In American politics, there are a few supposedly universal truths that dominate discourse. For example: you can’t fight city hall! People are naturally selfish! You have to compromise if you ever want to get anything done! And, my favorite: you’ll grow out of your idealism when you’re older.
Just in terms of logical construction, each of the above is bogus. There are no absolutes, humans aren’t “naturally” anything and history is not over. Throughout history, regular people have — in the face of the most crooked attempts to co-opt and sabotage their efforts — refused to be bought off and instead opted for the solidarity that flies in the ugly face of capitalist individualism. Yet these clichés are taken as the starting point for all “realistic” (read: careerist) political thinkers. In truth, this is all rubbish, and it should all be abandoned in favor of Marxist politics.
Our generation has a lot of catching up to do. Most young Americans have little or no idea what a picket line is, let alone what to do when confronted with one. Radical history is virtually absent from our high school textbooks, and for the occasional revolutionary who cannot be removed entirely, he is stripped of his ideas. Thus Mark Twain’s fiction is read, but his writings on war (“I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”) are kept safely out of sight.
Similarly, Helen Keller’s story — as told to most Americans — ends in her adolescence. It’s the model “work hard enough and you can do anything” lesson. But heaven forefend any students take the next step and actually read what she wrote. Take, for example, her opinion of the Russian revolutionary, Lenin: “Men vanish from earth leaving behind them the furrows they have ploughed. I see the furrow Lenin left sown with the unshatterable seed of a new life for mankind, and cast deep below the rolling tides of storm and lightning, mighty crops for the ages to reap.”
Why is it that George Bush gets away with evoking Martin Luther King Jr.? Could it be that he never read King’s speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967? “There are 40 million poor people here. And one day, we must ask the question: ‘Why are there 40 million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”
If I had room I’d quote Einstein’s essay “Why Socialism,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Song to the Men of England,” Upton Sinclair’s speeches from the campaign trail when he ran as the Socialist Party’s candidate for governor of California, and the rest of the remarkable anti-capitalist opinions of sanitized revolutionaries like Jack London, George Orwell or Mohammed Ali.
But the point isn’t that I’m in good company. It’s just that while you’re wrapped in the flag-shoving land of the free, home of the brave, united we stand rubbish down your throat, they are clearly keeping something from us.
In a world where 6 million children die every year because of malnourishment, grain is dumped in the ocean to keep prices high enough for profit margins. Nuclear weapons projects run little risk of losing Pentagon funding while Malaria and AIDS drugs fail to reach the millions who need them. And all the institutions that purport to end poverty, disease and armed conflict (the U.S. government, the United Nations, the World Bank, etc.) have been completely ineffective at stopping — and in fact are actively supportive of — the unprecedented inequality that lies at the root of these problems.
In short, we are being lied to daily by a complacent corporate media, our history has been stolen from us systematically, and the profit system has proven remarkably efficient at one thing only: concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the few. Another world is possible, but it depends on the actions of regular people. At the hands of this system, humanity will repeat the crimes of the 20th century. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to the rest of the world to halt the priorities of the Republican/Democratic consensus. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to compromise your politics to “get something done.” There are good politics and there are bad politics, correct positions and wrong ones. To compromise a good demand is to abandon it. For all their rhetoric about democracy, why won’t they extend it to the realm that decides who gets food, medicine and education? That’s all that socialism is: the democratization of the economy. This, of course, violates their otherwise uninterrupted worship of the free market. These are extreme times, and they require some radical rethinking. Like Malcolm X said, “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”
Chris Dols ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in civil engineering and is a member of the International Socialist Organization.
