Revolutionary Optimism in a World of Doom

The recent re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has a much different feeling than the first time he won the presidency. 

Instead of experiencing a resurgence, the opposition has been left demoralized. The response from liberal Americans who took to the streets in nearly unprecedented numbers in 2017 has not materialized this time around. Even the response from leftists, whose anti-Trump actions drew headlines right after the 2016 election, has seemed muted. This is not surprising. Trump’s second victory was much less shocking than his first. After eight years, Trump’s rhetoric has been normalized and his far-right program has won over the plurality of Americans who voted. This was not the case when he lost the popular vote in 2016, as the Electoral College carried him to victory.

The response since Trump’s victory from much of the anti-Trump camp has been one of doom and despair. The Democratic Party, supposedly the most powerful organization which could fight back against Trump, has shown itself to be ill-equipped for the task. Leaders like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have rallied under the illusion of bipartisanship, promising a “smooth transition” into the Trump administration and putting up little outward resistance to his agenda. They are forming themselves into a loyal opposition which does little to fundamentally oppose his ideas.

The Democrats’ failure, compounded by their accommodation to Trump’s agenda, highlights the necessity for a true opposition, an opposition based on the politics of class struggle and provide a way out of the crisis faced by the American people.

Popular movements such as Black Lives Matter in 2020 can radicalize people, sparking a resurgence of revolutionary-minded politics which are otherwise largely absent from the public discourse. However, the momentum which arises from protest needs to continue past the moment of the protest itself. Many liberal and progressive organizations experienced unprecedented growth out of the dissatisfaction of Trump’s election in 2016 but few are tangibly stronger today, and they are not prepared to wage an effective resistance to Trump. Only DSA and other socialist organizations with a concrete program for change have remained resilient over these past few years. It is futile to solely organize against something without also organizing for a broader vision, as the failure of the Harris campaign has demonstrated.

Building Enduring Resistance

When thinking about future steps, it is crucial to look to the past. Daniel Singer’s influential 1970 book Prelude to Revolution chronicles the lessons of the May 1968 student and worker uprising in France. During the uprising, the established unions such as the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) and the bureaucratized, Stalinized French Communist Party (PCF) failed to meet the moment. Rather than lending their full support to the mass demonstrations with the potential to topple the conservative government even when they had many chances to do so, organized labor and the PCF gave weak support to the demonstrators, favoring limited reforms and a focus on winning via electoral means. The conflict between the old left and the new left met its high point during this crisis, demonstrating that the revolutionary fervor of the supposedly revolutionary PCF had been long undermined through collaboration with the established powers. The stagnant Soviet Union, complicit in suppressing the Prague uprising that same year, provided no inspiration for the revolutionaries, and their representatives in France replicated the uninspiring line of Moscow. The result? A victory for the conservative right in France in the next election. The demise of corresponding global movements of the late 1960s foreshadowed further right-wing victories in the next decade, which allowed for the implementation of neoliberal policies around the world, and resulted in a dark spiral into irrelevance for pro-worker forces in the aforementioned countries.

The overarching perspective, however, of Prelude to Revolution is one of revolutionary optimism, an optimism which when expressed seems almost unbelievable today. Singer predicted socialist revolutions taking place in France and Italy within the decade, with the global events of 1968 serving as just a taste of what was to come, a foreshock to a much larger earthquake soon afterwards. Written just two years after the 1968 upheaval, Singer’s argument makes a lot of sense in the context. 1968 was a year which saw unprecedented shifts in political dynamics, with student movements joining with corresponding general strikes in France and across the world.

But the projected revolutions never came. The collapse of the Soviet bloc ended a great tension between world powers, with the victory of capitalist forces propelling a vision of an “end” to history among many observers. History, of course, never ended, and continues to unfold. And the collapse of the USSR did not mean that capitalism was the inevitable outcome of history. Western capitalism triumphed over a stagnant, post-Stalinist Soviet Union which had long been deprived of the revolutionary vision of 1917 and the energy to sustain itself in the long term. It was a temporary victory over a decaying system which provided little alternative hope for the international working class.

The final two paragraphs of Prelude to Revolution lay out a rejection of that deterministic view of history. I’ll leave them here. 

“If there is an intellectual victim of the current crisis, it is the fatalistic interpretation of history, the belief that what is must be so and that if it is to be swept away, the upheaval will come on its own. Man counts, the Vietnamese reminded the world, even in the nuclear age. This is why, once the description and analysis is over, there can be no clear answer to the question running through this book–whether the age of conflict, which has already begun, will see the victory of authoritarian rule or the triumph of revolution. The future will be what you will make it. What we shall make it.

Don’t run, young comrades. Don’t climb onto exposed barricades just to be shot at. Watch your step, because the ground is full of pitfalls. For you, workers in industry, some traps will be dressed up as ‘truly revolutionary.’ For you, students, technicians, intellectual workers, not all the traps will be so obvious as ‘participation.’ Watch out and learn. But go on advancing together, in a fighting formation, because your generation can take us on the road to socialism and freedom. And the alternative is still a relapse into barbarism, with or without nuclear doom.”

Singer’s warning is still relevant. His identification of pitfalls and “revolutionary” traps, which in this context refer to the neutralization of radical energy through the co-option of the May 68 movement by the PCF and the unions, has parallels in our society today. The United States doesn’t even have the powerful reformist socialist parties or powerful unions that France had in 1968. Our watered-down equivalents, liberal Democratic politicians and liberal unionists, have done a good job of co-opting genuine grassroots movements by transforming their demands into watered-down legislation and symbolic gestures, diffusing the trajectory of true systemic change.

Over the past 54 years, a lot has changed. The threat of nuclear doom has given way to more varied threats, greatest of all the threat of climate change. But the strongest threat remains: the large-scale loss of human life in war and genocide to the benefit of none but a few imperialist forces who stand to profit from immense suffering. The danger of climate change is constantly downplayed, not only by the fossil fuel companies and their enablers who deny it altogether but by politicians who reject any sort of meaningful action because of their notions of civility. The threat of a new cold war with China and Russia, with politicians on both sides of the aisle engaging in more escalatory rhetoric, looms larger than ever before.

We have to move beyond niceties if we’re going to have a chance to preserve the planet for our children and their children. The threat of far right authoritarianism and proto-fascism, exemplified by the recent election of Donald Trump but also by a resurgent phenomenon which has arisen in many countries across the world lately, has been downplayed since the election. This comes after Kamala Harris made “our democracy on the line” the centerpiece of her campaign. In a crucial time when Democrats and union leaders should be forming a new resistance to Trump’s agenda, they have been mostly silent or even conciliatory to Trump, such as American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten’s greeting to the present-elect: “Even though I am one of those people you probably dislike, happy Thanksgiving. I am grateful for this country.”

Singer’s callback to Rosa Luxemburg’s famous slogan of “socialism or barbarism” underscores the reality of the situation. In the words of Luxemburg, “Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war.” We face a choice, as past generations have faced, and will continue to face if we don’t resolve the question once and for all. There is an alternative to the present system, and that alternative is a socialist society.

Young people are usually at the forefront of social change, as they were in France then and they are today. But that doesn’t mean the youth are inherently radical. According to exit polls, 42% of young people who voted in the recent U.S. presidential election voted for Trump, compared to just 31% in 2020. This mirrors past phenomena: the millennial generation had similar patterns, with only 32% voting Republican in 2008 compared to a near tie in 2024. This is not a new phenomenon: in a 1970 Gallup poll, only 49% of people aged 21-29 said the U.S. did not make a mistake getting involved in the Vietnam war, compared to 61% of Americans over 50.

The lesson from all of this? Young people now, just as in the 1960s, won’t lead us to liberation without conscious organization and strategy. Just hoping history will finally catch up to the inevitable revolution to come ignores the collective effort required to make that happen. People who have been captivated by the tide of revolutionary moments find themselves directionless when the energy fades. When the protests die out and a cause which captivates a large audience seems to be on the tail end of its prominence, what comes next?

We Are Going To Win

“El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (The people united will never be defeated), perhaps the most influential protest song worldwide, was written by Quilapayun during the revolutionary period in Chilé in 1973. Its message, while adopted by various anti-government protests over the years, remains decidedly socialist in message and in meaning. Only through collective action – through our collective power – will we ever be free.

The first line of the song relays a simple message: “We are going to win.” Take that to heart. Now isn’t the time for pessimism. Historical mistakes must lead to future lessons learned, which equals future victories. Opportunities for wins need to be anticipated and planned for in advance rather than pushed away when they arise.

The lack of a concrete organization between the upheavals of the past few years is a sore spot in the American left. Millions of people who participated in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests returned to normal daily life without much thought towards politics besides perhaps voting every couple of years. The disunity of the movement was a hindrance to it, because without unified demands and a unified, lingering force to achieve those demands, any movement is ultimately bound towards failure. 

So what can be done about that? The strongest of all the classes is the working class. Only through our collective power, through forming ourselves into radical unions, socialist political organizations, and exerting the greatest strength we have – the power we can collectively exert if our demands aren’t acceded to – will we be free as a collective. We can’t expect to free ourselves without an organization with the potential to fulfill our demands, to carry out action in support of those demands and to serve as a fighting force against the capitalist class.

Don’t run, as Daniel Singer said. This is not the time to give up. Quite the opposite. The next few years will determine the outcome of the next century of world history. Will we push towards a better world or stagnate into an economy based on exploitation for the foreseeable future? Again, the choice is in our hands.

We need to build ourselves into an organization which has the power to act collectively to win concrete change when future mass social movements arise. The prelude to revolution has arisen many times throughout our history, and its failure to fully materialize is not inevitable. The course of history is always in flux, and can change through the intervention of the organized force of the working class. Whether or not it will change in our favor depends entirely on us and our willingness to organize for that change.