Daphne Lawless: A Vision for Radical Recomposition - Post‑Neoliberal and Anti‑Fascist Perspectives

I only just read this great piece by Daphne Lawless. Obviously the Trump/Musk collab collapsed after it was published,  but I think the name "Trumpism-Muskism" still captures well the broader right-wing authoritarian trend we're dealing with. 

You need to read it but I'm going to try to summarise the key points: 

Trumpism-Muskism

Trumpism‑Muskism is a global alliance of populist-authoritarian figures like Trump, Musk, Putin, Netanyahu. Is it fascist? There is a contradiction between Trumpism-Muskism's multi-billionaire class base and that of fascism, which is the downwardly-mobile middle class and other atomised social layers,  but the the beliefs of its leading members are very close to classical fascism. Better comparisons might be Francoism, Pinochet, or the personalist regimes of Louis Bonaparte/Napoleon III (France) or Juan Perón (Argentina): a mass movement with a classically fascist base but with an oligarchic capitalist leadership.

• Following Marx's analysis of authoritarian populism in the Eighteenth Brumaire, we know that such currents emerge from a stalemate in class struggle, where leaders act as deciding referees amid political paralysis.

• The anti-woke agenda is a form of class warfare, both from above and “horizontally”, against the Professional Middle Class (PMC). “Diversity, equality and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives from above, and movements from below such as #MeToo and BLM, have significantly impinged on the ability of US capitalists to discipline their workforce. For more, see Amanda Marcotte: sections of the white collar tech proletariat are expressing class warfare from below through identity politics, and the right is fighting back. 
  

The Left response so far

The Left response: paralysis, programmatism, and parasitism.

PROGRAMME: Paralysis because much of the left already agrees with core elements of Trumpism-Muskism's programme. 

• In 2016, Lawless summed up the programmatic basis of what she called Conservative Leftism in this way: 1) conservative anti-imperialism; 2) conservative populism; 3) anti-rationalism or intellectual populism. These live on today in the red-brown alliance as follows: 

1. Trump's pro-Russian, anti-NATO, anti-"globalist", economically nationalist geopolitical agenda, framed as “dismantling American empire” and disdain for high-minded "Americanism" is popular with tankies. 

2. Trump's anti-woke agenda resembles the Conservative Left's attacks on "idpol" and the "radlib" PMC. ("Ironically, the people who hate and rail against the “woke” PMC most are themselves podcasters, writers, journalists and academics – i.e. other PMC members. We should not be surprised; Pol Pot was an engineer. To some extent, my analysis of “gender critical” (TERF) politics applies: reactionary politics stems from those who had a little privilege and are seeing it under threat from the “undeserving”. But it may also just be that criminals and abusers are going to ditch their professed politics in favour of one which promises that their crimes and abuses won’t be punished. The Left-wing male writer accused of sexual harassment who goes “anti-woke”/“critical support to Trump” is now an established trope, à la Russell Brand.")
3. “crankery”, “woo”, or “anti-science”. The Conservative Left, soaked in conspiracy theory, made no attempt to fight the dazzling rise of conspiracism and quackery during COVID, sharing its "Deep State" mythology and even overlapping personnel (RFK Jr).

PARASITISM: The left is parasitical - organisationally, politically

• Organisational parasitism: The left's leaderships have tidy sinecures in sites such as academia where they are protected from the consequences of taking irresponsible and ultra-leftist maximalist positions. [Here my one note of disagreement with Lawless: she says "the best radical academics, such as Judith Butler, have (like Marx) based their theory on what is happening in practice at the grassroots that the mainstream can’t or won’t focus on", which seems completely wrong to me.]

• Political parasitism: The US left invests all its energy in the Democrats, blaming them for all problems then hysterically demanding they fix it or dissolve, a demand it can never meet.

A better left?

The actual resistance can be built on two platforms: 

1. The non-conservative left: those anarchists and others who get the "three-way fight" analysis (i.e. understand that neoliberalism and the far right are distinct threats, not identical) and are anti-campist (i.e. don't buy into the tankie left's anti-imperialist fantasy that the capitalist world will be saved by some heroic outside). ("There is a global anti-campist/anti-capitalist Left. Fightback is part of it alongside journals such as New Politics, the majority of opinion in the “official” Fourth International, and writers with mainstream popularity such as Naomi Klein (not the other Naomi) and George Monbiot. But it is marginalised.")

2. Liberals (and social democrats) who mean it: YIMBIES, urbanists, and others.

• A new political subject must transcend neoliberalism and authoritarian populism, uniting meaningful liberals and socialist currents into a sustainable, action-oriented movement: a new, future-focused movement based on the self-activity of workers (including the white-collar workers lumped in under the “PMC”). "The simple, material, Marxist point is that the working class (as broadly conceived in the era of immaterial labour) have the power of independent action to change social reality, regardless of big capital and the State, should they choose to organise for it."

Why can't we have this?

Sectarianism is the main block on this emerging.

• Liberal sectarianism: believing in the "horseshoe theory" that the left extreme is as bad as the right extreme.

• Left sectarianism: seeing centrists and liberals as just as bad as or merely opening the door to fascism.

How do we get there?

Pragmatic alliances without sectarianism: a concrete agenda. 

• We need to counter the Conservative Left's politics of irresponsibility with a radical, hopeful politics of self-activity. This needs to be proactive not reactive, not purely denunciatory, and organised around elements of a programme: goals on which we can agree, rather than on ideological identities. For example: against capitalist injustice, a programme of workers' self-activity; against obscurantism, a pro-science stance; against anti-wokism, a liberationist politics; against the environmental crisis, an eco-urbanist programme (e.g., 15-minute cities, more housing). 

• Where to start? Organising concrete grassroots initiatives (e.g., community and workplace actions) that don’t rely on capital or the big state.