Permanent Power Requires Permanent Revolution

It is ridiculous to talk about "left/right" coalitions when there is no organized left!

“If we do not build left-right coalitions on issues such as militarism, health care, a living wage and union organizing, we will be impotent in the face of corporate power and the war machine.”

• Chris Lynn Hedges, from “There Are No Permanent Allies, Only Permanent Power”

Chris Hedges wants you to know he’s attending a Nazi rally. He wants you to know that he is not ashamed of attending the Nazi rally and that you should support the Nazi rally. He wants you to understand that you are wrong and disloyal if you do not help the Nazis raise money to grow their movement by attending their rally. He wants you to believe that you are disloyal to your class if you don’t support the Nazis because they are the only real peace movement right now.

There’s a whole lot wrong with this. It’s written from a place of weakness. It comes from a failure of revolutionary optimism and a conscious decision to submit to pessimism because you have abandoned hope. It’s written from a place of cognitive dissonance. It comes from a failure to understand the ways that the “libertarian right” is the ideological workshop for the Nazi movement threatening both the institutional state and the Public right now. It comes from the poorly thought out decision to accept that Nazis are acting in good faith.,

Chris Hedges’ advice is nothing less than suicide for organizing an anticapitalist movement opposed to the institutional state. No such movement currently exists. Hedges wants you to believe that it does, but his “movement” is an individualist, idealistic, and communitarian group of leaders with no followers. People like Chris Hedges, Jill Stein, and Dennis Kucinich are not active anticapitalist organizers. They are political celebrities whose words and ideas support their lifestyles, but do not actually advance a revolutionary agenda.

Hedges uncritically quotes the organizer of the Nazi rally, Nick Brana, in his article, saying, “‘The left has become largely irrelevant in the U.S. because it is incapable of working with the right,’ said Nick Brana, chair of The People’s Party, which organized the rally with libertarians. ‘It clings to identity politics over jobs, health care, wages and war, and condemns half the country as deplorables.’”

The left is largely irrelevant in the US because there is no organized anticapitalist movement opposing the insitutional state and the dictatorship of capital. There are well meaning political parties and organizations like Socialist Alternative, the Party of Socialism and Liberation, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Equality Party, the Green Party, and the Socialist Party of America. There was even a hopeful sign in 2020 when the Green and Socialist parties formed a Red-Green alliance and ran Green Party/Socialist activist Howie Hawkins for President and Socialist Angela Walker for Vice President. This came at the cost of opposition by other candidates for the Green Party presidential nomination, who felt disempowered by the alliance with the SPA at the leadership level.

The fact that the decision was made by individuals in Green Party leadership and without consulting other candidates for the Green Party nomination illustrates my point. A movement built around a game of following influential leaders for pragmatic reasons, without first defining its unifying principles and committing to collective action, is not a true movement. It will forever remain mired in sectarian disputes and leadership scandals because personalities matter more than goals, commitment, or democracy. How can we replace oligarchy with a democratic society if we do not have a democratic movement?

Hedges then speaks for himself, saying, “There has to be a left-right coalition, which will include people whose opinions are not only unpalatable but even repugnant, or we will remain marginalized and ineffectual.”

There has to be a left coalition, built up from the grassroots on democratic principles following leaders of its own making whom it has the power to unmake, or we will remain marginalized and ineffectual. The rally for which Hedges is advocating is organized and owned by the Christian nationalist Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party and the anti-Black, antivax, climate denialist, anti-LGBTQ+ Movement for a People’s Party. This is a right wing rally. Its character as a right wing rally must be recognized and the fact that left wing celebrities are appearing is to bait their fans into supporting these right wing organizations: particularly the Movement For A People’s Party.

Make no mistake about it, Chris Hedges is advocating for anticapitalists to join a Nazi movement. I don’t believe this is his intent. I believe he still believes himself to be a committed “leftist,” but I submit that this is because of a deep ideological confusion and a failure to understand that he is a political celebrity and not a movement leader. We need to organize a coalition between anticapitalist organizations based on shared anticapitalist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist goals. Until such a coalition exists, any talk of “allying” with the Nazis means joining the Nazis.

Hedges shows his intellectual confusion when he references the peace movement of his childhood. He says, “There was much in the anti-war movement that he and other members of the religious group opposed, from the Yippies — who put forward a 145-pound pig named Pigasus the Immortal as a presidential candidate in 1968 — to groups such as the Weather Underground that embraced violence. He and the other clergy disliked the widespread drug use and propensity of some protestors to insult and bait the police. They had little in common with the Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists and Trotskyites within the movement.”

Chris Hedges is comparing the decision of religiously motivated anti-war protesters to join the left-wing peace movement despite disapproving and disagreeing with the anticapitalists on many issues to attending a Nazi rally and supporting Nazi organizations. The cognitive dissonance here is revealed when Hedges adds the finishing touch to the quoted paragraph:

“Daniel Berrigan, one of the most important anti-war activists in American history who was constantly in and out of jail and spent two years in federal prison, opposed abortion — a stance that today would probably see him deplatformed by many on the left.”

That’s right. Hedges is bemoaning the fact that the modern world has outgrown social conservatism. He’s bemoaning cancel culture, just like the Nazis do, out of sympathy with white people who he believes agree with him on something important. He doesn’t believe that the abortion issue is important enough to trump building the kind of peace movement he wants, because he personally likes and respects some folks who are anti-abortion. He’s valuing personalities over building a movement that collectively serves all its members once again. He’s putting his idealistic vision of the antiwar movement over your right to choose whether or not to risk death in childbirth and he is morally condemning anyone who disagrees with him.

This is divisive, counterproductive, and contrary to the actual work of building a movement. Instead of demanding that the rank and file support an idealistic position that does not show a direct material impact on their lives, meet them where they are and use their motivations for joining an anticapitalist movement to educate them on issues like war. Require organizations to disavow racism and capitalism to join the coalition. These are basic principles of anticapitalist organizing and our leaders constantly forget them. Why?

Permanent power is what we’re up against, and Nazis are part of that power. The only way we can meet permanent power is with permanent revolution. This means we must organize ourselves and not tail a Nazi movement that will ultimately kill us. The fact that Hedges cannot distinguish between the kind of united front we need (the anti-war movement he describes from his childhood) and the kind of suicidal decision to join a movement led by the Nazi forces that the “Rage Against The War Machine” really represents is why he is unfit to lead.

Please think seriously about all of this.