Project 2029’s Blanquist Apologetics

Guest contributor Marlowe Boettcher of Marxist Unity Group responds to J. Ryder and T.E. Moon of Geese Magazine’s manifesto and proposal for a socialist “Project 2029.”

Our comrades at Geese have outlined their vision for a “Socialist Project 2029” in two separate articles, subtitled “The Manifesto” and “The Proposal.” The former lays out the rationale for their project, the latter lays out the nuts and bolts. Although presenting itself as very revolutionary and Marxist, this framing belies what is actually happening. These articles amount to what is ultimately a mundane point: DSA should support an Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez candidacy for the 2028 presidential race. There is no real call to action outside of that. The veneer of “revolutionary change” amounts to wishcasting and a list of things they would hope AOC would do if DSA were to support her. It attempts to cover this with a nebulous call for “popular pressure” around AOC to at least make a show that the broad left might have some agency beyond door-knocking, but ultimately it is clear the authors are largely indifferent to that.

Despite its presentation to the contrary, the point of the “Project 2029” articles is not to lay out a serious theory of change. It is not even to convince revolutionaries to support AOC. It is in fact, not really to convince anyone to change their opinion about anything. It is to convince supporters of AOC that they are revolutionary. This limited goal might be noble were it directed at convincing those outside of the socialist left who support AOC to join the socialist left, but even that is not the goal. The goal is to convince those, already in the socialist left, who already have a strong proclivity towards supporting AOC, that they are not wrong or hypocritical to do so. It has all the depth of daily self-affirmations that a communist Stuart Smiley might repeat in the mirror each morning: you’re revolutionary enough, your theory is smart enough, and doggone it, comrades like you!

The Manifesto

The Manifesto begins with much fluff explaining how the name is obviously a reference to the conservative “Project 2025” and an even more immediate reference to Pritzker’s call for a “Democratic Project 2029” but this is the better, more socialist version of that. To this, it concludes, very Marxistly, that while the Democrats wish for a return to a pre-Trumpian past, the socialist understands there is essentially no way out but forward.¹ The authors lay out three broad presumptions (the essay calls them “dimensions”) to guide us forward. First, the socialist must make use of the expanded executive powers Trump has created. The second (which the authors helpfully point out “follows from the first”) is that the socialist must use these expanded executive powers to fire a bunch of people in government who are bad. The third is that the socialist must use these expanded executive powers to pass a bunch of things that are good. Without exaggeration, this is in fact the plan (the definitions of “good things” and “bad things” will be provided in “The Proposal”). Everything else is attempting to explain why this isn’t obviously stupid.

The remainder of “The Manifesto” goes on to explain basically what Project 2029 isn’t. It isn’t reformist, it isn’t under the illusion that the Democrats will change on their own, it isn’t harm reduction, lesser evilism, or opportunism. Additionally, the authors don’t use this word specifically, but it is clear in their intent: it isn’t Blanquism. This is an important point to make, because the tenor of the three “dimensions” they are working in seems to put a large amount of onus on top-down and highly centralized change. The first dimension was, after all, a call to embrace the expanded executive, the proceeding two dimensions were simply a description of what one should do with that expanded executive (crush one’s enemies, rule by fiat). How then is this not just some updated prayer for enlightened despotism? Are we not just hoping that AOC will become our Catherine the Great for a new era and wipe away the bloated boyar corruption of the past at the stroke of a pen?

The explanation for why we are not dealing with mere putschism is given in a single sentence that could only be over five lines long, the authors explain: 

our wager … is that the Democratic Party’s forced assumption of a more ideologically definite form through the socialist insurgency can accelerate the political education and movement of millions by making their reactionary character visible in practice rather than merely intelligible in theory—but only if this insurgency can consolidate programmatically² and subsequently create consensus for total state reform.

This is, essentially, a nod towards Luxemburgist notions of revolutionary pedagogy-by-action. Some crisis point in the near future (as we will see, an extremely specific crisis point they anticipate will occur within a very specific timeframe) will force revolutionary education onto the masses, under the guidance of a vanguard socialist pole of the working class Democratic Party base. These educated masses will then lead the leadership as it were, making unignorable demands which the leaders will have little choice but follow. When Luxemburg laid this notion out in Reform and Revolution she had a clear vision for what actions the vanguard of the socialist left should be doing in the meantime. The question pertinent here is what precisely should that vanguard be doing under this rubric?

About three quarters of the way through the article, the authors remember to mention Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the first time and make the specific call for DSA to endorse her campaign for President. This is the first call for action that holds any specificity beyond “building a Democratic Socialist pole within the Democratic Party” in the article. They state she is the only viable candidate that can bridge this nebulous people’s movement to institutional power. AOC, they argue, will be the “agent” who can “act to carry out a program³ of this nature”.

The remainder of the article again goes on to explain how this is not some vague liberal sentiment but is actually much more revolutionary than that. At one point it explains that our task “cannot be understood with the moral language of ‘support’ or the technocratic language of ‘influence,’” which is an odd statement to put two paragraphs after stating that AOC’s presidency must be “backed unwaveringly.” Perhaps we are entering the limits of what a Manifesto is meant to do. If we want specificity of action beyond “backing” and “backing unwaveringly” it is perhaps “The Proposal” we should be looking at.

Hearts of Iron V: The Proposal

If “The Manifesto” was a bit meandering and lacking in specificity, one can at least confidently say that such accusations cannot be levied against “The Proposal.” However in this specificity it becomes all the more clear that they are, in fact, using pseudo-Luxemburgist language of “the revolutionary masses” to launder Blanquist putschism. Very early on a statement is made, upon which the entire argument seems to rest by their own terms: “We must proceed from the premise that an overt, right-wing Trumpist coup attempt during the 2028–2029 transition is highly probable.” Why must we do this? Well, frankly, because none of the rest of everything we’ve read up to this point or from this point will make much sense without it. When Luxemburg spoke of a crisis she spoke of the manifestation of the necessary instability found within capitalism. This crisis might occur tomorrow or it might occur in 10 years. For our comrades at Geese it will occur January 2029. It will not arise from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, or the subsumption of non capitalist states to capitalism leading to a crisis of accumulation, it will occur from the decisions and ego of a single octogenarian.⁴

It should be noted here that this is a ridiculous thing to take as a base assumption. If I may be forgiven for using an old trope, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the authors offer none. They point, of course, to the January 6 riots, as if this is dispositive of… something. Truly, their evidence is “we must proceed from the premise,” they are asking the reader to humor them. Or they handwavingly assume it is self-evident. They offer a small nod to the possibility that perhaps the most unprecedented thing in the history of the American state may not just suddenly happen stating “Conversely, if the coup does not occur, our operational window will be narrower—but no less real. The compounding criminality, institutional degradation, and constitutional overreach of the Trump administration, paired with the growing strategic strength of the organized socialist movement, will still provide the necessary leverage to execute a less bold version of the same structural maneuvers to consolidate working-class state power.” This is generous of them, but does leave one wondering why we “must proceed” from their premise to begin with. 

Without downplaying the abuses of the Trump administration, a coup of the nature and scale suggested by the article has never occurred in the history of the United States. This includes January 6 and every other abuse of power by the Trump administration up until now. This even includes every assassination, including Lincoln’s! If one’s plan rests, largely to entirely, on this happening within the next three years one would hope more justification for this element would be offered. With that said, let us see what these “structural maneuvers to consolidate working-class state power” are.

What follows is an expansion of their “three dimensions” into seven bullet points. Here, we are mercifully given a definition of what “good things” and “bad people” are and what we should do about them. We must arrest the traitors, we must use a mix of legal and extralegal means to really arrest the traitors, we must fight the Constitution,⁵ subordinate the judiciary to the popular will, and “demolish the empire.” It must be conceded that these proposals have specificity behind them, laying out the constitutional provisions our presumably friendly and democratically elected socialist congress will be able to use to further empower President AOC, explaining how agencies from the SEC to the FCC may be marshaled to the revolutionary cause, and so forth.

Ironically, this very specificity brings us back to square one. For all the legal meandering, what remains a mystery is what the rest of us should be doing. This document is not written as a revolutionary manifesto, but an internal legal memo for a future AOC White House Counsel. Yes, clearly they imagine a “movement” that is making “demands” to “pressure” our electeds to carry out this coup. One imagines the image of the XIII Legion force-marching Caesar to Rome with spears at his back to take the throne whether he wants to or not. Beyond these fantasies, it’s not clear how the socialist left can do any of this in reality. This contrast of fine detail, listing individual federal agencies and telling how they can be marshaled to punish our enemies and help our friends, with the generalities and partial appeals to “working class pressure” cannot be missed.⁶

All this begs the question: what the hell is the point of any of this? If one is really so convinced of an inevitable rightist coup in the next 3 years, one that can only be staved off on the condition that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins the presidency, should I still be going to work? Should we as an organization take up weapons or survival training? Make preparations for going underground? Create alternative supply and communications lines, on the off chance that maybe AOC fucks this up? Even if we are to assume that AOC is the sole beacon to navigate the proletarian ship through the seas of fascism, is there anything more we should be doing to build relations with her office? Is she even planning on running? Shouldn’t we know this definitively if, again, she is the single finger in the dike stopping the flood of Trump’s Thousand Year Reich? Is this entire speculative fiction all just an Aesopian tale to convince DSA to endorse AOC’s still unconfirmed presidential run?

In short, yes! The entire point of these articles is to present an argument for DSA to endorse AOC’s hypothetical presidential run. It is not, however, an argument meant to convince. Very few people will change their minds after reading this. It is an article meant to feed the arguments of those who already agree with their conclusion. It is a form of apologetics. To understand that, we must look first to the apologetic form as it appears in its modern context: Christianity.

Apologies for Apologetics

In speaking of Christian Apologetics, there is a common saying that “the problem with apologists is they think they’re in sales when they’re actually in customer retention.” The apologist does not start from a stance of curiosity, they begin with a goal: the justification of their theology (usually some form of biblical literalism). They then work backwards to lay out something of an internally consistent rubric to place a path to this goal. The problem is they aren’t walking down that path, they’re already at the end and they have no interest in turning back. The more foundational problem is that this is ultimately true of their audience as well.

By and large, those from the secular world who view these apologetic works find them unconvincing. That is fine, because convincing them isn’t the point of the work. Their audience is the convinced believer who lives in the secularized 21st century West, who believes their faith is under constant siege by secularism. The goal of any work of apologetics is not to convince a nonbeliever, but to convince believers that they too can stand on the solid plane of reason. For the Christian, apologetics is there to assure them they aren’t outside of the mainstream ideology (in this case empirical reason) but in fact more knowledgeable of it than their opponents. It is the secularist who ignores objective evidence in service to pre-ordained conclusions, not them.

This is the clear goal of “Project 2029.” It begins from the premise that DSA must support AOC’s candidacy and works backwards to provide a “revolutionary” justification for doing so. Its audience isn’t the AOC-critical, it’s the AOC-convinced, who, like the beleaguered Christian going to public school, is tired of being told they are outside the in-group ideology.⁷ They come in already convinced that supporting AOC is the best path forward. None of them needed a “revolutionary” justification for this. The liberal promises of universal healthcare, a more “compassionate” foreign policy, harm reduction… all of these were already convincing enough. The problem is that those justifications lay plainly outside of the shared ideology of those they speak to regularly. Be it actual members of DSA, members of “Left Twitter” or other spaces, there is a particular language and rubric they interact with that has pre-built dismissals of appeals to harm reduction and piecemeal reform. What the supporter needs, therefore, is language that bypasses that.

Conclusion

Geese’s “Project 2029” can seem confusing at first. It is premised upon a wild and extreme prediction of the complete breakdown of the entire constitutional order within three years, but simultaneously is eerily understated in its call to action. It offers no real justification for the degree to which it is convinced this prediction will come true, assuming the reader is already on board. Likewise, while it claims to not be reliant on the good graces of AOC or the Democratic Party, it offers no formula by which the rank-and-file socialist should be interacting with the persons and institutions upon which our final battle for the American proletariat rests. Instead, it opts to helpfully point out how the FCC can arrest FoxNews anchors under a novel interpretation of the agency’s mandate. If one assumes the purpose of propaganda is to convince the skeptical, this proposal is not a particularly good example. That is not the point here. If the coup doesn’t happen, if the “window of opportunity” is passed by, none of this will matter—so long as DSA endorses AOC for president.

“Project 2029” also offers no real argument as to why AOC is or will be particularly receptive to popular pressure.  This is betrayed by the fact that both articles spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the ways in which a president might be able to rule by fiat. Geese then offers the idea that if AOC was that president, she could act like a socialist genie and culminate the centuries-long struggle for proletarian liberation into a period of months. Why she would do this is left blank or chalked up to some nameless, faceless “pressure.” All three “dimensions” laid out in “The Manifesto” and all seven points of “The Project” are saying exactly this. Notably absent is any space for mass organizations. No ink has been spilled on what unions would be doing, whether soviet-style workers councils will be set up, etc. For all its implicit Luxemburgism, the only mention of a general strike is in passing, to say that the National Labor Relations Board shouldn’t prosecute them during the revolution!⁸ At every turn the protagonists of this story are Washington bureaucrats. Despite handwaving declarations that they are the driving force, the workers are simply there in dutiful, nameless “support.” Even within the legacy of the fantastic or utopian socialist imaginary, “Project 2029” is lacking.

I remember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest endorsement forum with NYC-DSA. When asked as to whether she was in favor of cutting off aid to Israel, she said “yes” before proceeding to cryptically say “Bibi can buy his own missiles.” That second part, which clearly showed she was not actually arguing for preventing Israel from buying weapons, was ignored by the majority of people on the call. The next day, her clarification that she had no intention of stopping weapons sales took many members by surprise. Yet it was a literal reconfirmation of what she already said! They needed to hear the “yes,” after that nothing else mattered. It gave them the permission they needed to do what they wanted to do to begin with. That is what is at the heart of this “Project”: you have permission to do the thing you wanted to anyway, as it’s very revolutionary. They don’t care about convincing their fellow socialists. It is themselves whom they are convincing. They aren’t simply attaching a LARP power fantasy to bog standard harm reduction arguments, they are the “real” revolutionaries. “Project 2029” is not a broadside to wake the left of DSA to join the revolution, it is a pep rally aimed at a purely internal audience.

1. The keen reader may recognize this as “dialectics”, “materialism”, “history” or a mix of all three, probably. ↩︎
2. Hi MUG! ↩︎
3. The “program” in question, has, again, only been defined as: use a strong executive to fire bad people and pass good laws. ↩︎
4. Supporters of Project 2029 may make the point that said octogenarian’s ego is only an inflection point of history because of the inherent contradictions of the system that allowed it to be so. To this one must concede that truly none of us fell out of a coconut tree. ↩︎
5. Hi again, MUG! ↩︎
6. A later article, “For A People’s January 6,” does provide some more details about the shape of protests the authors envision in response to this hypothetical 2029 coup. A full critique of this article is beyond the present article’s scope and can be found here. In brief, while there is more mention of working class action (calls to flood the street, make political work stoppage strikes in key industries, etc.) little detail is given on how any of this ought to be organized by the vanguard left. It is consistent with the Project 2029 articles’ handwave appeals to “pressure.” Moreover it ignores many of the concerns that naturally might arise were the actions it calls for actually undertaken. If a general strike has shut down supply chains and the economy, where are the strikers acquiring food for example? No attention is given to the massive logistical concerns that come with maintaining a general uprising, much less the planning that goes into executing one. The image of mass uprisings and strikes amount to a broadly aesthetic vision of a protest but bigger. This stands, once more, in stark contrast to the granular detail the authors of the Project 2029 articles give about which laws, executive powers, and three-letter organizations can be utilized and how by a hypothetical President Ocasio-Cortez.
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7. Also, much like said Christian, the fact that their ideology, in this case supporting the most progressive, if imperfect, candidate for president as part of a utilitarian calculus of doing the most good, actually is perfectly acceptable within the ruling ideology of society writ-large, is of little comfort when your friends are making fun of you. ↩︎
8. We are, again, imagining a state of exception in which Trump, a large portion of congress, dozens of federal agency bureaucrats, and large swathes of the military are in jail. The constitution is either partially suspended or under active review in a manner not seen since Reconstruction. I am sure the workers will be thrilled at the NLRB’s leniency. ↩︎