Biden or Blood

“Bernie or bust” is bygone. These are the options now.

Friends, Americans, comrades. I write from the United Kingdom, because the United States of America — the greatest country on Earth — is everybody’s problem. I write because, as so many of your compatriots stare transfixed into the orange glow of fascism, so many of you refuse to vote for Joe Biden because he is not left-leaning enough. It’s not for me to tell you what to do. But I want you to understand something.

1. They are not the same.

It strikes me as odd that so much of the Left can grasp the concepts of intersectionality, social constructionism and an entire spectrum of genders but can only sort politicians into “saintly” or “evil”.

Usually this Manichean simplification at least contains a kernel of truth — that both candidates are representatives of, variously: the establishment; the old guard; the “elites”; bourgeois milquetoast capitalism; the centre ground. 2020 is different, as (it transpires) was 2016. One candidate threatens North Korea with nuclear dick jokes, emboldens white supremacist groups, denies the existence of a pandemic (before advising to treat it intravenously with disinfectant) attempts to call the military on anti-racism protestors, revokes peacekeeping deals with Iran, causes boycotts of Qatar, strips back trans rights, curtails freedom of speech, and imposes migration bans on Muslim countries. He acts with impunity, even after impeachment. There is something worse than capitalism, and you know the name for it.

Here’s Friedrich Engels on the urgency of this distinction:

[…] it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it.

Here’s The First Congress of the Communist International:

We are for the defence of bourgeois democracy — more precisely the defence of democratic rights — against attacks from the right.

Sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it?

2. Voting for the lesser evil is not evil.

It’s a utilitarian calculus, not a form of hero-worship. Here’s Noam Chomsky:

Generally associated with the religious left, secular leftists implicitly invoke [the “politics of moral witness”] when they reject [Lesser Evil Voting] on the grounds that “a lesser of two evils is still evil.” Leaving aside the obvious rejoinder that this is exactly the point of lesser evil voting-i.e. to do less evil, what needs to be challenged is the assumption that voting should be seen a form of individual self-expression rather than as an act to be judged on its likely consequences […]

All politics is a choice between greater and lesser evils. If you join a trade union, you will stand shoulder to shoulder at a picket fence with imperfect people. If you fight a revolution, you will fight side by side with fools and scoundrels. Do not kid yourself.

A common concern in this vein is that Biden is an alleged rapist. Consider, however, that Trump is an alleged rapist. America will be ruled by an alleged rapist as it is now. This decision will be made with or without you. One of these alleged rapists has repeatedly appointed to the supreme court Justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and one would not.

3. The DNC does not care what you think.

A common objection from the “Bernie or Bust” movement is that the loss of the leftist vote will draw the Democratic party leftward in the long run. Is the DNC sold out to capitalism or is it not? If it is, then it has no reason to answer to you, unless you are a donor. The “poor, weak-minded men” of whom Engles spoke have no reason, in fact, to care about winning. You have to make them do it.

Even were this not the case, a Trump victory would like draw the Democratic party to the right, not to the left. Here’s Chomsky (2016) again:

[…] far right victories not only impose terrible suffering on the most vulnerable segments of society but also function as a powerful weapon in the hands of the establishment center, which, now in opposition can posture as the “reasonable” alternative. A Trump presidency, should it materialize, will undermine the burgeoning movement centered around the Sanders campaign […]

History bears out his point — support for Sanders was higher in 2016 than in 2020.

4. Voting does not “legitimise” an illegitimate system.

Here we have echoes of the arguments Russell Brand made, in the UK in 2013.

The question is: so what? The countries with the lowest ballot turnouts invariably have shambolic and embarrassing governments, but what does it do to overthrow them? And before you say it —

5. Accelerationism will not work better under Donald Trump.

It may be that the ranks of each side grow fastest when the other is in power. It may well be that, by hastening the internal antagonisms of capitalism, we hasten its demise. But what replaces it depends on what happens between now and then.

Let’s get something straight: Trump doesn’t care what you, a leftist, think. He doesn’t answer to you. You will have an easier time holding the Democrats to account, and therefore agitating for your positions.

Here’s Lenin, as quoted by Sylvia Pankhurst:

Millions of backward members are enrolled in the Labour Party, therefore Communists should be present to do propaganda amongst them, provided Communist freedom of action and propaganda is not thereby limited.

Pankhurst continues:

Lenin argued, that in order to explode the futility of reformism and to bring Communism to pass, the Labour Party must have a trial in office.

Here’s Lenin himself, with lucidity, in which he famously argued that the left should support the best available parliamentary option “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man”:

The errors of the Left Communists are particularly dangerous at present, because certain revolutionaries are not displaying a sufficiently thoughtful, sufficiently attentive, sufficiently intelligent and sufficiently shrewd attitude toward each of these conditions. If we are the party of the revolutionary class, and not merely a revolutionary group, and if we want the masses to follow us (and unless we achieve that, we stand the risk of remaining mere windbags), we must, first, help Henderson or Snowden to beat Lloyd George and Churchill (or, rather, compel the former to beat the latter, because the former are afraid of their victory!); second, we must help the majority of the working class to be convinced by their own experience that we are right, i.e., that the Hendersons and Snowdens are absolutely good for nothing, that they are petty-bourgeois and treacherous by nature, and that their bankruptcy is inevitable; third, we must bring nearer the moment when, on the basis of the disappointment of most of the workers in the Hendersons, it will be possible, with serious chances of success, to overthrow the government of the Hendersons at once […]

A more coherent strategy than one tends to hear from Chapo Trap House, for example.

6. Learn a lesson from the right wing.

There is no such toy-throwing on the other side of the fence. Rather than purity-testing the Republican party, they rally behind its leader every time. And it doesn’t move to the centre as a consequence: it moves continually to the right. Why?

7. No compromise!

Lenin (again):

“… All compromise with other parties . . . any policy of manoeuvring and compromise must be emphatically rejected,” the German Lefts write in the Frankfurt pamphlet.

It is surprising that, with such views, these Lefts do not emphatically condemn Bolshevism! After all, the German Lefts cannot but know that the entire history of Bolshevism, both before and after the October Revolution, is full of instances of changes of tack, conciliatory tactics and compromises with other parties, including bourgeois parties!

To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilisation of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one’s enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating or conditional allies) — is that not ridiculous in the extreme? Is it not like making a difficult ascent of an unexplored and hitherto inaccessible mountain and refusing in advance ever to move in zigzags, ever to retrace one’s steps, or ever to abandon a course once selected, and to try others?’

For my part, I do condemn Bolshevism. The point here is not whether Bolshevism is good. I quote Lenin extensively because he was a guy who knew how to win. This is something we can learn from him.

8. It’s worth it

Look, I get it. There’s a queue around the block and you’re going to have to stand in it for an hour, in November weather, with a stars-and-stripes-clad Qanon disciple mouthbreathing on the back of your neck at six inches’ range, occasionally doubling over to clear their lungs of the Media Hoax they’ve caught at a barbecue. And for all that, your individual vote almost certainly won’t change anything. Political scientists call it “Downs Paradox”.

I maintain the “almost” is key here. You have a tiny chance of making a huge difference. And it is a huge difference, which could impact you without you even knowing. It’s a difference which, however extreme or however subtle, lasts for at least the next four years and spans across a nation of 328,000,000 people. Politics doesn’t start and end with voting, but a shrewd strategist will not abstain from it.

Engels counts the benefits on one hand:

[…] if universal suffrage had offered no other advantage than that it allowed us to count our numbers every three years; that by the regularly established, unexpectedly rapid rise in the number of votes it increased in equal measure the workers’ certainty of victory and the dismay of their opponents, and so became our best means of propaganda; that it accurately informed us concerning our own strength and that of all hostile parties, and thereby provided us with a measure of proportion for our actions second to none, safeguarding us from untimely timidity as much as from untimely foolhardiness — if this had been the only advantage we gained from the suffrage, then it would still have been more than enough.

Maybe you’re not persuaded. If you had a gun to your head, who would you vote for? Because a lot of people — protestors, black and Jewish people confronted by white supremacist groups, everybody who suffers from either a nuclearised Iran or a war with said country, everyone highly vulnerable to COVID-19 — have a gun to their head.

In 2016, following Trump’s last (or should I merely say “first”?) victory, David Mitchell wrote:

Trump’s win hit me in several ways. First, it denied me his defeat scene. I wanted to see that. His character seemed designed expressly for that sort of comeuppance, as surely as the diner redneck in Superman II.

Visualise Trump’s face. His defeat is the moment he was born for. If you can’t vote for the revolution, vote for that.