What Comes Next After Bernie?

Further Responses to Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag

In my previous post, I expressed my admiration for Amber’s Dirtbag. It’s a good account of her politicization. I respect her for her practical involvement without the conformism or silly eccentricities of the internet Left. She is honest to the point of self-evisceration. Amber also has a superpower for seeing through the bullshit struggles of the Left. She learned something from Richard Wright’s account of an out-of-town lunatic who succeeded in dominating and undermining a pro-communist chapter of the John Reed Society in the 1930s. He saw the attendant failure of common sense and saw through the opportunistic attempt to instrumentalize Wright himself as the chapter’s only Black member. When your associates impose rules that flout common sense, it’s probably a good rule of thumb to ask cui bono, who benefits from it?

Now, I want to bring up several points in which, in my view, Amber confounds personal preference with political priority. It’s something we all do, but it increases the closer we are to the group sorting endemic to high school and early adulthood. I want to take issue with her characterization of what she calls the “pedophile”-devotee of youth and ecology; and with her understanding of “entryism” (i.e., joining some organization in order to recruit for one’s own); with the ideology of “community” and, last but not least, with the question of what is to be done after Bernie (assuming that he doesn’t match Rabbi Schneerson in remaining the Messiah even post mortem). All these questions aggregate in that famous one, What is to be done?

After reading Dirtbag I understand better than before why it is that my young friends, Pancake and Ethan, turn up their noses at the Sunrise ecological organization and why their dislike of Elisabeth Warren is more visceral than their opposition to Trump. They and Amber sniff out the liberal do-gooderism of people who worry more about the climate than about the workers who need jobs and health care. They see, perhaps correctly, that Warren was a late and unreliable convert to the Left; and that Trump voters had their reasons for rejecting his liberal opponents. The dirtbag Left (evidently influenced by Trump’s foul-mouthed right) was amenable to the idea of owning the libs and vaporizing the snowflakes. The hardcore Left is serious about Socialism, rejecting what the 60s Left called “reformism.” We were, and they are, serious about revolution.

In conversation with my younger friends, I have argued about this to no end. No deep difference between Trump and Biden? Ask any woman who needs an abortion whether she thinks there’s no difference. And let’s remember how the hard Left in Germany underestimated the Nazis in 1933 by refusing to join forces with the “libs” of their day, the Social Democrats. That sure taught them all a lesson. Trump is not only an enemy of most of the causes we espouse. He is an enemy of truth itself.

But leaving these objections aside, I want to point out a trompe l’oeil in their perception of Left and center. As we noted, the dirtbag Left today despises the libs and ecological do-gooders for much the same reasons we were contemptuous of mere “reformists” back in the day: we wanted to structurally transform the capitalist system. But as we are all aware (and never tire of repeating), all the other advanced capitalist countries already have health care for all. Yet they remain capitalist countries. The admirable Bernie, like the European social democrats and the British Labor Party, is nothing if not a reformist. Who then is not a reformist? Well, unlike the demand for Medicare for All (the fulfillment of which, no matter how desirable, would change nothing in the structure of capitalism), the demands raised by the do-gooder libs of Sunrise, if fulfilled both in letter and spirit, would deal a heavy, perhaps mortal, blow to laissez faire capitalism, to its license to pollute the oceans with plastic, to deforest the Global South, and to deprive us of the air, water, and living space that should be the common property of us all. If we could curtail polluting industries—under the condition of providing other employment for the affected workers—this achievement would take us much farther toward the traditional ideals of international socialism than universal health care.

Amber thinks it’s objectionable to collaborate with certain organizations because doing so requires an opportunistic “entryism”? But why? The members of any movement will harbor diverse priorities. This could be a good thing if the goal were to treat ecological reform, immigration, and green jobs as facets of the same global challenge. We need a thick skin for engaging with people with whom we disagree. Facing up to it is good for us. I cringed at the prospect of going door to door to promote M4A. A cranky old guy answered his door and growled, “Who’s gonna pay for it?” When I shot back, “Who pays for what we have now?” the two of us shared a curmudgeonly chuckle before going into it. It’s not easy, but it’s a way of confirming our own seriousness. It won’t be easy to convince the Dutch people who voted for anti-immigrant Gert Wilders, the Hungarians who support Victor Orban, or the Italians who put Berlusconi and Meloni in power. But what is the alternative? In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht recently founded a pro-German-worker and anti-immigrant party. Is this what we want? I for one regard it as the worst kind of sellout, a step in the direction of a generic national socialism. Are we so invested in our cool crowd that we can’t carry on a conversation with Trumpers, nerds, or Christians? If so, we need to hire some Seven Day Adventists to coach us in the art of facing disdain and abuse.

What is needed in order to move forward after Bernie is first of all a non-reformist overriding vision of a socialist future. That has to mean socialization of all monopolistic and polluting industries, with their displaced workers compensated by green jobs. I don’t see DSA giving such demands a tenth of the attention and energy that went into the campaign for M4A. This would already take us a long way toward the traditional aspirations of the socialist movement. Beneath this non-negotiable lodestar, we could take on the countless more limited goals that could be achieved in the near future, and which would remind us at every turn that it’s precisely neoliberal capitalism that blocks further progress in every sphere. It’s only our lack of imagination that allows us to ignore the many challenges that await us—and their location along a path blocked and limited by the logic of monopoly capitalism. Housing needs—blocked by private ownership, by investors who under neoliberalism are sometimes headquartered not in our town but in Dubai. Same for all other needs. Why do we have food deserts? Why prohibitively priced medications? The reader of Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America realizes how much good could be done in the short run, even person to person. But it’s essential to remember and reiterate that in every sphere, it’s monopoly capitalism that sets the limits of what is achievable.

I understand that Amber and my younger Leftist friends regard the term “community” (as opposed to class solidarity) with suspicion. But here I can speak as a Rip Van Winkle of the pre-internet age. Anyone who fails to appreciate the true community of presence doesn’t know what she is missing, and doesn’t realize how vulnerable we have become to the counterfeit online community of hype and miscommunication. We are living in a society of unprecedented atomization. We can counteract this alienation simply by recognizing it and reaching out for friends, conversation partners, and comrades.

In my last post, I expressed my enthusiasm for Amber’s literary taste for Moby Dick—the novel of American capitalism steering toward shipwreck. I recommended that she next try Don Quixote. This is not only because, as the perennial losers she considers us to be, we are in dire need of the sense of humor Amber cherishes. Cervantes reminds us that the utopia of equality and the real presence of community are too deeply rooted in humanity to die. Quixote acknowledges as much addressing the simple goatherds with whom he shares the simplest of meals:

What a happy time and a happy age were those that the ancients called Golden! And not because gold—which in this our Age of Iron is so valued—was gotten in that fortunate time without any trouble, but rather because the people who lived then didn’t know the two words yours and mine! In that holy age all things were owned in common.

The socialist dream of a common ownership transcending the barriers of thine and mine was always known and will never die.