Three Challenges for the Left

Just a few months ago, many establishment liberals hoped that Biden’s election and the end of the pandemic would bring a “return to normalcy.” Indeed, this was the central promise of Biden’s campaign. Yet the events of the last year brought several deep contradictions of global capitalism to a boiling point. 

US society is at a turning point — a shift manifested by three major developments:
(1) A turn away from four decades of neoliberalism, forced by both popular discontent and a long-developing crisis in the neoliberal regime of capital accumulation.

(2) An ongoing social upheaval against systemic racism, currently the sharpest expression of a wider process of radicalization in society.

(3) A humanitarian crisis at the US southern border where Biden has continued many aspects of Trump’s border regime, alienating immigrant rights groups and the left, while allowing the right wing to double down on their war against immigrants.

(1) Biden Pushed to the Left

The April edition of our Reform & Revolution magazine deals heavily with the first of these, examining the underlying social forces which have seemingly transformed Biden from a staunch lifelong hack for neoliberalism into a pragmatic president implementing certain neo-Keynesian policies.

Biden and the Democratic Party leadership are struggling to develop a new policy framework to manage the fallout from the pandemic. As it became apparent that their “free-market” neoliberal policies had failed, the government has been forced to intervene and spend trillions of tax dollars to stimulate the US capitalist economy.

Democratic leaders’ political calculus for their stimulus packages and liberal measures is rooted in a fear of repeating the mistakes they made during the Obama administration when they alienated working-class voters by bailing out Wall Street, spent too little to stimulate the economy, and made rotten compromises with Republicans. These “mistakes” were fully consistent with the neoliberal orthodoxy that had dominated the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton’s administration. But against the background of the Great Recession, they opened space for the Tea Party Republicans and then Trump to make dramatic electoral gains from 2010 – 2016. And on the left, they fueled the rise of Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and protest movements.

The huge growth of socialist and left-wing ideas are now an important factor haunting the Democratic Party’s corporate leadership. In several articles, we argue that this situation is opening big possibilities for DSA to grow in both size and influence, if we recognize the political space that has opened up and offer a clear political alternative to the corporate Democrats who won’t be able to satisfy working-class people’s raised expectations due to the party’s loyalty to their corporate backers.

Shortly before our magazine went to print, Biden announced his proposals to address climate change. His plans are in line with what other governments around the globe have been promising and include the aspirational goals called for by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 report—a pledge of net zero emissions by 2050 and major cuts by 2030, which are required to keep global warming at or below 1.5 degrees. 

However, the baseline used by the Biden administration is 2005, whereas most EU countries use 1990. This means the US is pledging less than others, around a 40% reduction from a 1990 baseline. 

Nonetheless, this is a big shift, not only rejecting Trump’s policies but substantially exceeding Obama’s as well. The US has always blocked international agreements and defended their “right” to pollute. This continued under Obama, shocking people who were looking to him for a different approach. But at least now, there appears to be some measure of significant change.

On one hand, this is a victory won by the climate justice movement in the US and abroad, which shows that we can win significant reforms. But on the other, the Biden plan is still very far from what is actually needed.

The IPCC target is a global target, which means wealthier countries have a responsibility to set bolder targets. In addition, the US, as the top emitter of greenhouse gas emissions historically, has a special responsibility to marshal its vast wealth and resources to rapidly decarbonize and assist former colonial countries in reaching zero emissions by 2050.

The IPCC target of net zero by 2050 also relies on negative emissions (carbon removal), yet the technology to remove carbon and safely store it does not even exist on a mass scale. So they are gambling on aspirational solutions that might not materialize.

And even if we meet these targets and had the carbon removal in place, it only gives the world a 66% chance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees. Nor do these targets take into account feedback loops—warming of the permafrost and release of huge amounts of methane (which is already happening), further deforestation, etc. And the truth is, most governments rarely meet their stated goals because they succumb to the pressures of global capitalist competition, prioritizing the profits of “their” companies over the ecological needs of the world as a whole.

To put things in perspective: To stick to the goal of limiting global warming to a maximum of 1.5 degrees, the IPCC calculated a budget of between 420 and 580 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions left to be produced starting in 2018. The world uses around 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year at the moment. At that pace, the budget will be used up in roughly 10 years, or even less since emissions are still rising every year. 

DSA’s ecosocialist working group is calling for decarbonizing the economy fully by 2030. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal of a Green New Deal demands a ten year plan to achieve zero emissions. This is what’s needed, at the very least. The movement for climate justice and DSA should view Biden’s announcement as a confirmation that a fighting mass movement can win concessions, but recognize Biden’s plan is still very far from what’s needed, and we need to continue the fight for more radical policies.

(2) Upheaval Against Racism

A second major development in the US is the historic wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which recently won a rare conviction of a police officer who murdered a Black person. Much of the ruling class hoped that convicting police officer Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd would quell some of the anger and reinforce the idea that “the justice system works.” Yet throughout Chauvin’s trial, police continued to kill on average three civilians a day, as evidenced by the horrifying murders of Daunte Wright in a Minneapolis suburb and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago.

Many people rightfully celebrated the conviction of Chauvin, an important victory achieved by determined mass protests and years of BLM organizing. At the same time, the on-going police killings have reinforced the sense that the whole system is guilty, not just Chauvin and “a few bad apples.”

On a similar note, Biden has appointed a historic number of people of color to his administration, and yet he and other centrist Democrats have openly opposed calls to defund the police. The fact that Biden and many Democrats are so resistant to defunding the police and reinvesting funds in social services quite clearly reveals the ruling class’ commitment to maintaining wealth inequality and the system of police repression needed to maintain their social order.

Out of these experiences, a section of BLM supporters and activists are increasingly seeing the connection between racism and a political and economic system dominated by a mostly white capitalist elite. The growth of DSA during the BLM uprising reflects the increasing understanding among activists and young people that we are confronting an entire system of racial capitalism, not just individual cases of police injustice. Many young people are increasingly realizing that only a democratic socialist society can end such a system, pay reparations to heal historic wounds inflicted on Black, Indigenous, and other communities, and provide a decent life for everyone—from high quality Medicare for All to living wage jobs for all.

However, right-wing and establishment forces have made some headway dividing activists from the wider community by whipping up fear that protestors’ calls to defund and abolish the police would lead to a rise in crime. A key challenge facing the BLM movement is coalescing around a clear set of policy demands capable of translating mass sympathy for the protests into a sustained mass movement. 

As outlined in the feature article of our September 2020 magazine, “Unreformable: Police and the Capitalist State”, we believe that winning active popular support for the demand to defund the police requires consistently linking this demand with wider demands to end poverty, housing insecurity, and unemployment—the conditions that lead to crime in working-class communities. 

As new gut-wrenching police murders create further waves of outrage under Biden, the search for the most effective demands and political strategies will grow. In this context, the potential exists for DSA, in coalition with other community forces, to popularize specific demands around police accountability linked to anti-poverty measures and socialist solutions.

(3) “It’s Not a Border Crisis. It’s an Imperialism Crisis”

A third major development is the wave of migrants fleeing extreme poverty, drought, and pervasive violence in Central America, which has emerged as a serious political challenge for Biden. On the right, Republicans are exploiting working people’s deep economic anxieties to whip up nationalist fears over immigrants taking jobs, affordable housing, and other services. On the left, anger is rising at the overcrowded detention centers, the limited number of refugees granted entry, and the militarized response to asylum seekers.

Biden is being widely criticized for continuing many of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, and among more politically conscious people, there is a clear memory that the Obama administration deported more undocumented immigrants than any previous president. 

In March, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed to the root causes of the problems: 

It’s not a border crisis. It’s an imperialism crisis. It’s an imperialism crisis. It’s a climate crisis. It’s a trade crisis… And also, it’s a carceral crisis… even during this term and this president, our immigration system is based and designed on our carceral system.

AOC is right. Farmers are fleeing their homelands because of droughts caused by global warming, neoliberal imperialist trade policies that bankrupt domestic farmers, right-wing coups backed by the US, and the resulting poverty that has led to a terrible rise in gang violence. Who wouldn’t try to escape such unbearable conditions?

DSA stands in solidarity with these migrant workers, and we oppose racist attempts to turn them away.

To be able to win basic rights and resources for immigrants, the left should demand that rich corporations who super-exploit immigrant workers pay for decent wages, working conditions, housing, and healthcare — not only for immigrant workers but for all working people, including workers born in this country.  Only a strategy that unites the working class across ethnic, racial, and national lines against our common exploiters is capable of defeating arguments that this country does not have enough resources for everyone. Tackling these racial, economic, and environmental challenges requires building a socialist organization rooted in working-class communities and combining day-to-day activism with political education, including the study of Marxism. We are excited to see DSA grow to nearly 95,000 members, and we hope our Reform & Revolution magazine helps DSA activists grapple with the changing political and economic trends we face and the Marxist strategies we need to succeed in fighting for a better world.