We are publishing a transcript of Dr. Anthony Monteiro’s opening remarks from the Saturday Free School’s July 15, 2023 session on America’s Domestic Political Struggle. The Free School meets every Saturday at 10:30 AM, and is streamed live on Facebook and YouTube.
A lot of people will say, “Well why do you all keep returning to the political crisis? Haven’t you already said all that has to be said about it?” And my answer to that is, “No. Everything has not been said and we must return to it because we must know it, we must understand it, and to know it, it has to be investigated in all of its complexities.” And that’s what we’re doing.
What we’re doing is investigating the most profound political crisis the nation has faced since the election of 1860 which inaugurated the Civil War crisis. This crisis is important because it is an existential crisis and we are looking at both its objective and subjective dimensions. The subjective side of the crisis is perhaps the most complex and most difficult because the subjective side deals with all of the ideological and philosophical and social/class forces competing at this time.
The subjective side—by subjective, we mean the people themselves and what they do collectively. We’re dealing with, or thinking about the intentions and plans and strategies of various parties, political forces, and individuals. And then of course finally for us, the subjective factor has to do with the capacity of the people who are suffering as a result of the economic and political and social crises that consume our country.
And just parenthetically, you know, we always talk about Du Boisian sociology. What distinguishes Du Bois’s methods of sociology is that it is quintessentially the study of human capacity. Sociology, pretty much after Du Bois, or certainly after the end of World War II and the Cold War and all of that, ceased to be in its main forms the study of human capacity.
It is in a moment like this that we need sociology in the Du Boisian sense of the study of human capacity. And I would say, you know, most people know of Du Bois’s great sociological work The Philadelphia Negro which he did here in 1896 through 1897. It was published in 1899. He would go to Atlanta and teach at Atlanta University for about 12 years, where he carried out sociological studies of the Black South.
And those studies are organized in two huge volumes known as the Atlanta University studies. However I think that Du Bois’s most important sociological work and probably one of the most important sociological works in American intellectual history is The Souls of Black Folk, which is a study of the human capacity of an oppressed group, in this case black folk.
Having said that, this moment cries out for the scientific methods used by Du Bois to study human capacity. But leaving that for a moment and continuing with the nature of the crisis, it is not unusual and few if any would deny that we are in the throes of a great political crisis. Its meaning and how it will be resolved is where the contest over ideas and ideology takes place. We have said time and again, and it’s worth repeating—the so-called Left, unwilling and perhaps unable to free itself from the ideas and political practices of the ruling elites—is now almost completely consumed in opportunism—egregious self-centeredness, cultural identity politics, and utter contempt for the people they claim to speak for, the working people.
This has occurred before as we’ve mentioned. And like in the past, what is the so-called Left today is breathing its last gasp of oxygen. The crisis of the ruling elite—and let me define that again. Of course we use, sometimes interchangeably, the concepts “ruling elite” and “ruling class.” However I find the concept “ruling elite” to have stronger explanatory power.
Because you’re not just talking about an economic category, you’re talking about a political or ideological, economic category. So the ruling elite is made up—and playing a central role are the ideologues, the theoreticians, the strategists—who from an economic standpoint might not be anywhere near the billionaires or the billionaire class, but in terms of power [play a central role] especially in the organization of the state and the economy.
Ideologists, theorists, academics, researchers, and on and on, play a huge role in sustaining and upholding the ruling class and therefore in a lot of ways the concept “ruling elite” speaks to what we have to understand, and this does not deny the economic category “ruling class.” But we can come back to that.
Richard Haass, a political and ideological leader within the ruling class and the retiring longtime head of the Council on Foreign Relations, the most important think tank dealing with foreign relations in the United States, said directly in an interview in The New York Times that we mentioned last week that the greatest threat to the security interests of the United States—and by security interests what he is in essence talking about is U.S. global hegemony, and not democracy or not threats to the existence of the United States as a nation.
These threats which have in the past been associated with governments that the United States saw as threatening to their global hegemony—those threats do not come from outside of the nation but from within the nation itself. This claim, I don’t think has ever been made in the modern history of this country. Certainly, after WWII and throughout the Cold War and after the Cold War, the U.S. elites believed that they could build a broad national consensus concerning foreign affairs without being challenged by a domestic political crisis.
This situation is uncharted territory for the ruling elite and the ruling class of this country. Not only have the people not been here before, the ruling class has not been here before. And that has to be taken into account as we go forward, as we think about going forward.
[Haass] is therefore saying that the ruling elite’s ability to wage war, to impose economic sanctions upon nations, to destroy nations and civilizations in the name of democracy, and to control their wealth and labor and their people [cannot be maintained]. He is talking about maintaining the U.S. as the single hegemon and the U.S. state as a literal super-state with military power unequaled by any nation in the world. For this reason the United States spends annually on its military budget more than the next ten nations all put together.
At the core of the political crisis is the issue of war and peace, economic inequality, deindustrialization, and the consequent destruction of the working and lower-middle classes and the rise of unseen poverty. In a certain sense Richard Haass is saying the ruling elite, as seen by the masses of American people, is illegitimate and faces a crisis of legitimacy. So for those who want to argue that the 2024 election is a contest between fascism and the far-right vs. democracy are totally uninformed and blind to the very essence of the situation and do not even begin to understand what Richard Haass and others like himself understand: that the political crisis at home is the greatest threat to the American empire.
The political crisis at home is the greatest threat to the American empire, a threat it has never faced from a foreign nation.
Just this week for the first time in U.S. history, a fight broke out in the U.S. House of Representatives over the 890 billion—let’s just keep it real—one trillion dollar military budget. Because of the so-called Cold War consensus and the war consensus in the country, these military budgets just normally pass without any discussion or contestation. While the media draws attention to the issues of abortion, transgender surgery, diversity training, and critical race theory as parts of the budget that would be funded, the most important votes—and this confirms Richard Haass’s thesis—were over funding for war, withdrawal from NATO, and how much we should give to Ukraine to continue its war. Or to continue the U.S. proxy war in the Ukraine.
These were the most important votes even though none of them got anywhere near the numbers of votes that the Republicans in the House unanimously voted for concerning abortion, transgender surgery, diversity training, and critical race theory. But these votes over the question of war and peace are manifestations of the future and what the political struggle in 2024 will look like. Let me just indicate a few things. One hundred forty-seven members of the House of Representatives—now mind you, there are 435 members of the House of Representatives.
One hundred forty-seven of them voted against sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. Eighty-nine voted against a provision for 300 million dollars for training of Ukrainian troops to fight the Russians. Seventy—up from 58 a few months ago—voted to end all spending for the Ukraine war.
As well, there was a proposal put forward to withdraw from NATO altogether. The driving force behind these anti-war, anti-interventionist votes was the anti-war wing of the Republican Party. And let us be clear. There is a robust and growing anti-war wing of the Republican Party. They are not a majority, but they are a very critical part of what the Republicans do within the House of Representatives.
In particular the leadership of Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, among others, is critical. And it was Marjorie Taylor Greene who put forward the proposal that the United States withdraw from NATO altogether. On the other hand the progressive Bernie-ite wing of the Democrats were virtually silent and pretty much in support of the total funding of the war budget and in support of Biden’s proxy war in the Ukraine and aggressive policies towards China and North Korea.
By the way, the so-called Left is also silent about all of this taking place as it becomes not a Left, but a left-wing apologist for war and consequent poverty. Their hypocrisy is measured in their claims—almost virtue signaling—that they support the Teamsters Union in its negotiations with UPS. And they support the UAW (United Automobile Workers) in its negotiations with the auto companies—I think it’s Ford right now.
But how can you be in support of the working class itself and in support of war at the same time? Or let me put it another way: very timid in your anti-war activity and support for those who oppose war. In fact you know, given the Free School’s position that’s well-known that we support the anti-war, anti-interventionist group of Republicans in the House of Representatives and to a certain extent in the Senate, that we have called and participated in broad unified anti-war, anti-military spending activity and the other side of it—that we’re not just anti-Trump and all of that—you know, some have accused us of being a training ground for a red-brown coalition.
That goes back to the 1920s and 1930s and in particular in Germany, and what was claimed and in particular by Trotskyists, is that the Communists and the Left in Germany at that time were seeking an alliance with the fascists who were brown-shirted, and the Left was red, so “red-brown”—so they accuse us of being a training ground for red-brown activity. We’re going to return to that—they will not be untouched by us because we’re going to talk about that.
So the peace, anti-interventionist party in the House of Representatives is driven—and this must be taken seriously—by the anti-war part of the Republican Party who in a lot of ways are not Republicans in the old definition. On the other side, the majority of the working class has left the Democratic Party. Most of them vote and politically identify either with the Republican Party or as independents.
This does not, however, say that the Republican Party per se is a working class party—it is not. There is however, and it must be acknowledged, a working class part of the Republican Party which among other things—and you know the mainstream media always wishes to associate or identify them with cultural issues like abortion, like gender and transgender issues.
But more deeply the working class wing of the Republican Party is more committed not only to an anti-war stance but to an anti-poverty and re-industrialization policy—I wish to return to that. The Democratic Party has become the party of wealth, of finance capital, unmitigated.
Its base of voters are mainly made up of people with college degrees, whereas those without college degrees, with high school or less, tend to be in the Republican Party or vote Republican—or don’t vote at all by the way; and the last hope for the Democratic Party holding on to part of the working class—the black proletariat—is abandoning the Democratic Party and Biden with a quickness I don’t think we’ve ever seen a group of people abandon a political party they have traditionally aligned themselves to.
And again the last mayoral primary here in Philadelphia showed us almost all we needed to see when something like 75% of registered black Democrats did not vote in the last mayoral primary. And their vote was their non-vote. All of this is about the 2024 election and the political and ideological preparation for that great struggle, what we have called the triad of opposition, and especially the Trump-RFK Jr. dyad.
So within this triad there is a more significant, at this point, dyad: two. You know, because this is a project that I’ve been asking [Free School member] Michelle [Lyu] to work out with me for a number of years: the question of threes and twos, you know. Dialectics are twos normally. But could dialectics be threes, and could threes become twos? And what is a dyad configuration in a larger triadic configuration?
Now without going into a lot of things, this is both logic and sociology. The logics of social organization and social structures. These logics of social structural formation can take many forms. Their architecture can take multiple forms and in the case of the triad of opposition we’re looking at a self-organization of three.
But then there is a deeper, intentional self-organization of two. The dyad is stronger at this moment than the triad. But this dyad of Trump and RFK Jr. is one of the most significant political developments in modern American history. Each has praised the other—or at least said they would not attack the other. So for all of the liberals and social democrats who wanted to use RFK like another Bernie Sanders to attack Trump, they will be sorely disappointed.
Now, we’re talking about self-organization. By self-organization we mean the dynamics or dialectics of a relationship which are not decided by externalities. In other words, a puppeteer or a hidden hand is not pushing these two together. It is the voluntary activity of the two themselves anchored to their political principles and opposition to the ruling elite.
So like they say, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” In many ways this is a lot of what we had hoped to see. And every fighter against this single hegemon, this super-state, this hyper-security state, this military industrial complex—anyone that opposes any of that finds promise in this emergence. Seymour Hersh, probably the most important investigative journalist in America over the last 50 years—the one who broke the true story about the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline which was an act of war against both Germany and Russia and showed that it was the United States and Biden himself that were behind it—on his Substack he has an article—and what makes him so important as an investigative journalist is that he has contacts within the establishment and within the state that have been reliable over these years of his journalistic and investigative journalism.
And what his sources within the state and within the Democratic Party have said is that what the Biden campaign fears the most is not Cornel West being a spoiler—but what they fear the most is a presidential ticket of Trump and RFK Jr.
Steve Bannon and others in the Trump movement have made this suggestion. And it’s not so hard to make when you listen to the two of them and the fact that RFK Jr. has openly said that no matter what happens he will not support Biden in 2024. Where does he go? What are his options? Does he just fade into oblivion?
I don’t think so. One option is a Donald Trump-RFK ticket, which according to many people is unbeatable. And a weak, doddering, falling down, can’t read, can’t walk, all that kind of man—what does [Biden] do up against a ticket that is anti-the deep state, anti-the corporate state, anti-the war state.
The other question is what impact RFK and his harkening back to his uncle, father—and significantly Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Freedom Movement—will have in shaping and reshaping the approach to politics of Donald Trump. Again, this dyad, this self-organizing dynamic of two out of three, holds great political promise.
And you know, I’m talking a lot about twos and threes and numbers and logics, and you know I look forward to us discussing this more. I’ll just say this as an aside—the Free School has been very involved in the study of logic—essentially the logic of twos, dialectics—we have often talked about logics of threes in terms of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.
But the question of how numbers and aggregates are formed is a sphere of sociological investigation and human self-organization that we must further examine. There’s a lot of like I’d like to say about this—this is the area that I studied in sociology and sociological theory and it is a question of the way humans act, how they organize at various levels of human interaction—that human beings are as much active at the level of small groups and aggregations at that level as they are at mid-level, or the macro, the entire society.
And frankly to understand human capacity we must see these dynamics of social aggregation, of social organization and how individuals go from individuals to groups and how forces regroup in twos and threes and how political organization can be a manifestation of both dyads and triads, and fours and other things. But we’ll come back to that, I just wanted to put that on the table.
But then, the ruling elite who understands very well what the coming together of this triad means—and more significantly, the threat in the 2024 election of this dyad—[the ruling elite] are going out of their way to split it. All three of them come in for the most damning and untruthful attacks—of course Trump is criminalized and threatened with jail and and all kinds of other things, and we know that is manufactured—he is being treated in ways that no other public figure or politician has ever been treated, not even Nixon.
But then the smearing of RFK Jr.—”an anti-vaxxer, an anti-science person, conspiracy theorist, too close to Trump”—you know, the whole nine.
But now, the full out attack upon Cornel West, and the big thing that they’re throwing at him is that he could play the role of a spoiler in a close race. This was on full display in two events: one, Cornel West’s recent interview on CNN where the entire interview was not to interview Cornel, but to establish for the viewers that Cornel West could be a splitter and could throw the election to Trump.
The other was an interview with Briahna Joy Gray. In her interview, the editor of Jacobin magazine, Bhaskar Sunkara—it was a long conversation and interview and Sunkara, who is also a leading member of the Democratic Socialists of America, was saying that Cornel West should have run in the Democratic Party. And be again another Bernie Sanders. And after he loses or after the Democratic establishment robs them of whatever election votes he would get, he would then lick his wounds and support Biden.
Now, Cornel, who remains the reluctant and weakest link in the triad, is coming up against a number of attacks that he will have to answer in one or another way. And that I think will necessitate that he move away from his anti-Trumpism sense of “Trump is a neo-fascist thug,” and more towards finding a common ground—which already exists by the way—with Trump and RFK. On the question of war, Cornel has recently developed his position against the war in the Ukraine saying that it was provoked by NATO and the United States. And although he makes the claim that, “Well the Russians are an empire and they acting as an empire would act”—well you know, we’ll see how far he can go with that. But the fact of his anti-war position and calling the war in Ukraine a proxy NATO war is huge and it moves him inevitably towards RFK and Trump.
Now, I was particularly interested in Sunkara. Again, Briahna Joy Gray effectively defeated Sunkara and exposed the depth of his contradictions. It was almost like he retreated from the battle after a point because his position is indefensible unless he is prepared to acknowledge that he’s not a socialist and nothing more than a left-wing liberal. And the left wing of the party of war and the party of corporate power, you know. And so Briahna constantly pointed out that we do not need another Bernie Sanders at this time.
Just to finally say, like we’ve said before, this election in a lot of ways will be a referendum on the ruling elite. Can they rule and do the American people support their policies of war, deindustrialization and poverty? Does the ruling elite define what democracy is, or will the people through their struggles define what democracy must become?
However, taking the triad, there are weaknesses in it. In particular while they oppose the war in Ukraine and oppose war itself, especially nuclear war, they do not have a position on a positive peace. Which is to say none of them have come up with a peace industrial policy to replace the military industrial complex with a peace industrial complex.
Neither have they connected anti-war to anti-poverty. None of them have connected anti-poverty, anti-war to a reasonable and plausible approach to environmental protection. This is a huge challenge going forward, and part of the reason that we have to continue talking, continue thinking, continue going to the people with ideas.
The last two things I want to talk about is—in this crisis, as in many crises over the history of capitalism since the Russian Revolution—there is the reappearance of Trotskyism. Trotskyism is new, interesting, and fascinating for many young people looking for a Left that is not going to sell them out—as was the case with Bernie Sanders—and so you get a fascination with Trotskyism.
In a lot of ways it’s a fascination with getting quick answers and reflecting or manifesting those quick answers in sloganizing. But there are three areas that have to be explored and understood if people wish to understand Trotskyism. One, their position on war and peace. In this respect, Trotskyism has always asserted that war is a condition for revolution and therefore anti-war action or anti-war struggle is not to prevent or end war, but only a political tactic by which they enter anti-war movements in order to win converts.
This is a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow. Trotskyism has never opposed war and in fact sees war as a condition of revolution. Or to put it another way, a precondition for revolution. People have talked in the past about “heightening the contradictions”. Trotskyism sees war as a method of heightening the contradictions.
Secondly, Trotskyism in its practice and theory opposes the building of coalitions and united fronts. They do this most often by using the claim that they as revolutionaries must maintain a stance of permanent opposition.
This idea of permanent opposition as a way of opposing all forces who do not completely agree with them—perhaps y’all have experienced this from time to time—where forces in an activist circles who claim that to be truly revolutionary you have to be “uncompromising”, “unbending”, and “in permanent opposition” which turns out to mean in permanent opposition to united fronts and coalition.
We experienced this most recently in the two anti-war marches in February and March, where the February march was opposed by a number of allegedly left organizations on terms that said that, well, the February march had people in it like libertarians or Ron Paul or others that they were not in agreement with over their economic theories or other theories. And “why should they call for the freedom of Julian Assange and not include Mumia Abu-Jamal” and all things like that. It is the politics of permanent opposition—”unless I get everything I want, I’m not going to participate—or better yet—I’m going to disrupt the unity.”
And the third thing is an inherent racism which literally, in the case of the United States, erases the black community and the black proletariat in particular as a decisive force in the unifying of the working class in general, and the advancing of the struggle for democracy and against war. I wrote about this some years ago, you know, and I think Emily [Dong is] going to write about it soon.
You know, a group of Trotskyists in the 1930s went down to Mexico to meet with Trotsky himself. Among them was C.L.R. James, the well-known Caribbean, African scholar and writer, the author of the book Black Jacobins and other writings. He was among that delegation—he didn’t use his name, he called himself Johnson.
And in the transcript of the discussion Johnson asked Trotsky, well what do you think of the black people? And Trotsky in a way that I also associate with the attitude of—among other people—Noam Chomsky when it comes to the black question—dismissed them: “Well, they can do whatever they want to do.”
Not, you know, a proposal based upon what his theory was. But that they’re a separate marginal group that will do what they want to do. And Trotsky associated this somehow with a theory of self-determination. It is also associated with the Trotskyists, this narrow position that a lot of leftists and far leftists take of the working class, which turns out—seeing the working class as white, and seeing black people as a second or third thought.
Saying all of that, it must be acknowledged that Trotskyism along with social democracy which was once revolutionary, and those who today label themselves Communists who are really mere social democrats themselves, only with a different name—all of these are deployed at a time of crisis for the ruling elite against the emerging forces of resistance. This is what we see today, this is what we will see going forward. The ideological struggle demands an astute and mature investigation. Taking ideas of what the situation is to the people, discussing our ideas with the people and exposing the obscurantism and opportunism of the Left that is aligned with the ruling class but claims to be a radical or revolutionary force.
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