Part 1. The Election is Over
Americans awoke on November 4th to a world fundamentally different than the world they left in their dreams mere hours before. Whether we understand it or not, the election has ceased to be an election. It will not be decided by such mundane bureaucratic mechanisms as the counting of votes or even the rulings of courts, though doubtlessly Trump and Biden will fight an endless series of legal battles that will serve both as proxy and distraction from the main event. But Trump ended the election proper when he claimed victory last night and called on the Supreme Court to stop counting mail-in votes. He has ensured, in essence, that the real political battle for control of the United States will be decided in the streets.
The shift in the stage of political struggle is not immediately obvious. Most Americans, after all, have lived through an election decided by the courts and a significant number of them, working under the assumption that this is still an election, will doubtlessly trust “the process” and attempt to leave the results of the struggle to the courts. That demobilization is Trump’s path to victory. The courts are a political body, one Trump has been stacking in his favor since his first days in office. If the terrain of struggle begins and ends there his advantage will be insurmountable. But this is not the America that passively accepted the Supreme Court’s decisions in 2000. This America has been engulfed in running street battles against the police and far right paramilitaries for 6 months now. It has seen, if only for a brief moment, the Black working class (flanked at least initially by an unprecedented multiracial coalition) seize control of the stage of history and fight its way from the charred remains of the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis to the gates of the White House itself. It will (and indeed already has) take the fight to the streets.
Part 2: The Streets
So what do we know about the battle in the streets? Protests against the Trump regime (to the extent that these early election protests can be distinguished from the previous anti-police protests) started a few days before the election itself. What are likely to be substantially larger protests have already been called in every major city, beginning this afternoon. One of the most important factors in the initial battles will be the new American frontliners, a force comparable tactically (if different politically) to famous frontliners of Chile and Hong Kong. The emergence of these autonomous militants, who’ve operated with a nearly unprecedented degree of popular support, lend to the struggle a core of experienced and hardened street fighters capable of facing (if not always necessarily beating) the police head to head. Critically, these frontliners are distinct from what will probably emerge as the main numerical body of the protesters: Democratic professional class anti-Trump partisans of the kind that took to the streets at the beginning of the Trump administration. This fragile anti-Trump alliance will be the core of the initial protests and it remains to be seen whether the partisan wing will attempt to sell out the frontliners to the police (a move that would doom both factions) or if they can successfully cooperate. Without the frontliners the battle in the streets will inevitably replicate the protests against the Iraq war: massive but completely ineffective.
The police for their part have also been mobilizing for weeks now. Cities are calling almost their entire police force into the streets, and the national guard has been mobilized, as of the 4th of November, in 16 states. In the lead up to the election the police pepper sprayed Black voters attempting to march to the polls in North Carolina and viciously attacked groups of frontliners across the country. As the most powerful pro-Trump force in the country their violence will only escalate as the real street battles start. They will likely make no distinctions between the various factions as the protests wear on, which ironically will only help to solidify anti-Trump forces under a single banner. What remains to be seen is what the mass of the working class will do. It was a mass of young, non-white workers who so thoroughly trounced the police in the first weeks of their confrontation in May and June. Their spontaneous, decentralized attacks left the police unable to cover enough ground to respond and resulted in mass looting and the retreat of the police from vast swaths of urban areas. A repeat of this specific sequence of events, however, is unlikely. The May uprising hinged on the unpreparedness of the police and on simultaneous attacks in multiple locations. Even if the working class came out in the numbers they did in May (and it’s possible that like most electoral events they simply don’t give a shit, the May revolutionaries appear to have, as usual, sat this election out) the vast existing protest infrastructure will likely channel them into marches and pre-planned columns, where their earlier advantages will be negated entirely. The other unknown element is the extent of militia and other right wing mass mobilization. The most immediate danger is 2000 style mob attacks on sites of vote counting, which essentially becomes a proxy for the street conflict writ large. Left and right wing protests and counter-protests of the kind seen across the country in the last 6 months will continue. But it’s also entirely possible that key portions of the Republican base (like QAnon) turn into full on paramilitaries and drastically escalate the level of bloodshed. Without a doubt car attacks on protesters and shootings will become a common feature of the weeks to come, with a potentially debilitating effect on the struggle. To get a better understanding of the shape of events to come, let us turn to the rest of the world of uprisings.
Part 3. Lessons from the World in Revolt
Since mid 2018 the world has seen a host of uprisings stretching from Haiti to Sudan to India to Hong Kong, the largest wave by far since the collapse of the 2011 revolutionary cycle (and possibly since 1968). These movements have produced a wide range of tactics, from square occupations in Algeria to road blocks in Bolivia to roving riots in Reunion to a general strike ousting the prime minister of Finland. The most common form of protest, seen most prominently in Chile, the US, Hong Kong, Honduras, and Lebanon, has been a combination of rioting and street marches culminating in massive running battles with the police. All of the uprisings fought on this basis (and on the basis of occupations of squares or even military bases) have either fizzled out or were simply crushed by the weight of the police or the army. Unable to physically defeat the police and unwilling to take up arms, their movements slowly crumbled, occasionally reawakened by yet another police shooting or economic disaster but fundamentally unable to change their society. Their problem was a lack of power, a lack of the leverage necessary to force the ruling class to bend to their will. It is not a unique problem: Iraq war protesters across the world faced the same dilemma in 2003 and were unable to produce a solution. But there is a way forward, as the movements in Finland and Bolivia proved. There is leverage in two forms: labor and logistics. In Finland, as we’ve already discussed, mass protests and a general strike encompassing a truly breathtaking portion of the population quickly forced the collapse of the government and reversal of postal worker pay cuts. In Bolivia an extensive network of roadblocks nearly brought down the government itself and paralyzed the national economy, forcing a coup government to hold and respect elections by waging a direct economic assault on the ruling class itself.
Now a direct repeat of the Bolivian roadblock strategy is geographically untenable in the United States, but a similar blockade of ports or shipping centers is theoretically possible. In practice however, and despite discussions of such actions in the US dating back to at least 2011, no major move has been made against American infrastructure in the recent cycle and there is no reason to believe that these protests are substantially better organized than anything that’s come before them. The decisive role in tipping the balance of the struggle, then, falls to organized labor. Now obviously conditions in Finland are vastly different from those in the US. A closer comparison would be the strikes and mass protests that restored Hugo Chavez to the presidency after the 2002 coup (at least insofar as we’re dealing with a coup in both scenarios), though again Chavez’s base was significantly more radical and better organized than anything that currently exists in the US. The situation, as we shall see, is not quite as dire as the attempted general strikes in Sudan or Hong Kong but American organized labor, aside from a brief moment when AFA International President Sara Nelson’s threat of a general strike ended the devastating 2019 government shutdown, has broadly ceded the stage of history to the ruling class. Nevertheless, the dragon of organized labor is merely sleeping, not dead, and even the puffs of smoke from its nostrils are enough to strike fear in the ruling class. As we shall see, what’s coming out of the labor movement right now is more than a puff of smoke, it could signal the awakening of the dragon itself.
Part 4. Watch the Unions
I do not have the journalistic integrity or frankly the time to even attempt to count the number of times random people on Twitter have attempted and failed to call a general strike in the last several years. A general strike is not a demon, you cannot summon it by chanting its name. Such a strike can only emerge as the product of a sustained organizing campaign in a moment of great crisis. There has never been a nationwide general strike in American history, and ordinarily I wouldn’t even dane to discuss the possibility. But this is 2020, the people openly discussing a general strike are not the motley rabble of left twitter that normally fails to produce anything at all. As Kim Kelly has noted, the most radical labor councils of the AFL-CIO have been looking at the possibility of a general strike for some time now. But the real movement in organized labor has come from Chicago, where several unions, including the powerful Chicago Teachers Union, have called for demonstrations and actions scaling up to a general strike. Now it is important to note once again that American union penetration is incredibly low and the unions that exist are much weaker, less organized, and more conservative than the unions of places like Venezuela, and have clashed with Black abolitionists and their own members over the inclusion of police unions in their ranks. But the intervention of American labor into the electoral process would open a fundamentally new political phase of American history. It would mark, in a sense, the movement of the working class as a class in and for itself, one that recognizes itself as workers and crucially acts in that capacity. That brave new world has a horizon of possibility vastly different than our own, one beyond petty concerns of the maintenance of bourgeois democracy. By calling protests themselves, Chicago unions have already begun to directly intervene in the struggle. Where this will lead only time will tell, but the preparation at least is beginning.
Part 5. Some Notes on Ideology
Or why should the left care about this at all
To understand the potential impact of this struggle (and the impact of the entrance of the general strike onto the scene), we need to look at the production of ideology itself. Mass ideology is continuously created by the state of the cycle of struggle around it. The explosion of abolitionist thought at the beginning of the May uprising (and its slow decline in importance as the months wore on and the police regained control of the country) is a perfect case study. In the initial weeks of revolt, when the police were in retreat, the struggle blew open the gates of possibility. Without the violence of the police to enforce the political realism (and realism, as theorists like David Graeber have long pointed out, is essentially nothing more than the acceptance of the state’s capacity for violence and thus the adoption of the state’s political perspective as the only real one) that serves as a bureaucratic constraint on our imagination, abolitionism took the stage as the dominant ideology of the struggle. The works of Angela Davis (and her liberal faux mirrors) flew off the shelves. People began frantically staking out formerly unthinkable positions like police and prison abolition. The raw hatred of the cops was palpable and ACAB appeared everywhere from the streets of Chicago to Twitter bios of people who’d called themselves liberals the day before. It had literally become possible, in a way it has never been before or since, to imagine a different world. But as we all remember, the fires faded, the police retook the streets, and the politicians who committed to abolishing the police in Minneapolis backtracked the instant they were no longer in danger of being overthrown. Abolition and even defunding the police began to fade from the public consciousness, its flame maintained by an increasingly ideologically isolated core of militants. In the face of these events we must ask ourselves how a country that mere months ago showed over 50% support for burning down police stations is now divided between two authoritarian prison state architects. Obviously structural factors are at work here. The people who vote, for example, are rarely if ever the people who riot. Rioters lean young, poor, and non-white. Voters lean old, wealthy, and white. But that alone cannot explain the sea changes of opinions even among registered voters, or how those voters swung as the uprising progressed. Nor can it explain why many simply acquiesced to the new order without a struggle.
The ingrained white supremacy the revolt was attempting to destroy likewise reasserted itself and the older political mechanics of history (the election in particular) came to the fore. But white supremacy alone also cannot explain the real ideological shifts that occurred in the wake of the uprisings. Certainly people marching in the street and changing their Twitter bios can be understood as insincere, still committed to white supremacy even as they superficially express their support for the revolt. We saw the horrific culmination of these dynamics in the murder of a Black child by white nominally leftist militias in Seattle. But while the uprisings didn’t literally end white supremacy (something that could only conceivably be achieved by the destruction at the very least of the American settler police state) the ideological effects they produced were real enough to cause people to take to the streets and to, in the most cynical interpretation, force people to pretend. But pretending is essentially how ideology works: people follow power. Their ideologies shift rapidly, often without them being aware of it. Constrained into the violent realism of the police and funneled into the electoral system, people invariably shift to the right. While a leftist struggle throws back the police they shift to the left as the ideological constraints weaken. Consciousness is not a linear process as the most vulgar Marxists argue. It ebbs and flows, turns back on itself before surging forwards. It is determined by the state of the struggle even as it determines the struggle itself. These same ideological effects are at play even in the current struggle, with its conservative, origins in the ballot box. The historical process we’re about to see very well could delegitimize the American political system. In the worst scenario we could be watching the opening act of a civil war, in the best a revolution. It is in these events that a new American consciousness will be formed, and the left cannot cede this ground to liberalism or fascism. The world will not survive it.