A wild proposal for how the radical left might respond to the Trump victory
Open letter to Jacobin magazine:
I wish I could make it to your discussion tonight about we on the left what to do in the wake of the Trump victory, but I have a thought I wonder if anyone among you have been talking about. I think it deserves discussing.
Suppose that we call a mass strike of government workers and/or everyone on inauguration day. The formal demand will be that Trump be barred from taking office. That demand has sufficient legal justification. More importantly, we can refuse to work whether that is legally permitted or not. If we do so, the repercussions are hard to predict but a movement of workers could send a powerful signal.
Yes, it’s a strategic and tactical question. Most movement organizers prefer caution. And the centrists prefer to deescalate. Raising the very real bugbear of the far right, they prefer to go on with business as normal. An argument against that is that they cannot reign in the far right now; they missed the chance, unfortunately (we would all have preferred it, as a centrist government that wants to control the left and may give us some influence and be more susceptible to our pressure has proven almost always to be better than one that considers us its enemies to be defeated or destroyed). Since they cannot, we should take this gamble. It is a gamble, because anything publicly visible that we do will provoke reaction, some of which will be violent, with officially encouraged vigilantism, and most of it repressive. But I believe that is going to happen now anyway, and the quiet strategy will not work. Escalating civil conflict, in the organized and peaceful manner that we on the left do almost exclusively and sometimes remarkably well, is worth the gamble. That’s a big debate. It must be on the table.
We could understand the demand for Trump’s demission as a tool and not the ultimate goal. It is important to make this clear to those among us who believe in an electoral strategy of “left” politics excusively or primarily, as many people on the left do. This is necessary to be clear about because presumably the likely result of a legal demissioning of Mr. Trump would only be the accession of Mr. Vance. That is not a very interesting motive to protest or strike, but we have other purposes, and in today’s global situation and political climate we may as well be open about this.
We would make it clear we aren’t calling to overturn the election results. Trump won fair and square. But he is a criminal, should not be permitted to take office, and if he is, we aren’t working for this government. Not until our demands are met. We can claim this right and use it.
We need to openly tell at least each other that: The ultimate goal of any radical left politics worth the name is not a concession by the management nor a different government but a different society in which enterprises are managed democratically by their workers. (We know this, though the left at least since the end of the Soviet Revolution in 1924 and in some ways since the social democracy of the First international has been consistently tending to place most of even all of its energy in building and sustaining governments, according to the state socialist and Western social democratic models, which led to the shipwreck of “Communism” through the state-party system in both East and West.) The DSA has an electoral strategy mainly, which limits their effectiveness even when theoretically their idea of socialism may diverge from the state socialist model. It’s not good enough.
Further, Trump is already delegitimated for many Americans and his own rhetorical efforts have been about delegitimating the government and the system, though of course only to ally capital to pure force and remove it from representative democracy and civil liberties, partly by using political speech to destory the political public sphere as such so that no one takes it seriously.
This gives us a context; we should use it, instead of heeding the mainstream Democratic Party’s calls for normalcy, which they just ran a losing campaign on the very idea of. We should recognize delegimation and seize it in our way.
Social movement theorists differ generally from political scientists in recognizing that the function of social movements is not tied to electing politicians, and their consequences are always unpredictable, which is risky but often a very good thing. It’s how the most important social change happens. Among the unpredictable consequences are massive social “ferment” involving the kinds of discussions everywhere that social movements tend to generate and involve. We cannot through normal governmental political procedures drive Republican government out of office. But among the many good things that might result, among them is that this will create a pressure of pushback against the kinds of midnight arrests and harassment of dissidents like most of us as well as the state violence against workers and the poor.