Author: Struggle for a New World

On Friday, April 28, the Republican-majority Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled in favor of voter ID laws and gerrymandered legislative districts previously ruled illegal by the then Democratic-majority court. The court also stripped the franchise from felons still under parole or probation.

Then on Tuesday, May 16th, the Republican supermajority in the North Carolina General Assembly voted to overturn the Democratic governor’s veto of an abortion ban bill. The new law bans abortions after a mere 12 weeks with few exceptions, and requires multiple prior doctor appointments with 72-hour waiting periods, effectively limiting the window for the procedure to barely 10 weeks and effectively banning abortions for poor and rural women. The bill was passed, controversially, after a Democratic state representative (elected promising to defend abortion rights) near Charlotte flipped parties, handing the GOP enough votes to overturn the Governor’s veto.

This marks the latest chapter in the now decade-long saga of attacks on the democratic rights of North Carolinians. Ever since the historic Republican victory in the 2010 state legislative elections, our state has been a testing ground for conservative policy, with voter ID and redistricting at its center. North Carolina, like the rest of the South, was long politically dominated by the Democratic Party. This began to change during the Civil Rights era party realignment, exemplified in our state by Jesse Helms, the conservative firebrand elected in 1972 as the first Republican senator from NC since 1903.

Over the ensuing decades, conservative white voters continued to flock to the GOP, culminating in 2010. That year, the GOP won control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time in history, and this control remains unbroken. Once in power, they immediately moved to cement their power with gerrymandered redistricting and a voter ID law. Now they can claim overwhelming majorities in the house and senate, regardless of any electoral result the popular vote might suggest. The Democratic party responded with the same failed electoral strategy it employs at every level – platitudes about “defending” a status quo that was rapidly shrinking away, fixation on an increasingly Republican-packed court system as an impartial arbiter of justice, and a total focus of electoral efforts on the figurehead-in-chief (the governor here, the President federally).

For over a decade, the NC Democratic party and its nonprofit appendages have fought the antidemocratic (and clearly racist) drawing of gerrymandered districts for both houses of the NCGA and the US House of Representatives. Repeated court rulings had struck down districting maps on the grounds that they violated the Voting Rights Act, only for the very same illegitimately-elected General Assembly to adjust two squiggles on the map and proclaim the patient healed. Then Donald Trump handed the U.S. Supreme Court to the most reactionary wing of “textualist” justices via Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, and the conservative wing of that court set about striking down every federal law that got in the GOP’s way. This infamously involved their decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade, but it must be remembered that it began at the federal level the same way as it did down here – gutting the very Voting Rights Act that NC Democrats had relied on in the courts to fix the undemocratic manipulations of the Republican party.

Until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, post-Reconstruction North Carolina and the rest of the South were one-party states in all but name, catering to the interests of capital, the old planter class, and reactionary white opinion. We are now facing the possible return to this order on a larger scale. Over the past decade we have seen the conservative movement re-emerge as a well-oiled machine with an increasingly visible street fighting presence and a keen eye on institutional power. Where they win power (through slim margins, gerrymandering, or the Electoral College) they move to secure it with judicial appointments and by shaping the next election to their advantage. In power, the GOP has shown little restraint in pursuing a hard reactionary agenda cheerled by the loudest sliver of white hooded fascists, despite the popular backlash it frequently incites among the oppressed majority. This is the terrain of struggle we face.

As communists, the writers and readership of this article all know both the pitfalls of bourgeois democracy as well as the importance of democratic rights. Rehashment here is unnecessary. We must simply chart a course between sectarian isolation and liberal tailism. What is important to state here are three interconnected points:

1. We must be in the struggle for democratic rights. It will not do to tell oppressed peoples, especially those not even a generation removed from Jim Crow, that their voting rights don’t matter because elections won’t save us. The rights of the oppressed are under attack – where should we be if not the forefront of their defense?
2. Struggling on the path of elections, legislatures, and courts is an increasingly narrow needle to thread. We cannot merely follow the defensive position of the Democratic party as the GOP they view as a necessary counterweight increasingly embraces fascism. We cannot abandon any battlefield to merely let the liberals and fascists duke it out. Every site of struggle, every weapon, must be ours.
3. The inability of the present constitutional order to reflect a semblance of majority opinion calls that order into question. Even when and where we are forced to struggle toward reformist demands or defensive measures, we must be clear that victories are only small battles in the far larger class war. When we lose ground within the framework of bourgeois democratic rights, we cannot allow ourselves to retreat.

There may be times where electoral participation is called for, where having leftist elected officials is beneficial. But we should not put our hope in reformist comforts within the system. Legal protests will continue to have their place, but we need to prepare for increased repression. We need to develop and practice a mindset in which we expect our legal rights to be disregarded and where they function as a weapon, not a rescue. We know that we cannot simply declare a revolution, but the system is designed, increasingly directly, to force us to surrender outright if we do not accept exactly those means which are proscribed by the system.

The post-Sixties consensus is being undone. This is in effect the culmination of an ongoing counter-revolution that began immediately after the conclusion of the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements. The liberal majority of the US took it for granted that Roe v. Wade would be upheld, the Voting Rights Act enforced, that the “norms” and precedents and even the laws of bourgeois democracy were infallible. They were wrong. Using the existing legal framework, a minority conservative movement has leveraged its natural advantages to take power and push for a Leave It To Beaver dream on a higher level. Their success has shocked the liberal majority and led to the questioning of the power of the Supreme Court, the existence of the Electoral College, and the structure of the Senate. Beyond this, we must ask what the point is of a constitutional order that fails to represent the interests of the majority of the population. This opens space for a broader struggle against the foundations of the US state, and we would be remiss to not take advantage of it as best we can.

We welcome any commentary, criticism, clarifications, elaborations, or other responses, especially from fellow communists in North Carolina. We could go on writing at length about what the struggle should look like here, but if we all talk only to ourselves we will never form a coherent line, and we will surely flounder and fail to lead the struggle against fascism, locally, nationally and internationally.

Against abstract communism and abstract political education.

Communists love to tell people about communism. Communism is the best, we feel, because it’s the ideology for everyone and everything. If people just understood communism better, they would become communists, and to add a slight dimension of nuance, the more they understand communism, the better communists they will be.

The more people there are who understand communism better and are therefore better communists, the more communism will be out there, in the political world; the more this occurs, the more that we grow as a consequence, and the more that we grow, the more we win, right? On the surface, this seems to make some sense. But in political reality, this has failed time and again as various (often theoretically relatively advanced) organizations have come to mean very little and even disappeared because of a rather vulgar approach to political education.

This past weekend, a white nationalist terrorist carried out a massacre in Buffalo, New York. The killer’s own published manifesto makes crystal clear the genocidal zeal and demographic panic induced fanaticism which motivated this base act of public murder, which he live-streamed so as to strike fear into the targets of his hate and for the amusement and inspiration of other thugs like himself.

The manifesto’s obsession with the white nationalist “great replacement” theory is particularly disturbing in its timing with the impending Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, as while believers in this theory rejoice at their chance to turn everyone they understand as a “fertile white woman” into a baby factory for their deranged racialist worldview, fascist militias are stepping up deadly attacks on groups they consider “racial enemies” with the same underlying motive. Biden’s election, much touted as an antidote to the fascist trends encouraged by Trump and those close to him, has self-evidently not changed their goals or means or confidence in pursuing both.

On the evening of May 2nd, POLITICO published a shocking leak of a draft majority opinion of the Supreme Court in the upcoming case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, showing the court poised to strike down their previous ruling in the famous 1973 Roe v. Wade case that abortion was constitutionally protected at the federal level. The news is infuriating, a triumph decades in the making for the reactionary Evangelical anti-abortion movement, and a terrible blow to women everywhere who already fight daily against all manner of assaults against their bodily autonomy, but the unplanned and premature manner in which this news was delivered is most welcome indeed, for it has given movements and the masses something that has previously not been present at the top level of judiciary politics: space and time, however limited, to act.

The entire US left is reacting to the shocking invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The reactions are varied and reflect a vigorous discourse which we are pleased to see includes many positions not constrained by Cold War biases and “campism”. There is a broad consensus that Russia’s behavior, no matter the pretext, went far over the line, as is the view of many Russians who identify with the communist movement, even many we might analyze as right opportunist.

Unfortunately, not all on the US left are able to take a similarly circumspect position of condemnation of US imperialism, which has been and remains the most powerful imperialist center in military and economic terms alike. We have witnessed prominent representatives of the left call for sanctions against Russia, which would have an escalating effect, when as purported socialists and internationalists their immediate practical duty should to call for the disbanding of NATO and other actions that would have a deescalating effect.

In the midst of the practical discussion, there is also a theoretical discussion over whether Russia today qualifies as an “imperialist country”. In general, the trend is for those who advocate sanctions against Russia to assert that it is, so as to position Russia and the US on equal footing. For those who take a revolutionary defeatist stance on US imperialism, there is also a trend to assert that Russia is not an imperialist country, which naturally is partially motivated by a need to provide extra theoretical justification beyond revolutionary defeatism for opposing US escalation.

We have already said that many of the latter category none the less correctly join their Russian comrades in condemning Putin’s aggression, and we of course emphasize that it is not only wars carried out directly by imperialist centers which we condemn, but all wars except wars of defense and liberation on behalf of the poor and oppressed, which in fact serve to secure real and sustainable peace.

For the past four years, ever since the rise of Trump, political analysis and popular discourse in the United States has been consumed with the question of fascism. Is Trump a fascist? Is the US becoming a fascist state? Has it always been a fascist state? How do we fight fascism? What does fascism even mean? These burning questions, which have been hotly debated everywhere from the most Marxist to the most liberal circles, deserve critical discussion. What follows is our small contribution to this vital debate.

What is fascism?

The original rise of fascism in the inter-war period, first with Mussolini’s movement in Italy and later most notably with Nazism in Germany, prompted a series of debates among the radical left as the socialist and workers’ movements tried to define and contend with this new enemy. The Communist International (Comintern) played a leading role in this debate. The German communist Clara Zetkin and Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov put forward two separate but interlocking analyses, which we take as our starting point.

As the George Floyd/#BlackLivesMatter protests show no signs of slowing since late May, we have just observed Juneteenth, the national holiday of the Afro-American people celebrating the news of their legal emancipation from chattel slavery. The significance of this day, in light of their ongoing oppression in all parts of the US, and the historic betrayal of the Union of the people they ostensibly fought to liberate in the South in particular, can hardly be overstated. 

Generally, Juneteenth is overwhelmingly celebrated by Afro-Americans, and is largely unknown by the rest of the US. Any official acknowledgement of the day has generally been confined to Texas, which is where it originated. However, in light of recent events, Juneteenth 2020 was commemorated on a massive scale. Thousands upon thousands marched from coast to coast, union dockworkers organized by the left-wing ILWU shut down every port on the West Coast, and a bill to make Juneteenth a countrywide holiday was introduced in the Senate. In this we see the tension between the powers that be and the insurgent masses. While our rulers are forced to acknowledge Juneteenth and try to turn it around and co-op it into a whitewashed summer version of MLK Day (a day for fine speeches and mattress sales), the masses tore down Confederate statues in the heart of the South and shut down a vital point of the global economy. Once again, the gap between their boardrooms and legislative chambers and our streets and communities has been shown. They attempt to pacify, but find themselves outpaced by events. We must not let them close this gap. We must continue to push the struggle forward.

Our people in New York, North Carolina, and Massachusetts have been out among the masses shouting for justice for Afro-American people in the face of police violence, the continuation of historic slave patrols. Since the initial #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2013, however, there has been a quantitative and qualitative increase in the prominence and political capital of these protests. Accordingly, now is the time to begin to speak about the implications for revolutionary organization in this country.

Struggle for a New World strongly condemns the brutal and inhumane police murder of George Floyd, committed by Officer Derek Chauvin, with the aid of other officers of the Minneapolis Police Department, on May 25, 2020. This on-camera murder of an Afro-American man, already handcuffed and on the ground, is only the latest in a long line of legal lynchings. We salute the ongoing popular resistance and community self-defense actions being carried out by the Afro-American people of Minneapolis and their allies. On May 26, thousands defied the restrictions of the coronavirus to peacefully protest George Floyd’s murder, only for the MPD to attempt to viciously repress them. These heroic protesters resisted the attacks of the police. This protest and resistance has continued now into the following days, and will not stop until police murders stop. While the bourgeois media engages in “both-sides” rhetoric and condemns “violent riots” and “looting” in the same breath as they cry crocodile tears over George Floyd, we recognize the legitimacy of resisting, in the words of Malcolm X, “by any means necessary” the attacks and repression of white-supremacist US imperialism, in this instance represented by the MPD.

Let us be clear: it is right to rebel. It is right for the people to storm a police station, as just happened on the night of the 28th. The police are an occupying army who must be kicked out of every Black community, every working class community, every community of the oppressed and exploited. It is right to storm the Targets and ever other store, to seize the capitalist institutions that suck the money out of us and give nothing but starvation wages (with wage theft) in return. Which side are on? Are you on the side of the people, or the pigs? There is no middle path.