Episode 106 – Reform or Revolution with Danny Haiphong

Macro N Cheese – Episode 106
Reform or Revolution with Danny Haiphong
February 6, 2021

 

[00:00:03.000] – Danny Haiphong [intro/music]

We don’t need to drop it completely, but we do need to deprioritize the electoral sphere because right now most of what calls themselves the left is basically obsessed with electoral politics and a system that is poorly designed and organized to destroy them.

[00:00:21.990] – Danny Haiphong [intro/music]

There is no amount of consolidation of power that the ruling class can do, which will stop its system from digging the grave for itself, that it has been digging for so many decades now.

[00:01:26.670] – Geoff Ginger [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:34.530] – Steve Grumbine

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. I have spoken to, well, just about every member of the Black Agenda Report from Margaret to Ajamu to Glen. And now today I’ve got Danny Haiphong. And Danny is a contributing editor at Black Agenda Report and co-host of The Left Lens.

His work’s been published widely elsewhere, maintains a blog at patreon.com/DannyHaiphong, where all of this work can be found. And with that, I want to thank Danny. Me and him have played tag now for about a month and this is worth it. I’m so grateful to have him come on. So, Danny, thank you so much for taking time to be with me today.

[00:02:20.850] – Danny Haiphong

Yes, of course. Sorry for all of the tag. Life has been, as you know, and as so many out there can probably relate. It’s been a little hectic.

[00:02:29.340] – Grumbine

Oh, yes. Heck yes, man. Let’s be fair. You just started this Left Lens with Margaret, in fact. Just real quick before we get started. Talk about your show.

[00:02:41.080] – Haiphong

Sure. So we’re right now primarily on YouTube, probably in the future, looking to get on to regular podcasts streams as well. But the idea – it’s been in the works for quite some time – but the idea was Black Agenda Report has the website, it has the online journal, has the radio program. But YouTube is the second largest search engine.

And despite all of the suppression and repression that people like us face on there, we felt it was important to get on there. So I’ve been working on it for a while, trying to play with some of the technical aspects. And finally, I think it was back in the summer, we were able to finally launch in kind of a quarantine mode. And so we’re doing monthly episodes with me and Margaret. We’re trying to introduce some guests there.

And then I’m also doing my own section of it called The Internationalist Transmission, which will be interviews with folks on international topics, on war, and trying to get people even from around the world who are facing the empire kind of head on and get their perspectives and introduce that into the space, because not a lot of people are doing that. So that’s where we’re at right now.

And so a lot of people ask, how do you support it? Because we’re not really doing the monetizing thing right now. So many people have had issues with it. We’re saying donate to the Black Agenda Report, donate to the hosts individually on Patreon and you can find us both there. And we hope to continue to move forward with more content in the future.

[00:04:07.690] – Grumbine

Fantastic. Well, that sounds like a great way to segue into our subject today. Obviously, we just had an election and for progressives there wasn’t a whole lot here. This was a pretty hollow, empty election, even though most of us, I would say probably 99 percent of us would love to have seen Donald Trump and fascism kicked in the teeth.

But for those of us who have been following the stuff, we know that that’s kind of a hollow thing because the Democrats have proven every bit as willing to be fascist, every bit as willing to be warmongers, every bit as willing to dial up the austerity narrative with how are you going to pay for it, and all the other things that we’ve grown to love and hate about the Republican Party.

Democrats have decided, hey, hold my beer, we got you on this one. And not to be outdone, we had all kinds of madness here with the election. And obviously Donald Trump didn’t go down quietly and we had what I’ll call direct action. They’re calling it insurrection. But let’s just say we had a direct action done by people that are on the opposite side of the political spectrum from where I stand.

And this particular event seems to be an opening, a gateway, if you will, to suppressing the left as well. And when you look at what our demands are, what we’ve been talking about, both in Green Party, independent circles, even the progressives that have supported the Democratic Party traditionally that find themselves wandering further and further left, none of us saw this Biden campaign as something to celebrate.

And yet we realized direct action and things like that, organizing, being ready to make demands and have some teeth to it. This insurrection that they’re calling it on the Capitol is being used already to start cracking down on all forms of dissent, all forms of speech. And the left is typically the one hit hardest by these sorts of things. What are your thoughts on the current events that just transpired?

[00:06:06.920] – Haiphong

Yeah, well, it’s certainly something to behold and study closer and not a lot of people are doing that because of all of the ways in which the ruling class has sanitized and flooded the airwaves with particular narratives. And right now we’re being told that what happened on January 6 was somehow some sort of exception to a rule that the United States – what was the big issue – was that there were these fringe protesters, these fringe insurrectionists, who were directed by Trump to attack the capital.

And one of the police officers said inside the capital when speaking to these Trump legions, that that was the most sacred place. And so that’s been the reaction. The reaction has been that the most sacred place imaginable in the world was attacked on January 6th, and that this means what needs to happen is there needs to be a fortification, a real militarized response in order to protect this, quote-unquote, “democracy.”

But the reality is, is that what happened on January 6th is actually really mild case of what has been a problem in the United States since its inception. And this is one of the most frustrating things about the Trump era, is that white supremacy is not some sort of Russian backed operation which was ultimately brought into being by Donald Trump. Actually, white supremacy is a fundamental relationship that shapes every single thing in the United States from its economy to its military policy.

We can go down the line and the idea that a state like the United States, a state which is a racist state and a white supremacist state can censor itself, can manage its own fundamental contradictions in a way that will benefit anybody except the ruling class is laughable in this period of crisis. So for me, it I think is a real lesson to learn. And we’re going to learn it. And we’re learning it already pretty fast that the ruling classes look for any excuse to consolidate its power.

Joe Biden’s administration is going to be a huge key to this. And Donald Trump, despite all of his legitimate, abhorrent qualities, especially policy-wise, things like his racist demagoguery to me are very common in the United States. That is something that people should expect from anybody, including someone like Joe Biden. Policy wise, though, there was no real resistance to him among anybody, but especially those who call themselves liberals and lefties.

Most of them just went along with the Democratic Party and fell into the Russia gate narrative and peddled their own kind of racism, anti-Russian racism. But they didn’t criticize Trump’s policy on China. They didn’t criticize the tax cuts. They didn’t put up any fight to real policy which damaged the lives of working people, poor people, black people, etc. the most.

So in my view, what’s going to happen now out of January 6th is that there is going to be this militarized consolidation of power, which will include, of course, censorship, which, as you said, and you’re 100 percent correct, it always affects the left primarily, if not solely because what we know about the repression of these so-called right wing forces, because they are much closer to the establishment than not, they always find new avenues and channels to be able to take advantage of and to be able to grow their base with.

But for the left who happen to be also folks who are either aligned with or in the working class themselves, when the levers of communication are closed off to us, we find ourselves in a much more dire predicament. So that’s the difference, really. And increasing censorship and repression of the left only serves to strengthen the right. And that should seem to be a very obvious conclusion.

But for many, people are breathing a sigh of relief right now with Joe Biden and his cabinet that has a black secretary of defense and others who somehow reflect the most oppressed sections of the United States. But this is a real mistake. And out of January 6th and out of inauguration and we already have seen what the Biden administration is really going to be about, which is austerity and a kind of slow rolling decline and stagnation of this empire and of this capitalist system, which will then increase the pain and increase the strength of the so-called faux populist right wing elements that exist that are literally drooling at the mouth, hoping and wishing and waiting for Biden’s administration to utterly fail working class people and to take it advantage of that.

[00:11:06.590] – Grumbine

You bring up a great point, and the austerity narrative is so pernicious, so horrible, most people don’t really understand austerity and Europe has had a much better understanding of austerity and have been fighting against austerity for forever. The word austerity is still somewhat new in the United States. People aren’t quite latched on to it the way that I feel we need to be. And it goes far beyond just we’re not going to spend on you. It goes far beyond the fact that we’re going to say, “well, how are we going to pay for it?” and things like that.

What it does is it fuels the very hatred the right-wing has as the ineptitude of an economy based on austerity. Once again, as you said even earlier, finds us scapegoats and scapegoats tend to be the most depressed, the most vulnerable people who end up being kicked and maligned and marginalized even further. And so as we’re talking about this stuff, you look at immigration in particular. The kids are still in cages, guys.

All of a sudden, when you don’t have enough jobs and you don’t have food on your table and the mortgage is in arrears and people are genuinely hurting, they don’t have health care, they don’t have all the normal things that a quote-unquote “first world nation” would be expected to provide its citizens. Well, who’s eaten my lunch? Who’s the one taking my lunch? And so naturally, many of those people that were at the Capitol, they see immigrants and are like, why are they getting a job?

They’re not even a citizen. And so it fuels xenophobia. Austerity is a trigger for xenophobic concerns and for xenophobic behavior like building walls and more crackdowns like the Patriot Act and all the other things that come with it. I’m just curious, what is your take on austerity politics? I know that, like I said, it’s been a global thing where most people really understand, but the US, we really don’t get this, do we?

[00:13:04.830] – Haiphong

No, it’s so normalized in the United States, and I think that’s because the United States has not really had a successful struggle in terms of a successful class struggle which was able to, like in European countries, really force real concessions. One thing that a lot of people don’t know, like, let’s say in Germany, Germany used to be split east and west and East Germany was the socialist republic. And when the Berlin Wall fell and there had to be a merger between the two governments, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party had to merge together and form one left party.

And that’s the reason why some of those reforms that people really hold their hat on, like universal health care here in the United States, that’s why they exist in places like Germany, because there was a real left struggle that was able to gain actual power. But in the United States, the two party duopoly prevents that entirely. And this has been true since the inception of the United States.

And when the United States’ ruling class read the writing on the wall for its capitalist system and said the new transition had to be neoliberalism, that the next stage was to eradicate all vestiges of social welfare policy, it used what has been a staple in the United States from the beginning – racism. It used xenophobia. It used these things and this isn’t new. And I think the Trump era was really damaging in the sense that a lot of people began to take part in a sort of cottage industry that said Trump represented something that hasn’t really been the case in the United States’ attention, an openly racist president.

But if you read Margaret Kimberly’s book, you find out that all the presidents have been openly racist. And if you even just go back to the beginning of the period of austerity, whether you’re talking about Richard Nixon, the end of the Nixon reign, or whether you talk about the Reagan era, etc., you see that each and every one of them use xenophobia, use racism to justify some sort of clamp down on the economic well-being of working class people.

Reagan was one of the architects of the so-called welfare queen narrative, which really took the assault on welfare as we know it – completed by Bill Clinton – into effect. So I think it’s absolutely ridiculous what has happened, where, to me, austerity is the assault on the rights and well-being of working people that has been disconnected from this question of race and xenophobia and white supremacy to the point where we can’t even really criticize and condemn someone like Donald Trump the way we might want to, because the so-called liberal wing of the ruling class, the Democratic Party, is peddling its own form of xenophobia and white supremacy in order to consolidate its own power in this kind of a faux competition between the elite over who is going to lead the charge for the empire at this given moment.

So I think, in my opinion, austerity, it is really the rule of law in the United States at this point. And it’s accepted largely because it has been normalized. It has been normalized for so many decades. This idea that working class people have to be the ones that sacrifice. And when they don’t feel like that, then the ruling class says, OK, well, it’s not our fault, it’s China’s fault or it’s the fault of those undocumented workers who are trying to cross the border because of the violence we’ve inflicted in their countries, whether it’s Mexico or Central America or Syria, anywhere.

That is sort of the genius around austerity politics: that it’s racist in character. And for the last four years, all we’ve heard is that this is some kind of new phenomenon that is fully represented in Trump and solely represented in Trump, and once he’s gone and we bring in someone like Joe Biden with his quote-unquote “diverse cabinet,” and things are going to get better.

But Joe Biden, he’s an austerity champion and he has been since the beginning of his political career, actually, he could be credited as one of the fathers of austerity in the United States dating back to the 70s and his tight relationship with the credit card industry, because we all know that credit was part of the financial schematics of austerity because it meant wages were so low, working conditions for workers were so poor, and we’re going to be made so poor, that credit was going to be the way that working people could feel like they could keep a standard of living that they had become accustomed to over the last 20, 30 years beforehand.

[00:17:42.250] – Grumbine

That’s the sneakiest thing, because you go back to the Powell Memo, you go back to Mount Pelerin Society, you go back to the Chicago school and Milton Friedman, and all along the way, they, along with Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan and the whole gang, have literally made the concept of public money a lie like there is no such thing as public money, there’s only taxpayer dollars.

And by using this taxpayer narrative, what they’ve done is when you think of a taxpayer, do you think of it as some poor black kid in the street, or do you think of it as some fat white guy with his hair slicked over and glad-handing everybody? It’s typically the white landowner going back to the beginning of the nation’s founding. When I say the nation’s founding, I mean the colonial period.  And the idea of so many of these individuals running around today.

I can hear Hillary cackling at Bernie back in 2016, “How are you going to pay for it? Pie in the sky,” and all this stuff. And that’s the Democrats. That’s not the Republicans. Although one could say that the title is irrelevant; they’re neoliberals all the way. My question to you is, I guess this. We were talking about the impacts on the left from what happened in the Capitol.

And you think back to Lenin and Lenin writing the book, “What Is To Be Done,” and toward the end of the book, he talks about the need for communication systems and talks very specifically about how important it is that revolutionaries be able to communicate with each other, to be able to do bold, direct actions, and to be able to impact labor and society in general to make the labor movement have teeth.

You had the Black Panthers with mutual aid and you had a whole slew of other groups throughout time that have recognized the need for shadow systems to support the working class in order for them to be able to take bold action against the state, to be able to support the needs of the people. Those very important tools, planning, communication, direct action, mutual aid, being able to support legally people that take bold action that are arrested, and be able to have legal services for them, all the things that go with being able to act outside of the establishment norm, those things are all going to be heavily under assault. Do you agree with that?

[00:20:06.770] – Haiphong

Yeah, I definitely agree with that, and it’s been quite an assault that has definitely escalated during the Trump era, not for the reasons that we thought maybe they were – at least a lot of people thought Trump was going to enter office, and he was going to be the one to lead the suppression of the left.  And while Donald Trump certainly took aim at the left and made some interesting equivalencies between the Democratic Party and the left and this whole idea that the Democratic Party is full of Marxists.

And there is this right-wing trend, this so-called faux populist trend doing that. In terms of policy, what was happening was Russiagate was being used as an excuse to suppress the left on what should be a public utility through the Internet and all of its various channels, social media, YouTube, et cetera. We found that our content was being completely stifled and throttled on these venues, and that’s going to get worse.

It has been bad for the last four plus years and it is going to get worse under Joe Biden, because what we know is that Joe Biden and his administration and its penchants for copying the Obama period and the Obama administration, means that the Democratic Party will be taking aim at what it sees as the biggest threat. It saw the Bernie Sanders-led camp as a threat to its existence. So what do you think it thinks of people who are to the left of the Bernie Sanders camp and who want to see real radical social transformation happen?

We are, in fact, the targets, and we’ve always been. This is part and parcel of the history of the United States – that the United States has perhaps the most brutal history when it comes to suppressing its most left sections of the population and those folk who try it and have attempted to organize real independent social formations that can bring about true self-determination for black people or true socialist relations in terms of the economy. That is part of the history.

And sometimes a disservice is really done, I think, when folks in the Sanders camp, for example, talk about the New Deal and FDR being the model, when at that time there were forces in that camp who were purging and attacking the left, socialists, communists in order to purify them from those ideological elements and in fact, save capitalism. So there’s always these contradictions that existed. In this period, the biggest contradiction that the left faces now is that the Democratic Party, if we were in any other moment, would have already transformed into its opposite, would have already transformed into the right-wing party, but because the GOP has nowhere else to go and makes all of its credibility from being the white man’s party and being the party of white supremacy in full austerity, the Democratic Party can’t give up its name, but in fact has taken form as the neoliberal party, and it’s directed at us.

It’s not directed at the right wing. It’s not directed at the so-called white supremacist forces, grassroots forces in the United States. It’s directed at the left. And so we are going to have to really figure out how to operate independently and how to build real relationships with workers and oppressed people. Because in this moment, in this covid-19 economic crisis and in this moment of the attempted revival of American exceptionalism and this neoliberal order, we are going to be wading in very difficult terrain.

And so it’s very important that we begin and that we continue to build these kind of relationships with each other and hash out and honestly talk about some of the big fundamental differences in our movement that will make a difference, because I think sometimes there is this real desire for unity and then you get down to it and then there’s these big disagreements that need to be talked about in a way that can move us forward rather than keep us from actually being able to do any kind of activity together, which is what you see a lot in the United States when it comes to left wing politics.

[00:24:32.030] – Grumbine

This isn’t new, right? Going back to Lenin for just a second. You look at the Bernsteinians and the Dem Socialists and Social Democrats and each one of these groups had a different level on the spectrum as to how quickly they would cave in to capital. But only the Bolsheviks and the true socialists were willing to die on the vine for that period come hell or high water. And Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote the book “Reform or Revolution.”

And I guess the question to you is, do you feel like we are in a position to reform our government without a revolution of some variety? And when I say revolution, I’m using that term in a very wide ranging sense, not necessarily pick up your guns and storm the Capitol. I’m talking about in general, even a cerebral revolution, even some sort of a nonviolent revolution. I keep looking at this and I go back to Howard Zinn’s book and his view on “The People’s History of the United States,” and Margaret’s book and folks like Sandy Darity “From Here to Equality” and even Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” and everything that I see there, all it takes is the slightest wedge issue, the slightest perk for the lowest white guy to be able to splinter the unity of the left.

And this has happened going back Bacon’s Rebellion. And a million times throughout – they throw a crumb to the white guys and all of a sudden they’re willing to abandon class unity in the name of their class perk. What are your thoughts on that? How do we even get unity? And you talk about these issues. The wedge issue has been used to disrupt unity from the dawn of time. How do we get past it?

[00:26:17.180] – Haiphong

Yeah, a very good question. Definitely. I believe in the United States there’s going to have to be a social revolution of some kind. Of course, what form that will take in terms of strategy, in terms of tactics will always depend on where we’re at in a given particular moment. And I think that we can’t predict whether that revolution will be violent or nonviolent or anything, or maybe a combination of the two.

But what we do know is that – or at least what we should know – is that it’s absolutely necessary right now, because when you think about the United States historically, the massive struggles that it took to even engender some minor reforms, oftentimes these examples, whether it’s the New Deal or the civil rights era, they’re often taken without any regard to the economic base of society. So there really isn’t any analysis of, OK, what kind of development stage is capitalism really in at that particular moment in the United States?

And how does that influence its historic roots in racism and white supremacy? And so a lot of people think that, OK, we can just do the New Deal again in the 21st century. That was kind of the thrust of the Bernie Sanders campaign. It was kind of the thrust of the Occupy Movement as well, that if we just protest, demonstrate, I think the Sanders camp has always had it backwards. Right? They’ve always thought we can elect these folks into office and that will then bring the movement, when in fact, the only time this has ever happened is when the movement kind of made politicians do what they want.

But indeed, the problem now – and I know you do a lot of Modern Monetary Theory, et cetera – is that the possibilities, the revolutionary conditions are kind of there in terms of the lessons that maybe should have already been learned, have been building up over the course of the decades. And it’s very clear that the system of capitalism in the United States is in its most advanced imperialist stage and it’s decaying at this time.

The way that it is constructed is completely anathema to any kind of idea of reform. And if Bernie Sanders’ two failed election campaigns didn’t show that, then we don’t have to look any further than the fact that in a global pandemic that’s killed hundreds of thousands in the United States, the idea of extending health care to people, not even talking about universal health care, but the idea of extending it is seen as a cost too high for the ruling class.

And so really, the ruling class in the United States is in this holding pattern of any kind of cut into our enormous profits, any kind of even example, even if it doesn’t provide a cut into the profits, if it provides any sort of inspiration to working people, whether it’s Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, whether it’s higher wages, even if those things are possible, scaling back of the military state, just the very idea that working people, oppressed people will be inspired to fight for more than that scares the ruling class to its highest degree of fear.

So I think we do need a revolution because this is the stage that we’re in. Any aspect of society that we can look at, whether it’s the military state, whether it’s the capitalist economy, whether it’s any issue, we can come to that conclusion. And so what is needed now is for us to organize in a way where those lessons and those conclusions can happen in a mass way, because that hasn’t happened. There has been a normalization of the sacrifices that need to happen under austerity.

And it has to be acknowledged. There has been an increase in the reactionary xenophobia and racism that is embedded into society that has intensified as the state has had to rely on mass incarceration, endless war, to preserve its hegemony. And I think that requires us to focus on the organization, as Lenin was and as so many communists and revolutionaries before and after him, because there really is no other way, and that’s why it’s so imperative for us to make that shift.

And I think one of the biggest arenas where that shift has to occur is we don’t need to drop it completely, but we do need to deprioritize the electoral sphere, because right now, most of what calls themselves the left is basically obsessed with electoral politics in a system that is completely designed and organized to destroy them. So what needs to happen is there needs to be a reorientation toward the masses, toward workers, toward people, toward the prisoners, toward those folks who, when they rebel, there is power there that can be harnessed toward actually trying to transform the society.

We’re not going to do that at the ballot box, no matter how progressive or revolutionary the candidate may be. It’s a lot of energy into a system, a lot of resources that could be going into independent organizations, as you said, that could do some of the mutual aid work, that could do some of the on-the-ground work that is so needed when you have hundreds of thousands of people sleeping on the streets or in shelters.

And it’s definitely more than that because I’ve worked in homeless services before. So when you have just this decline happening on the world stage with the United States, you have so many focal points that need addressing, and we can’t do that if we’re stuck in the narrow confines of what the US elite define as legitimate politics, which to them is purely electoral politics and purely within the two-party duopoly.

[00:32:05.020] – Grumbine

Yeah, that’s definitely a ploy there to make sure that there is no alternative space of Overton windowing doesn’t expand. They can keep you in this area where there’s no hope. And even if you do have hope, it’s only marginal hope.

[00:32:24.530] – Intermission

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[00:33:07.940] – Grumbine

 One of the things that jumped out at me with what you were saying there, it goes back to Ayn Rand and her impact on the United States culture with this libertarian, more like the anarcho-capitalist type libertarian. And some of the people that got discouraged with Bernie, they watch Bernie and they said, “Oh, life is hopeless. Forget it. It’s all about the individual now. There’s no way a government for the people, by the people could ever possibly succeed.”

And then they start becoming so jaded with the process that they slink back into that selfish libertarian “I got to look out for number one” mindset. It’s not completely farfetched that somebody that’s not getting their needs met would say, “Well, how else can I do it? I better look out for me,” which is a shame. But you can see the logic behind it. If you’re not getting taken care of, how else are you’re going to get taken care of? But that’s no way of governing.

And unfortunately, we’ve created a lot of people that have grown apathetic to the process who no longer believe there’s any chance of any good thing happening. And the idea of participating in either activism or electoral politics is just a bridge too far to them. They just literally think the government and everything about it can’t possibly do anything right. And that’s a right wing thing. They have created a government small enough that it can be crushed so that the only thing it’s there for is protecting private property and going to war and opening markets.

It doesn’t serve the people. It serves capital, period. So with that in mind, you’ve got an apathetic public that’s been beaten down to nothing. They work all the time. They come home, they got kids, no downtime whatsoever. And the idea of revolution is just a bridge too far. They can’t get past survival mode, that lowest tier on Maslow. How do we get to a point where we can actually do meaningful organizing with neoliberalism stealing every last moment of time for self-care? How do we even get there?

[00:35:21.940] – Haiphong

Yeah, well, the left, especially the radical left, has an aversion and I think this comes from COINTELPRO. This comes from just decades and decades of infiltration, betrayals, divisions not just from the state, but also the state exploiting the real, quote-unquote, “American qualities” that we all unfortunately, acquire: this rugged individualism, the racism, et cetera. All of that has made a lot of the most radical of the left almost adverse to conflict within the sphere of the left, so there’s a lot of this, whenever something happens, you just latch on to it.

You don’t follow people like Lenin, people like Marx who were not afraid, even if certain philosophers and certain movements were supposedly popular at the time, were not afraid to condemn them and to also agitate them and force them to explain themselves. And I think we have a real opportune moment to do that right now for however many of us exist right now. We have millions of people who were energized and who do kind of follow these more quote/unquote “progressive elements” of the Democratic Party – like Bernie Sanders, the AOCs, the Ilhan Omars – kind of follow them almost religiously.

And there isn’t a moment to raise questions to them about, well, how is it that if these policies, these social Democratic policies, these universal policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, the end of cash bail, all of these things are so popular. Yet it wasn’t on January 6th that there were millions of people marching on the Capitol to demand them, it was actually a few thousand of the most addle-minded white Americans loyal to Donald Trump who are doing that? How is it…

[00:37:20.390] – Grumbine

Right.

[00:37:20.390] – Haiphong

How is it that there aren’t masses of people on the streets demanding something like even just the hashtag #forcethevote, which Jimmy Dore and others, the Movement for People’s Party were leading? I think when we ask that question, then we can begin to reflect on the true weaknesses of what it means to forward a model of change, which says, OK, if we just work hard enough and vote and elect enough people who sound and look like us, then that will somehow bring change.

When in fact, what can break the neoliberal mold is by questioning those and bringing this public debate into being questioning those who are trying to steer this movement, trying to steer masses of people in that direction when you have millions of people ready. These folks are ready. If they’re ready to vote in the millions and ready to donate and volunteer, then they’re ready to do some real work right now. But if they’re convinced that Bernie Sanders has lost and AOC’s position as a congresswoman, if they’re convinced that that’s the goal, ultimately, to bring them into power and then fight it out in the Democratic Party, then we’re going to continue to suffer losses.

So finding ways, I think, to engage with this model of change in a time where it’s obvious that we need a lot more than that, and we also likely need to abandon that strategy, if not now, hopefully in the next few hours or so [laughter] because look at what we’re living through. And then there’s this question of empire and there’s this question of can we hold together, which not a lot of people are doing – even people who are sort of making these criticisms.

But can we hold together the fact that there’s a real existential crisis that’s going on in the US empire right now, and its neoliberal capitalist system, that led to Donald Trump? And also understand and be vocal about – which is what’s happening right now, so we don’t isolate folks who do see racism as a serious problem. Can we hold together the fact that this system is racist to its core? That empire is part of that white supremacist, so-called, and white nationalist, whatever you want to call it; can we hold all those things together and put them at the center of the debate?

Because what we saw happen on January 6th, I find it ridiculous that people just target Trump’s most loyal supporters as these are the forces that are the problem, when Trump was blaming China for covid-19 and the economic crisis and damn near about everything and escalating policies that were very aggressive towards China and that was very effective in changing public opinion across the board. It didn’t matter how you identified politically, because certainly there is no targeted polling, right?

Folks could have said, “Yeah, we blame China for all of this. We want reparations from China,  God forbid. They fell on the so-called more liberal side of the spectrum and much of the left was silent on it. So I think the way you break the neoliberal mode in this normalization of austerity is really agitating those forces that claim to be in motion now, but yet are failing to take on the most pressing questions of the day, which target the roots of this society and target the roots of the system.

And when we do that, we can begin to build forces ready to take what I think is the next step, which is to build these independent organizations that we need and we can actually begin to do that rather than continuing to just have these conversations about “is Nina Turner the one we should support right now?” A lot of the left is doing that. That’s an individual choice, in my opinion. You can go ahead and focus some energy on that. But the pressing matter is how are we going to organize workers?

How are we going to organize people? How are we going to win people over? And you’re certainly not going to do it by, on the one hand, ignoring race in these contradictions that exist in the United States that have existed for centuries since its inception; and you’re certainly also not going to do it by ignoring the class question and ignoring the fact that when there is austerity, when there is economic suffering to this massive degree without any sort of organization behind it, that in and of itself lends us very vulnerable to a further shift to the right, because people are lost and people are going to look for answers from anybody.

And we don’t have the power to steer them away from Tom Cotton and Donald Trump, whoever it is, Josh Hawley or even the Joe Bidens, right? We don’t have the power to do that unless we are organized.

[00:42:08.640] – Grumbine

Media consolidation has been going on now for 20, 30, 40 years, and I think we have five major media outlets and you change channels and you’re just dealing in slightly different bedside manners. They’re largely saying the exact same propaganda, almost all of which is just bullshit. It’s like fluff. The people that we’re trying to organize don’t have access to alternative media. Most alternative media is niche-y, so it’s not like the left is really feeding from a unifying outlet.

I hate to go back to Lenin once again, but Lenin decried all these little mom and pop press outlets, saying we need one unified message because each of these groups is not fit to hold the ideals of socialism. And they would go off message, they would start straying. We’ve got a bazillion of these things with 15, 20, 100 people watching, instead of having a real honest to God left presence, we’re still stuck with this mainstream media that pumps out nonsense. What do you think are some strategies we might be able to do to overcome that?

[00:43:14.420] – Haiphong

Yeah, well, in my opinion, and perhaps objectively, many of these forces haven’t been able to come to this conclusion and there is a lot of this infighting, it’s not even infighting in so much as it is competition that I think is inherent to the fact that we are using – and we’re not even just talking about capitalist mechanisms, we’re talking about monopolies which represent the highest form of both competition and consolidation at the same time.

And so while we’re using these privately-owned for-profit entities, we are in fact absorbing and learning and being kind of conditioned into the modes in which these channels operate that we don’t have control over. And so I think the biggest shift that needs to happen and the strategy we need to discuss more is OK, if we are politically aligned, if we do have common objectives, fighting austerity, fighting war, debating socialism, some sort of form of socialism here in the United States, and we all do agree on that, then how are we going to make ourselves independent?

I think really we have a lot of independent media channels, but we don’t have really independent sources to really spread the work. And it’s going to be a challenge because it will take some technical capacity. I know there are some folks doing this PanQake thing, which I don’t think is a bad idea, but I think it will need to extend far beyond that to tools where we are even using ourselves to make this happen. In Cuba, they have they have a massive journalists union.

And we’re going to need a real organization that consolidates all of our resources and have us willing to do that where we can kind of shed some of that – I think there is some of this desire to be the most-watched and the most clicked on, et cetera – shed that and I think this will have to first come out of a real political organization. So it’ll probably likely have to start with a political organization of workers. And then the media apparatus will have to be the next institution and it will have to all come together.

And that’s why Lenin in “What Is to Be Done” was really making the best case argument for why we need a Communist Party and not some kind of divided up, chopped up movements led by forces that capitulate to capitalism. No, we need a real party that can then administer these kind of tasks. So I think there’s sort of multiple layers to it. But first, it will be: are there champions of independent media out there right now on the left willing to do this for the sake of the movement?

And I think that will be the first step. And who has the ability? And again, we’re running up on some real challenging, objective conditions where at the moment most people, including myself, can’t even do this work without working full-time employment – plus – to just survive, right?

[00:46:15.110] – Grumbine

Yep. [laughs]

[00:46:15.110] – Haiphong

Then you run into that problem, which is a relatively new problem insofar as the standard of living in the United States is so astronomical. And the stage of capitalism that we’re in really does place this extreme downward pressure on people, which then increases the attachment that people will have to the platforms that for some is their job. A lot of people on the independent left who have been able to make any sort of wave that is now their job, right?

And we get back to these fundamentals of capitalism. You sacrifice your job, you sacrifice your livelihood, and we end up in this cycle. So figuring out ways and the first way to do it is to be engaged in struggle. And to have these conversations, I think is the first step. As elementary as that sounds, I think oftentimes the first answer to our problems is to raise the problem so we can actually debate and figure out who is even willing to take that leap right now.

[00:47:17.900] – Grumbine

I appreciate that very much. One of the things I want to touch on real quick is third party politics. Obviously, a party represents electoral politics and electoral politics by its very nature, represents reform. And so within that space, I see the Green Party’s been around forever and struggled to be able to break out of this. I hate to say this, but a guy like Ady Barkan, who has been lauded for his work on health care and he’s got a very sympathetic story, but lo and behold, he spent a good three days crowing that the Democrats were able to keep the Green Party off the ballots across the country.

I already had some feelings, but that really changed how I saw him, because he was celebrating eliminating voices from democracy. And there’s a lot of people like that. This is not an obscure thing. People still holding onto the idea that Nader cost Gore the election. And the ability for third parties to organize its one major thing. But the non-governmental, non-party based organizations that are fighting against us, like the Pete Peterson Foundation that is supported heavily by both Democrats and Republicans, billions of dollars there to talk about how we got to fix the debt, how we’ve got to institute austerity, how we should balance the budget, how we should do all these crazy, economically illiterate things.

But they serve capital, they serve the oligarchy and they serve the status quo and they are paid in full. And they’re not even a media company. They are a lobbying group. They’re a think tank whose express purpose is to maintain austerity in the United States. So you got a third party over here that can’t get onto the ballot. You’ve got no actual outside sources to be able to combat the insanity of our mainstream media. And then you’ve got this other leg, these lobbyists who are fully funded, and that is what we’re up against. It is incredibly daunting. And if you’re just thinking it’s electoral, you have completely slipped the plot and missed it. What are your thoughts on that? That’s terrifying, isn’t it?

[00:49:32.140] – Haiphong

There are so many aspects to just the imbalance of power between the contending classes in the United States, which unfortunately we don’t have a lot of people who are doing what you did just there, which is going over it so people can have a realistic sense of what it is scientifically, because this is all a science. And I think that there’s so many elements to it, right? If we just even look at people who throw around the word “the military-industrial complex,” for example.

If you look at the think tanks and the various institutions that go and our own corporate media, which are all interlocked to normalize war and to justify it at any cost, you will see that, yes, there is this huge imbalance of power that we are going to have to confront. And I think the science of socialism, right, people call it scientific socialism, is that even though the forces of power are so daunting right now, the forces that control the United States, the capitalists, the imperialists and the technology that they wield at their disposal, this system is marked by an incredible level of crisis just right now.

But in the sense that this is an inherent quality of the system, we know that at any given moment  – and we’ve seen even in the last four years, conditions change so rapidly politically, economically, that the best medicine to confronting, at least in these very elementary stages of struggle that we’re in, is to understand that there is no amount of consolidation of power that the ruling class can do, which will stop its system from digging the grave for itself that it has been digging for so many decades now.

And whether that level of crisis and revolutionary, cataclysmic series of events happens first on the world stage before it even really gets to heat up here, whether forces here in the United States can pick up the struggle and begin to put the finishing touches on burying the system. I think the thing that we can hang our hat on is that we have, one, the truth on our side. We have these sort of inherent qualities in ways that the system develops, at least on our side, in the sense that we know what direction the system is going in.

And, two, we can understand that at a given moment, and that moment could be right now for a lot of people, but in the next several years, we will see that this system has created the possibility of a huge crisis for humanity in the realm of nuclear war, climate change, et cetera, which will force people to make certain kinds of decisions about how they are going to want to live in the future. And so I think that we have an opportunity right now to begin building the kind of movement we need to prepare for what is inevitable and what we are going through right now and what we can foresee in the future under this system.

And I always try to encourage that this movement move out of its narrow nationalistic, not necessarily the white nationalistic that everyone is talking about, but the kind of white nationalism that exists in a more universalized sense that says that this movement is going to have to rely solely and primarily on what happens here in the United States. We’re going to have to look globally then.

That’s why I’m always combating and trying to focus on what the United States is doing around the world, because that is really our first link to being able to build those kind of relationships and to be able to really engage in what is ultimately always a global struggle, the struggle against imperialism and the struggle against this for-profit-driven system that we are currently living and dying under.

[00:53:49.920] – Grumbine

This brings me to the last point, and this is going to seem a little bit like a step backwards, but I want to tie this up with what I consider to be an important point. Trotsky was famous for believing that revolution is continuous, there is no such thing as the revolution ends after a few months. And I’m going to take us back to the French Revolution for a minute. The people themselves rose up. France had gone bankrupt after supporting the United States revolution and the French were in trying economic times.

Things were crazy back then under the monarchy and the people stormed the Bastille. They took the Bastille and they started getting rid of class. They started getting rid of all the perks of class. They started reenvisioning what they thought society might look like. And these people didn’t have any perspective. They had been serfs. They had been part of a feudal state, part of a monarchy. And all of a sudden they’re learning this stuff. They brought about this great change that then in turn met up with the terror, thank you, Robespierre. And then the terror went to paranoia.

And then the people end up killing Robespierre and they end up bringing back the monarchy. They bring back King Louis after all that, some 30 years later. So my question to you is this. Given the fact that we’re afraid to even have the beginnings of a revolution, but even these people who did have the mindset, who did create revolution, who did end the monarchy, I wouldn’t say they went back to sleep, but I would say that the royalists and the monarchists never stopped fighting.

And you could call them the capitalists to some degree, too. And ultimately, the minute that the revolutionaries put their guard down, the capitalists/monarchists/royalists came back with a vengeance, and then you ended up with Napoleon Bonaparte. And the rest is history. But I’m just curious, the idea of once you embark on this, this isn’t something you just do for a few days. This is the commitment to a change that has got to continue because there’s always enemies lurking to take that power back.

[00:55:57.660] – Haiphong

Yeah, and it’s true, and I think that’s one of the things I’m often thinking about is we have to have a nuanced conversation as well when we are more advanced. I mean, right now, one of the things that’s a big problem is that there is this idea that the United States, if it would just live up to its values, if we could just universalize not just ideologically but also materially, these kind of values embodied in what the United States said it was all about since the beginning, then we can live in this perfect society, this ideal society where people’s needs are met.

And what that does is it negates a real class struggle. And even in a revolutionary situation, you’re still fighting a class struggle. And anywhere you go that’s had a real revolution, Cuba, China, anywhere, no one is going to tell you that, at least politically involved, that somehow the struggle is over. No, it really is something that must be fought out continuously as things develop and as you win victories and as you win power. Winning power isn’t enough. Keeping power is just as hard, if not harder.

And so we will inevitably have to have conversations as we move forward about something like censorship, for example, because while I’m totally against censorship and repression of the left by big tech corporations and tech monopolies, and my position on all of this is that we need to be fighting the forces that are diametrically opposed to us. And that really is the ruling class. That really is those who actually have power in this society.

But once we do get to the stage where we’re in the heat of battle, we’re going to have to understand that the levers of power are not going to reform themselves for us. They’re going to get more oppressive. They’re going to get more brutal, and there will need to be suppression. You can’t have forces with big money and military connections. Just look at the way our intelligence apparatus operates. There will have to be suppression. You will have to have people who are focused on this, who are focused on how do you battle that.

And I think because there isn’t this vision, this revolutionary vision, just rolling around people’s heads right now in the United States, given the condition that we are in, and the stage that we are in, in the struggle, I think it’s hard for people to hear that. But the reality is, when you do win power and this is even just in a small circumstance. Like I’ve been in unions – once you do get any kind of victory, you can’t stop there because the bosses are ready to take it away from day one that you signed a contract that’s advantageous. You’re now fighting to protect that. You’re fighting to build on it. You can’t stop.

You have to make sure that the forces trying to destroy you can’t. And that means, in effect, suppression and repression. So it’s all about the character of it. And I think some folks have a hard time with that because they don’t think in terms of class analysis. They don’t think in terms of power. They think in terms of what is ideal. And it’s this age-old question that Marxists, communists, socialists have been debating – the struggle between idealism and materialism.

But in reality, we are going to have to deal with forces that are going to want to destroy our movement from the very beginning. Look at what happened to the Black Lives Matter movement even, right, this black identity extremist campaign by the FBI. It’s no mistake that the most so-called liberal establishment-oriented forces in the Black Lives Matter movement are the ones who get all the attention, and the forces who are doing on the ground community organizing work, who have a radical analysis, are often the ones that face police repression and terror and are harassed internally and externally, constantly.

So we have this now in our movements and it’s important to acknowledge it and to fight it and to combat it within whatever we’re doing and to have very difficult conversations. Because I think right now, this conversation about free speech, it blows my mind oftentimes because it’s almost like we’re all talking about free speech and then we forget that free speech was never ours to begin with. So how do we fight these elements of society, which seem very attractive, but at the same time can really negate some pressing realities that if we ignore, we often do so at our expense.

[01:00:24.040] – Grumbine

I was going to finalize on that, but you brought up a really important point, and I want to touch on that for a second. The concept of freedom of speech is about the government not suppressing, shall make no law basically stopping it. But the typical outlet that we’re looking at is a private space, a private space that the First Amendment never was intended to touch on.

However, one of the other things that happens in our society that we are supposed to be all about is trustbusting and ending monopolies and the mad push for privatization. “How can we get this out of the public hands and into the private hands of industry” has done more to destroy society, in my opinion, than just about anything else. And these tech giants have virtual global, not just domestic, but global monopolies that are there to control speech, there to control messaging, there to extract data about us both for law enforcement, which has been proven and also for marketing purposes. At the end of the day, none of this is for us. It is not about the state doing this.

The state has given up its constitutional power, given it to private industry. So the oppression and the suppression by these Silicon Valley tech giants is not technically wrong because they’re a private company. They make their own private rules. Why we have not nationalized these platforms, though, is a question that I think that we should really ponder and think about, because these platforms represent a glue, a connectivity of society that has been perversely taken over, if you will, by private interests as opposed to the public purpose. What are your thoughts on that specific angle? And then we can close out?

[01:02:14.050] – Haiphong

Yeah, definitely. Well, it’s a very good point. In my opinion, it is beyond me why the supposedly most left section of the United States and the Sanders camp, etcetera, have not made the nationalization of these tech giants a priority. I mean, the public utilities, whether it’s in the cell phone technology, the Internet, the computerized technology, all of it is completely in control of big private corporations, which only have their own profit motives as the imperatives of everything that they do. And this includes the fact that a lot of them are just spawns of the military.

I mean, a lot of these big corporations that are right now using their tools, their products to suppress our content are doing so on the fact that they literally were birthed out of the womb of the so-called military-industrial complex. And so it’s important to call for true nationalization, not just let’s hand it over to the military, which some people may interpret as nationalization, but we need, I think, if we’re talking about nationalized health care, which is really what Medicare for All is, if we’re talking about nationalizing key industries for something like a Green New Deal, we need to talk about nationalizing telecommunications and all forms of public utilities, like . . . .

[01:03:31.300] – Grumbine

Amen.

[01:03:31.510] – Haiphong

. . .  the Internet airwaves as well.  They’re supposedly a public utility, but private corporations basically own everything that you utilize to engage with the Internet.

[01:03:43.380] – Grumbine

This literally peels away our rights. Every time they privatize something, they take away the protections that we had previously because the protections were government-based protections. The minute they privatize us  – wild, wild west. We’re at the mercy of big tech immediately.

[01:03:58.320] – Haiphong

And it hurts the most vulnerable. Some people might think that this is somehow just helping those with access to the Internet, for example. But this is hurting prisoners right now languishing in state and private prisons where big private telecom companies have huge, lucrative contracts to control the communications of prisoners, right? This is a real deep problem. A lot of people languishing in prison, isolated, tortured, can’t even communicate with their families.

And I think there’s so many connections to be made with the fact that these private telecommunications and so-called Silicon Valley social media corporations are doing the same thing on this platform. They’re doing the same thing right now, which is the primary mode of communication, which is online, which is the digital sphere. It is social media sphere. And so it needs to be part of any broader struggle for nationalized anything. And it’s important to build a class struggle based on that, because to be honest, it isn’t just whether it’s the rampant advertising that really shapes so many things, but we know that there is a real class character to all of this and it could have massive appeal.

So I think it’s important to make this a very big and leading issue for anyone in the struggle right now, because to be honest, it’s going to be very hard for us to operate otherwise to build any of these other organizations. It’ll be very difficult if we are stuck with tools which can at any moment get rid of us or just make it really hard for us to do what we need to do in building this movement.

[01:05:35.210] – Grumbine

Nailed it. Danny, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to be with me. This is a fantastic episode. I really appreciate this. And well worth the wait. And I hope you’ll come back and join us again in the future.

[01:05:47.460] – Haiphong

Of course. Thank you. Sorry for the wait, but I really appreciate it. This was really good. And yeah, keep doing the work you’re doing. I’m loving it.

[01:05:54.980] – Grumbine

Absolutely. All right. Well, this is Steve Grumbine and Danny Haiphong. This is Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here.

[01:06:06.620] – Ending credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham.  Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.