, bar-b-que’d witches, and then acquiring a proper alienation from standard male-female interaction. In other words, learn all of the horrible oppressions males have unleashed upon women, and then cite the examples as reasons why you hate men and demand a fundamental change in the relationship.

This, comrades, was the tricky part. What Dworkin’s simple, loyal, canine mind could never grasp was that for a sly player like Steinem, this first stage of the process was fine, no matter how violent the denunciation of men and patriarchy became. Why not? As long as one didn’t let it interfere with one’s life (Steinem’s relationships with a series of male billionaires, for example), then Hell — the more violent the denunciation, the better!

Because — and this was another wrinkle I, like Dworkin, was far too naive to grasp — most meanstream men were in on the joke too. They were, in fact, more aware of what a joke it was than the young women students who in many cases, truly thought they believed their own clenched-fist chantings. The male response to 70s feminism was horror from old fools like Mailer, but a tolerant smile from the cool dudes whose job it was to disarm and fuck the feisty ladies. Their stance was a slightly more subtle, coy version of “you’re so cute when you’re mad, honey.”

2. The oppressed minority must mobilize, replacing its colonial relationship with the oppressors with ties to comrades among the oppressed.

What this meant for a “sane” or normal 70s woman depended on the degree of identification with the movement. At least, it meant lip service to a female version of “bros before ho’s” — high-profile socializing with female friends, during which male company was noisily disparaged. (This type of socializing, of course, was already a common habit of middle-class female socializing; giving it an ideological cast was simply a matter of replacing a few jargon terms.)

At most, it meant lip service of another sort: the big plunge into lesbianism. If you wanted to be a professional activist, you had to make the jump. A Women’s Studies lecturer I knew said a colleague once told her outright, “You’ll never have any street cred, Jennifer, because you don’t sleep with women.” For meanstreamers, the lesbian allegiance was all anyone could ever be asked to give; it was, in fact, more than most were willing to make. All you really needed to do was grit your tongue and give it a try — a rite of passage, a gesture of solidarity. After that you could get back to planning your wedding. That’s why the university lesbian interlude has been compressed into mock acronyms like BUG, “bisexual until graduation.”

But even full-time dyking around had little to do with the original model, the Fanon national-liberation rhetoric. He and Ho and Che didn’t advocate fucking other proletarians; they were in favor of wiping out the Other, the Oppressor. Fucking other revolutionaries was, if anything, a dubious way to spend time owed the Revolution.

Which brings us to Dworkin’s sexual orientation. If she was a lesbian, she was the worst I ever saw. And I should know — read my book. She called herself a lesbian, but then she also called herself a celibate. Even Morrissey would be scratching his head at that point. And besides, once the term acquired a positive connotation, everybody was a lesbian — Jane Fucking Austen was a card-carrying dyke, according to the ideologically-correct journals. Men at UC Berkeley who were cool but still wanted to fuck women took to calling themselves “male lesbians.” I don’t want to dwell on this; it wasn’t a great moment in American culture.

The point is that Dworkin never offered the world a significant other of the proper gender. Instead, she lived openly with…a man. I don’t mean to dwell on such sordid things, but it’s a matter of public record. The point was that they didn’t fuck.

And in this, once again she was a good orthodox Fanon/Guevara feminist. For the revolutionary, the point is not to screw in your own class but to stop getting it on with the enemy. And this was something America’s avid, proud young lesbians-until-that-first-big-job never, never promised to do. They’d made their point by licking girls; after that, they had every intention of fucking, or as Dworkin would insist, getting fucked by men.

For Fanon and the rest, any interaction between the Oppressor and the Oppressed is to the disadvantage of the Oppressed. That’s axiomatic. What that means in Dworkin’s simple, obvious reading of the Revolutionary Scriptures is that when men fuck women, it’s always an act of oppression.

That was where she went too far in the views of her more flexible colleagues. They didn’t like having their options reduced. That, in the view of an American striver, was the worst thing you could do to anybody.

Dworkin didn’t know a thing about her audience. Didn’t know they were talking career and fun when she was talking sacrifice, martyrdom. (It’s no accident her heroine was Joan of Arc. Dworkin was a Catholic without knowing it, an old-time Catholic who never suspected it of herself. She and J. K. Toole, another fat loser who died young, are the only Catholic writers to survive, for a while, in modern America.)

Dworkin maintained this strictly orthodox view in her most-hated book, Intercourse (1987), arguing that heterosexual intercourse was rape. Oh, and please, don’t tell me that’s not her argument. I not only read and reread that book but taught it to a group of horrified Berkeley students in 1990. That damn well is what she said. You could tell it by the expression on their little faces — a great moment!

Even the reviewers who praised Dworkin did it in ways intended to alert their readers that they were encountering a nut, someone who was to be admired rather than listened to. Intercourse was “daring,” “radical,” “outrageous” — in other words, beyond the pale. It was something to have on your shelf, or your reading list, as ballast, another sort of street cred. It was never meant to accuse women who fucked men of, to coin a phrase, sleeping with the enemy.

But that was exactly what Dworkin meant, and all she meant. It was so obvious; the real shock is that it took so long for someone in the women’s movement to say that and get noticed for it.

The last stage in Fanon’s and Guevara’s blueprint was the one that put Dworkin out of play forever:

4. Kill the oppressor.

That’s what the revolutionaries said, and they didn’t mean it figuratively. They meant get a fucking machete and kill a cop, take his gun and use that on as many of the oppressors as you can get. They were pretty damn clear on this, as clear as a Calvinist ruling out salvation by works. You could not overthrow the oppressor with harsh language, or the evil eye, or moving depictions of slum conditions. You had to kill the bastards. Are we clear?

And Dworkin, as loyal and dumb as the horse in Animal Farm, trotted along to this fatal fourth step — and found herself alone.

She said it, as usual, with simple clarity, in the language of Che Guevara. It must have amazed her that she even needed to say it; it had been so obvious from the start. Her pleas for resistance are couched in a wonderful diction, mixed of Catholic martyr-cult and Fanon’s call to jacquerie: “I’m asking you to give up your lies. I’m asking you to live your lives, honorably and with dignity. I’m asking you to fight. I am asking you to organize political support for women who kill men who have been hurting them…They resisted a domination that they were expected to accept. They stand there in jail for us, for every one of us who got away without having to pull the trigger.”

In the end, the most remarkable thing about Dworkin is that there was only one of her. Hundreds of millions of women more sly, raised with the notion of compromise and an immunity to ideology, scrambled away from the inconvenient implications of liberation rhetoric. She alone stood there on her famously arthritic knees, doing her simple best to fight the jihad she’d been fool enough to believe would actually take place.

What if they held a war and only one fat lady sang? You don’t need to ask; you’ve lived through it.

This article was first published in The eXile on April 22, 2005

Buy John Dolan’s novel “Pleasant Hell” (Capricorn Press).

Many people have sung the praises of the progressive government that came to power in Bolivia in 2006. Under the leadership of Evo Morales, unionist and former coca grower who led the relatively new MAS party to a sweeping victory, the Bolivian government has instituted a far reaching expansion of welfare and social services, while putting an end to decades of rightwing and military rule.

But the Left has a long history of proclaiming premature victories and shielding regimes that pay lip service to their values. And while Bolivia certainly is not hiding any gulag archipelago, there is a troubling underside to this “plurinational state” that needs to be examined before we can proclaim any revolutionary victory. With an eye to Egypt, many progressives have recently warned of the danger of seeing a popular revolution where something far more sinister is going on. The Left should also revisit its long held optimism about Morales.

First of all, Bolivia’s new social programs need to be demystified. The MAS government has taken the bold yet hardly unprecedented step of withholding a small share of the hydrocarbon profits from its booming gas industry. This is indeed a step against unmitigated corporate rapaciousness, but it is not a step towards revolution. For one thing, social struggles in Bolivia had already made unmitigated corporate rapaciousness untenable before 2006. In opposition to the government of the time, they defeated major neoliberal privatization projects, first at Cochabamba and then on a nationwide scale. The MAS government has only put into policy a reality that was created by hundreds of thousands of people in direct struggle. And this policy is not even as radical as, say, the New Deal. Minus Morales’ grandiose rhetoric, it’s not even as progressive as what Norway does with its gas profits, and there’s nothing revolutionary about Norway. It’s just another capitalist country that keeps people in line with high salaries or welfare checks instead of police truncheons. The sorry lot of immigrants in that Scandinavian paradise shows that the Norwegians have not created a new society.

And neither has Bolivia. As elsewhere, the social programs are used to restructure society in the interests of control. Take the money that the MAS government gives to mothers, for example. As far as public assistance goes, it’s a great form of protection, but only mothers who see Western-style doctors throughout their pregnancy and give birth in a hospital are eligible. In a country where home births, midwives, and holistic, non-commercial medicine are still viable traditions, this policy constitutes a major assault on indigenous cultures, as the indigenous feminist group Las Imillas points out.

But most feminists and other would-be dissidents have been kept quiet by the most effective strategy the Morales government has deployed: integrating the social movements into the State itself. Key leaders from all the important grassroots groups have been given positions in government ministries or elected straight onto the MAS ticket. What might have been the object of their criticism has become their employer.

And it’s not like the Bolivian government has avoided committing any outrages that feminists might criticize. At the end of last year, two MAS deputies assaulted two indigenous cleaning women, raping one of them, at a party in a provincial legislative assembly building and in sight of numerous other deputies. The one assault was scarcely mentioned in the media, but the rape was caught on video. While the government charged the two deputies with improper use of public office, they resisted charging them with rape for half a year, and their first move was to imprison the technician who leaked the surveillance video. The cleaning woman lost her job, while the provincial governor, also a MAS member, suggested the whole scandal had been organized by the rightwing opposition, a claim some pro-government feminists allegedly echoed.

[pullquote]The key reason why Bolivia’s MAS government cannot be considered revolutionary is because all its social programs are predicated on business-as-usual capitalist growth, whether this is the extraction of natural gas or the paving of the rainforest.[/pullquote]

The MAS strategy to silence social movements by incorporating them into the government is not new. Journalist Rafael Uzcátegui documents, in his book Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, how the Chavez regime that served as a major inspiration for Morales systematically institutionalized social movements and used them to protect the government from opposition, also hoodwinking international progressive celebrities like Michael Albert to become advocates for the regime. The political movements in Bolivia and Venezuela are closer to Peronism, itself a sort of gentle fascism, than to any revolutionary socialism. The link with Peronism was explicit in Kirchner’s Argentina, but in closely allied Bolivia and Venezuela it is just as evident.

The key reason why Bolivia’s MAS government cannot be considered revolutionary is because all its social programs are predicated on business-as-usual capitalist growth, whether this is the extraction of natural gas or the paving of the rainforest. They have quietly changed their much celebrated “Mother Earth” Law to allow the importation of genetically modified foods, and they have endangered the fragile altiplano ecosystem to boost their mass production of quinoa for international export.

A particularly egregious case that shows the many sinister dynamics of the Morales government at work is that of the Bioceanic Highway. The highway is one of many development projects being pushed by IIRSA, the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America, which is supported by the Inter-American Development Bank and in turn links up with NAFTA and Plan Pueblo Panama. The purpose of the highway is to link Atlantic and Pacific markets, extending from Brazil, through Bolivia, to Chile and Peru. In practical terms, the highway means an explosion in the commercialization of the South American interior and the death of the Amazon rainforest.

In Bolivia, the MAS government has plotted the highway’s route right through TIPNIS, a rainforest preserve that is also the protected home of several indigenous nations. Although MAS changed Bolivia’s constitution to make it the “plurinational state” that recognizes indigenous rights, these rights have proven to be nothing but scraps of paper. They do not guarantee indigenous access to the land or recognize the land as something other than a commodity, both prerequisites for the survival of indigenous lifeways.

Morales is an outspoken priest for the religion of progress, Western style, and in the face of local resistance he launched a major campaign to convince indigenous inhabitants of TIPNIS that the highway would be good for them. Without the highway, the government would not build any hospitals in the impoverished interior (encouraging traditional forms of healthcare was off the agenda). Despite the media blitz—after all the highway is supported by the Right and the Left—locals rejected the project in a major referendum. This was no setback for the democratic government of Morales, however. They announced they would simply prepare for a new referendum, much the same way the European Union just ignored the results when popular referenda in several member states vetoed the EU constitution. Referendum or no, construction on the highway is already in advanced stages in Bolivia, and huge swaths of rainforest have been paved over.

With a rhetoric that is surprisingly neoliberal, Morales defends the highway on the grounds that it will create more jobs. He is protected from accusations of being just another capitalist thanks to decades of work by populists in the South American Left, who have confused anti-capitalism with anti-imperialism and substituted anti-Americanism for anti-imperialism. This substitution seemed like a convenient and accurate generalization, as US capital was the biggest force in South America for a long time, but in reality it was nothing other than a disguised nationalism. Never mind that a country is more than its investors, nor that US capital has been largely overshadowed by European and Asian capital when it comes to South American development. Local capital has also become a force to be reckoned with. Case in point, the highway construction in Bolivia is being carried out by Bolivian companies and funded by Brazilian capital. For most of the supposedly anticapitalist Left in South America, this has been cause not for condemnation but for patriotic celebration.

And the celebration is a morbid one indeed. Aside from cutting the forest in half and exposing it to heavy pollution, the highway will also open it up to logging, poaching, and coca cultivation. Which is why Morales’ principal base, the Coca Growers’ Union that launched him into power, is an avid supporter of the highway. Specifically because it will allow them to cut down the rainforest and grow more coca on stolen indigenous land.

When thousands of indigenous people and their supporters protested the highway and began a multi-month march from the interior to La Paz, Morales accused them of being supported by the US government(in the process tacitly acknowledging that protest organizers’ phones had been tapped). This has been a consistent formula since 2006. Anyone protesting the government is accused to be in cahoots with the rightwing and the CIA. But the CIA is no longer necessary to protect business in South America. The new “revolutionaries” are more than capable.

In September 2011, police violently attacked the eighth indigenous march in defense of TIPNIS, injuring numerous participants, including several children. But the police are far from the most effective arms the MAS government employs for social control. Its preferred method of repression is to turn social movements against one another. MAS members and activists in the town of San Ignacio de Moxos organized a strike and blockade to try and stop the indigenous march. They also attacked a radio station that transmitted a call in support of the march.When the march finally reached La Paz, MAS mobilized the miners to oppose them. Now lured by promises that the highway would bring jobs, the same miners who had valiantly stood down the military in street fighting in 2005 now threw sticks of dynamite at indigenous marchers in front of the San Francisco church. They had already covered the walls of the city in pro-highway graffiti as the police looked on.

When some anonymous opponents of the highway began carrying out sabotage and arson actions in La Paz, the government arrested thirteen anarchists practically at random. Far to miss out on the greatest of Bush-era bandwagons, it charged them under Bolivia’s brand new anti-terrorism law. Nevermind that the social movements that defeated the rightwing regime frequently used molotovs, slingshots, heavy fireworks, and dynamite against security forces, setting fire to a bank was now to be considered terrorism, and setting off a smoke bomb in the lobby of the Vice Ministry of the Environment would be prosecuted as attempted murder against the Vice Minister.

There was no physical evidence connecting any of the arrested to the sabotage actions being prosecuted. The only reason for their arrest was that they represented a cross-section of the anarchist movement in La Paz. The prosecutor even told the mother of one of arrested that they knew he was innocent, but hoped he would give the police more information if he were locked up for long enough.

Most of the arrested were released. Of the three whom prosecutors continue to target, one was released into house arrest after collaborating with authorities, another was given house arrest in May of this year, just shy of one year in prison, and the third was released into house arrest about two months later.

As recently as July 22 of this year, the MAS government justified its practice of infiltrating the indigenous opposition to the highway. The struggle continues, but the social movements stay mum, or they actively support the highway.

The cynicism of Bolivian society only deepens as solidarity disappears, replaced by an ethos of progress and personal gain. But these newly cynical activists hold on to their practice of direct action, as when the people of San Ignacio held a strike and blockade to stop the indigenous march. While clashes like this began as a calculated government strategy to disable any opposition, they have begun to spiral out of control. In the city of Cochabamba, where groups of neighbors organized water committees to build their own water infrastructure, and then the whole city mobilized to heroically defeat the selling of the water to Bechtel, neighborhoods have begun fighting one another for control of the water.

Add to that the rampant patriotism, jingoism against Chile going back to a 19^th century border war, the growing militarism, the machine gun or shotgun toting cops in front of every single bank, and you can’t help but suspect that Bolivia is more of an authoritarian dystopia than a society in the throes of a revolution. One old indigenous radical confided to me that the macho, homophobic Morales has inaugurated dozens of new football stadiums during his tenure, but has not set foot in a single theater. He also said that the president plays up his indigenous identity but opposes any meaningful autonomy for indigenous peoples.

Bolivia is a colonial creation. The patriotism that the MAS government has excelled at promoting is a commitment to continuing that colonial project. Up to 2005, women, miners, peasants, and indigenous people had effectively blocked capitalist development across the country. The supposedly revolutionary government has succeeded in renewing Western-style development on a larger scale, not just in spite of the social movements but generally with their active collaboration.

If this is the kind of example that gives people hope for the creation of a new world, we live in sorry times indeed. If this is revolution, the status quo might be preferable.

Fortunately, MAS is not the only model for liberation we can look to in South America.

To be continued next week… 

John Severino has travelled extensively in South America and organizes solidarity for social movements there. His writings can be found onchileboliviawalmapu.wordpress.com

To vote or not to vote? To run or not to run? Those are the questions —whether it is nobler (and more effective) for the left to (a) venture into an antiquated, gerrymandered, bought-off, computer-rigged American electoral maze, where progressive third parties get lost and disappear, (b) just avoid the whole thing and organize by other means, or (c) perhaps just hunker down with Netflix, a remote, and a cabinet of Jack Daniel’s to await the apocalypse.

The British comedian-actor Russell Brand, who has recently outed himself as a radical leftist, chooses (b), the default anarchist position on elections, and with brio: “Billy Connolly said: ‘Don’t vote, it encourages them.’ . . .  I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X-ing a little box.” [1]

Then there is the traditional Marxist approach, which views elections, however compromised, as a potentially fruitful arena of “propaganda work” to complement organizing efforts. In 1972, when huge swaths of the left were stampeding to the Democratic presidential campaign of the putatively antiwar George McGovern, I spent countless hours touting the presidential candidacy of Linda Jenness, the candidate of the Socialist Workers Party (then a vital, creative force on the left, now a sadly shriveled cult). I figured that if election campaigns were good enough for hard-ass revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky, they were good enough for me, a mere aspiring hard-ass revolutionary.

Much older now but scarcely any wiser, I still can’t shake the voting/electioneering habit, although I’ve never voted for a Democrat when there was a choice for in independent left candidate. I’ve petitioned and campaigned for all four of Nader’s presidential bids. But Nader, alas, even at his peak in 2000, never made more than a small dent in the election tallies; the various Green and socialist presidential candidates never muster more than a flea bite (although Greens have won numerous small local offices around the country).

Unchastened by these decades of futility, every time a general election rolls around—even the off-year mayoral / city council / dog-catcher election—my wife and I make our evening trudge to the grandly lit public school auditorium around the corner, queue up dutifully for the check-in by the brusque retirees at their ancient battered classroom desks, self-importantly flipping the oversize pages of registration rolls and then, our identities safely confirmed, briskly shunting us to yet another ghastly long line for the actual vote. My eyes glaze over as I mark my SAT-style ballot for the Greens, socialists, and any other available malcontents. I cautiously slide the sheet into what resembles a cheap inkjet printer. The machine whirs and burps back my ballot; I hand it off to yet another election worker bee. The deed is done. I walk out into the chill autumn night, a faint glow of civic accomplishment mingled with nagging feelings of resentment and demoralization at the sheer preposterousness of the whole show, as though I’d just been dragooned into carrying a spear in the chorus of the local amateur grand opera. And compared to the people who wait in line for four hours only to be told that the dog ate the voting machines, I had it easy.

My ambivalence is symptomatic of an American pandemic of wariness about voting. This country has the lowest rate of voter turnout of any industrial country (barely 50 percent even for presidential elections) because nearly everyone senses that nothing important hinges on the outcome. Left, right, or center, we all sense the primal truth of Chris Rock’s observation: “What have I got to do tomorrow that I can’t do because of who’s elected president?” And how much truer for senator, congressperson, mayor, judge, etc. The two major parties both play the same corporate-funded game, and outsiders don’t stand a chance. What is remarkable, then, is not that so many Americans don’t vote but that so many of them still do, by the tens of millions, even though they rightly sense that their trip to the polling station will likely have as much influence on government policy as not walking under ladders or not stepping on the cracks in the pavement.

And herein lies the buried potential of elections for the left: people still want to believe, contrary to the promptings of reason, that their vote can make a difference, that somewhere beyond the confines of the SUV and the local Walmart, beyond the desolation of food stamps and underwater mortgages and unemployment offices, there persists a summons to collective civic duty, no matter how atrophied or corrupted—an inexplicable refusal to disbelieve all those grade-school lessons about the glories of American democracy. It is during election campaigns that Americans’ rusted antennae of political attention are most fully extended, and thus it is the most opportune time to penetrate the media-narcotized minds of working-class and poor America—the vast majority of the increasingly besieged 99 percent who know little and care less about the grandiose proclamations and posturings of this country’s microscopic left, who wouldn’t know Jill Stein from Gertrude Stein from Ben Stein. Perhaps vigorous independent election campaigns can help to open up a narrow pathway into that heart of darkness and indifference and despair, notwithstanding the obstacles of mainstream media blackouts, corporate financing of the duopoly bad guys, and suspect computerized voting systems. And for an American left that remains trapped in a cul de sac of insularity and impotence—notwithstanding the fragile fleeting spring of Occupy—any pathway at all, no matter how perilous and booby-trapped, could make a difference.

And that’s exactly what’s happening, mirabile dictu, in two large American cities, Seattle and Minneapolis, where socialists—not maybe sorta kinda half-assed speechifying Bernie Sanders-style socialists, but militant on-the-ground revolutionary socialists—have a good chance of winning city council seats. [2] Yes, I said revolutionary socialists right here in the belly of the beast, within hailing distance of winning an election: not the presidency, to be sure, but not the local school board either, and not in one-horse towns. Is this for real, and if so, what does it say about the prospects of the American left in general and elections as an organizing tool in particular?

These two socialist city-council candidates–Kshama Sawant of Seattle and Ty Moore of Minneapolis—are both members of the Trotskyist Socialist Alternative (SA), the U.S. section of the London-based Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), which claims affiliated parties in more than fifty countries on all continents. Many of those parties, like the SA, could not fill a modest auditorium with their members, some not even a modest walk-in closet: the U.S. section claims only about 200 members. [3] Although it follows a variant of the Leninist formula of vanguard party building (members cannot publicly dissent from the official party line), the SA’s public posture is refreshingly unencumbered by the stale Marxoid cant and sectarian spite that afflict some other “Trot” organizations: SA has supported Nader’s last two presidential bids, endorsed Jill Stein’s 2012 Green Party campaign, and works readily in activist united fronts and independent left electoral coalitions with a broad range of activist groups on a series of important, practical, achievable demands, such as living wage; affordable housing; expanded, cheaper mass transit; and so on.

Notwithstanding the potential authoritarian hazards of SA’s Leninist modus operandi, the group’s focused, disciplined approach to activism offers a potentially fruitful and effective alternative to an American left mired in the sentimental goo of consensus up-twinkling and down-twinkling and endless self-indulgent palavering of the kind that paralyzed and sucked the energy out of Occupy. Whatever the reason, the same small group with the same demands and approach has managed to galvanize an unexpectedly enthusiastic and wide response among large numbers of voters in two major U.S. cities—numbers large enough to vault self-described revolutionaries within a stone’s throw of significant political offices there.[4]

Both SA candidates were active in their cities’ Occupy movements; both have put their bodies on the line in civil disobedience to defend the foreclosed homeowners against bank-ordered evictions; both have made a $15-per-hour minimum wage the centerpiece of their campaigns; both have pledged to accept only as much salary as the average worker makes, donating the rest to activist causes. Sawant (http://www.votesawant.org/ ), a forty-year-old Indian-American economics instructor at Seattle Central Community College, has garnered more mainstream media attention, including a front-page feature-story endorsement by The Stranger, one of Seattle’s two large alternative weekly newspapers, with a circulation of nearly 90,000. In its endorsement The Stranger wrote,

Sawant is the real deal. She kicks ass. And she could actually win in November. . . . An immigrant woman of color, an Occupy Seattle organizer, . . . Sawant offers voters a detailed policy agenda, backed up by a coherent economic critique and a sound strategy for moving the political debate in a leftward direction. She is passionate but thoughtful. She speaks comfortably on noneconomic issues. She is likable. And most important, she’s winning over voters.[5]

Sawant, who is also calling for rent control and a millionaire’s tax to raise money for social services, is benefiting from a powerful groundswell of volunteer support that has most observers judging the race too close to call despite a four-to-one spending advantage by her opponent, the Democratic incumbent Richard Conlin (no scientific polling results have been made public in the race). The liberal commentariat in Seattle has not failed to take notice. The left-liberal blogger Tom Barnard wrote, “[Sawant] didn’t just ignore the Democrats, she openly challenged them as servants of the 1%. . . . It’s nothing short of an earthquake. If nothing else, Kshama has shown a new path for independent candidates who directly advance working people’s interests and issues. It opens the way for candidates to challenge the status quo.” [6]

Ty Moore’s Minneapolis city council campaign (http://www.tymoore.org/ ) has not made as big a splash in the mainstream media, but he is running just as strong a race. Although no reliable polls have been published, indications that he might be the front runner have sent tremors into the state’s political establishment. He, like Sawant, has tapped into a vein of voter unrest that has brought his campaign dozens of zealous volunteers and an expected $55,000 in contributions.

Moore, 37, has been a socialist activist since high school. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in political science from Oberlin College—where he co-founded a branch of Socialist Alternative—Moore made his way to Minneapolis, where he worked as a city-transit bus driver for seven years before becoming a full-time organizer for SA. In that capacity he emerged as a major leader of the Twin Cities Occupy Homes movement. With mixed success, he and a dedicated band of activists repeatedly barred the way of sheriffs attempting to evict families from foreclosed homes.

Moore recounts what he calls the Occupy Home’s turning point, in May 2012, when they repeatedly rebuffed sheriffs seeking to evict the siblings David and Alejandra Cruz, local activists and college students living in the house with the owners, their Mexican immigrant parents. “We prevented four attempts by police to evict them. We locked arms to repel police, we took the down concrete barrels they put up to impede our interventions. A number of people got arrested. The city spent more than forty-five thousand dollars to have this family evicted on behalf of the banks. We marched through the city carrying the broken-down front door of the Cruz home, demanding no police resources for evictions. So foreclosures have become big issue. Police shouldn’t function as the bank’s private police force. There was a huge public outcry over that incident, and my and SA’s role in the defense of the Cruzes has helped us to build an activist base that has made a big difference in this campaign.” As Moore told me, “The upshot is that they lost, but following that struggle we had our biggest string of victories—many barely a fight—because the banks and city officials didn’t want to see a repeat of the Cruz fight and so agreed to renegotiate.”

In addition to relying on the activist base born of Occupy Homes, Moore’s campaign has garnered endorsements from the Green Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a wide array of organizations not normally associated with the far left, including the Minnesota State Council of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), where pressure from an increasingly restive rank and file prodded the normally Democratic leadership to support an avowed socialist.

I asked Moore why he thought his openly socialist campaign was catching fire in a way that few expected. He told me, “Five years into economic crisis there is no meaningful recovery. People are fed up. There’s a rising level of anger and frustration against all mainstream institutions—big business, media, two major parties, disappointment in Obama. Particularly in cities like Minneapolis, where the Democratic Party has ruled unchallenged for decades, there’s a level of frustration that can be cut with a bold left challenge. If we weren’t running that frustration would remain untapped. The boldness and clarity of our initiative has given voice to voiceless anger.”

I asked him how his campaign was tapping into that anger. “What we’re doing is unique,” he said. “We have really tried to be really unabashedly working-class candidates, using Occupy ninety-nine percent slogans against big business in a way that others on the left like the local Green Party have been too timid to advance. An openly socialist candidate working with Occupy Homes has excited people and created a level of energy. People are really taking notice.”

And not only working people are taking notice. The popularity of Moore’s campaign has set off alarms among the nation’s financial and real-estate elites. Determined to prevent this radical left brushfire from spreading any further, the National Association of Realtors—which in the past has donated PAC money to Tea Party rightists like Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz—has spent thousands of dollars on a mailing in support of Moore’s leading opponent, the Democrat Alondra Cano.[7]

So . . . to borrow from Buffalo Springfield: There’s something happening here . . . but what it is ain’t exactly clear: a flash in the pan or a harbinger of the fire next time? One thing is clear: People are hurting, and the pain is increasing every day: people were promised healthcare reform, and many have lousier, more expensive “insurance” than before, if any at all, and the vaunted exchanges are an unworkable sham; the “official” unemployment rate is going down only because millions are exiting the workforce (the official method of “disappearing” them from the statistics), while more and more people can’t find decent jobs to support their families and pay their rent or mortgage. The air is dense with the nausea of lies and frustration and uncertainty and suffering, and people are sick of it—enough so that radical socialists who cut through the mass-media treacle of reassurance with blunt talk and bold actions are being treated as contenders, not cranks—a circumstance that would have been unthinkable just five years ago, before the onset of the economic crisis.

But this is no ordinary time of crisis. We face not only global economic collapse but also an environmental/climate emergency so grave that some of the world’s great cities—New York, London, Paris, may not be habitable in just forty-five years, according to a recent study from the University of Hawaii.[8] Occasional flares of hope cannot dispel the pervasive gloom of demoralization and despair in a massively depoliticized population laid low by a contracting economy, abandoned by confused and complicit liberal class, and largely oblivious to a tiny and impotent left. So where are the likely sources of resistance? Marx’s historic agent of revolution, the industrial proletariat, has been decimated in the United States by systematic deindustrialization, outsourcing, and the wholesale retrenchment of the union movement. Chris Hedges argues, therefore, that the “dispossessed working poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed journalists, artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement.” [9]

But in the absence of traditional vehicles of mass organization, how to unite and galvanize these disparate, demoralized victims of the status quo? There is no single magic formula, but no conceivable arena of communication and resistance can be written off to self-indulgent sanctimony. Avenues of thought and action remain open—if barely open—and independent electoral action is one of them—even though, like the rest of our hard-won rights, it is under siege on multiple fronts. But until the day arrives when Congress or the president, under yet another emergency pretext, cancels elections altogether, the left cannot afford to spurn the slender opening they provide. Independently of the corporate parties, we must thrust our foot in that crack in the door and push back, as hard as we can, just as we push back on every other front: in the streets, online, at the police barricades. As Occupy showed, it is impossible to anticipate the spark that will inspire wider, bolder forms of struggle.

A long shot is infinitely preferable to no shot. And sitting on our hands on any front gives us no shot. As Ty Moore told me, “Even if we don’t win this election, we’ve already won because we’ve given hope to those who don’t think there’s a chance to push back against the system. We’ve shown that it can be done.”

The SA city council campaigns and other scattered activist initiatives have yet to cohere into a potent mass movement for change. But they are precious rations of hope—nothing more, but nothing less—in a time of gathering darkness for this country and this planet. That might not seem like much, but even if that’s all we have for now, we would do well to recall Shelley’s revolutionary credo: “To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; . . . / to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

In times as dire as ours, with the human prospect on this planet possibly measured in mere decades, even the frailest reeds of hope—the mushrooming of Occupy, a socialist winning or almost winning a major city council election, a thousand anonymous scattered souls standing up to housing cops or an oil pipeline—might serve as tinder for the next great firestorms of resistance. We must hoard all these slivers of possibility, lest we mindlessly discard the one that might make all the difference.

In another dark time, as the night of fascism descended on Europe in the 1930s, the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote,

Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben.

It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

William Kaufman is an educational writer who lives in New York City. He can be reached at kman484@earthlink.net.

NOTES

[1] Russell Brand, “Russell Brand on Revolution: ‘We No Longer Have the Luxury of Tradition,’” New Statesman, October 24, 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolution.

[2] Seattle is the 22^nd-largest city in the United States (pop. 634,535), ranking just behind Boston; Minneapolis is the 47^th-largest (pop. 392,880).

[3] For those unacquainted with the obscure dynamics of Trotskyist fission, there are numerous global tendencies claiming the mantle of “true” and “authentic” Trotskyism. The largest, from which the CWI split in 1974, is the Belgium-based United Secretariat of the Fourth International (often referred to as the “Mandelistas” after the name of their long-time leader, the prominent Marxist activist and scholar Ernest Mandel), which claims affiliates in more than sixty countries, including the French Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, the largest far-left party in Europe (the U.S. sympathizing groups are Solidarity and Socialist Action). The CWI is the second-largest “Trot” international.

[4] Another noteworthy socialist contender is Howie Hawkins, long-time activist and leader of the Green Party of New York State. Hawkins, a UPS truck unloader and Teamster, is locked in a tight city-council race in Syracuse, New York’s fifth-largest city and one of its poorest. In 2011, Hawkins, an avowed socialist, received 48 percent of the vote for the same seat against the same Democratic opponent, so he has a good chance to become the first socialist office-holder in Syracuse in more than a century (http://www.howiehawkins.org/).

[5] Goldy, “The Case for Kshama Sawant,” The Stranger, September 25, 2013, http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-case-for-kshama-sawant/Content?oid=17825832 .

[6] Tom Barnard, “The Real Meaning of Kshama Sawant’s Stunning Numbers,” Washington Liberals,  August 12, 2013, http://waliberals.org/the-real-meaning-of-kshama-sawants-stunning-numbers/2013/08/12/ .

[7] A reproduction of the NAR postcard mailing on behalf of Moore’s opponent is available at http://www.tymoore.org/don_t_let_corporate_pac_money_corrupt_our_city_council_race .

[8] James Nye, “Apocalypse Now: Unstoppable Man-Made Climate Change Will Become Reality by the End of the Decade and Could Make New York, London and Paris Uninhabitable Within 45 Years, Claims New Study,” Mail Online, October 9, 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2451604/Apocalypse-Now-Unstoppable-man-climate-change-reality-end-decade-make-New-York-London-Paris-uninhabitable-45-years-says-new-study.html .

[9] Chris Hedges, “Sparks of Rebellion,” Truthdig, September 30, 2013, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_sparks_of_rebellion_20130930 .

 

Merkel reportedly agreed on the initiative with the SPD, who demanded in exchange the right to name the new EU commission president. The SPD want to replace the current commission President José Manuel Barroso with the current chairman of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, an SPD member.