What there actually is are two strong and equally valid movements…one for radical reform of the existing system, another for the replacement of the existing system with something kinder, more sharing, less damaging.
The reform cause focuses, justly, on changing the way police treat people of color-btw, even those who advocate “defunding” generally don’t want the police completely abolished; they want some of what it tries and fails to do now- such as dealing with people with mental wellness issues and the de-escalation of potentially violent situations- handed over to different groups with different values, values centered on talking dangerous situations down and getting everyone out of those situations first, rather than focusing on the increasingly pointless goal of getting people to “respect the authority” of the police, or on the use of arbitrary ticket/arrest quotas that are put in place not to actually reduce crime- these measures usually don’t reduce crime, especially genuinely violent crime- but simply to encourage the police to harass, write up and arrest people for the SAKE of harassing, writing up and arresting people. There is nothing illegitimate in working for this cause.
The radical change cause is based on the belief that, given the difficulty, if not impossibility, of enacting meaningful change within the existing order and the massive biases within that order towards a shrinking group of wealthy heterosexual white people, especially wealthy heterosexual white men, and against the growing majority of Americans who are not wealthy heterosexual white men, we need to change how we run life in this country- we need to create a new system, drawing out of the lived experience of the traditionally powerless in this country, that includes all of us- that expands the say over the economic, social, and political decisions affecting us all TO all of us, and does so not based on some arbitrary notion of who is considered “successful” or a “maker” or a “job creator”, but instead on the recognition of the fathers of the country- flawed and hypocritical as many of them were in the way they lived and the values they actually lived by on a daily basis- that ALL are created equal.
Recognizing this equality of creation- based on whatever each of us believes was the source of human origins, whether Genesis or evolution- we can create a system in which all of us are treated with a basic level of respect and dignity, no one is “othered” or treated as if they are NOT a “Real American”, and no one has to struggle to survive simply because those who never had to struggle believe that making other people struggle so they themselves can feast is somehow a “tonic” or “character-building” thing to force complete strangers to do.
Whatever this led us to would be nothing whatsoever like what you envision when you write or say the word “Marxism’.
You see, the system that YOU think of as “Marxism”, is both extinct as a global political movement and held in utter contempt by the U.S. Left of this century.
When you mean “Marxism”, you clearly mean “Marxism-Leninism”, i.e., Stalinism- an ideology whose rigid, repressive, bloodthirsty, paranoid, reactionary and ultimately pathetic remnants died once and for all in 1989.
There is no support for imposing Stalinism OR its even more repressive cousin, Maoism- two ideologies that are so closely related that the famous “Mao suit” is actually just a copy of the semi-military costume Stalin usually wore to the office or the executions- in the contemporary Left at all.
When people on the U.S. Left in this era hear anyone- and there is hardly anyone anymore who even expresses these views- defend “actually existing socialism”, i.e., the Stalinist or Maoist models, we have a word for them:
“Tanky”.
A “tanky” is a person who actually defends the practice of sending armies from one “socialist” country to invade another “socialist” country in order to prevent the country being invaded from deviating in any way at all from the Soviet model- as was done in East Germany in 1953, when tanks from other countries in the Eastern Bloc rolled in to crush a rebellion against austerity measures imposed by the Stalinist regime-everyone in the rebellion was a committed small “c” communist, btw; or in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 simply because the Communist leadership in those countries saw no need to maintain the absolute prohibitions against dissent and free speech the regimes had imposed.
The earliest example of “Tanky-ism”, of course, was the Krondstadt rising of 1921, where the soldiers and sailors of the Krondstadt garrison rose against Lenin’s unjustifiable decisions to abolish the autonomy of the local soviets(workers’, soldiers’, and sailors’ councils which were originally supposed to democratically make the decisions in each town and region) and the unnecessary abolition of worker management of the factories. Trotsky led the crushing of this revolt- he was working under the delusion that it was somehow counterrevolutionary- and in so doing inadvertently destroyed any chances of his own later revolt against Stalin’s tyranny could possibly succeed, because it would leave him without any cadre of trained resistance fighters.
The “tankies” have no connection with what’s happened in the streets, and they are so utterly outnumbered and despised by the rest of the Left that there is no possible way they would play any meaningful role in creating an alternative to the status quo.
What would come of the victory of the radical cause would be a far different model than Stalinism OR Maoism.
The Left of today sees those models as absurdly rigid and unresponsive, and unjustifiably paranoid in their view of dissent.
it would be based on inclusive democratic decision-making from below, not a vanguard party enforcing a “line” from above. It would provide space for people to follow their conscience on spiritual matters, so long as they did not try to impose the restrictions on others that they feel their beliefs impose on themselves. It would be based on moving away from resource extraction and towards creating high-paying jobs that don’t put the climate at risk.
It would be a mix of worker co-ops- sometimes merging into networks of co-ops to deal with “economies of scale”, small businesses that are willing to accept strong labor, workplace safety and environmental regulations, and a small number of state-owned but employee managed concerns in which there would naturally be a monopoly structure- utilities, some forms of transit such as rail, and healthcare, which would finally be treated as a right, rather than a commodity to sold for a profit.
People could own their own homes and cars and things like that- nobody on the Left of today wants the state to own your toothbrush like Stalin did.
And it would be a society in which creativity, generosity, the formation of community from whoever wishes to form it, and basic human empathy would be as valued as greed, egotism and war for war’s sake are valued in the system we have.
Why not work from the assumption that, if we could create something better in 1776, we can create something better, kinder, more decent and more inclusive today?
Why not work on the assumption that the human race has the capacity to work for the good simply because working for the good is a thing worth doing?
