Abstract
After brief opening reflections prompted by the planetary emergency, this chapter puts forward a series of theses based on the arguments of preceding chapters. Factors both advancing and impeding the spread of socialism are considered. While socialism has returned to public discourse, fragmentation of the working class persists. Ecological crisis intensifies, along with the threat of war, while the ruling class weaponizes tokenism and white nationalism to impede popular awareness. Spanning this book are arguments urging reconciliation of perceived dichotomies among strategies originating in a shared commitment to socialist outcomes.
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- 1.
See the continuing reports by environmental journalist Dahr Jamail at truthout.org, as well as Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019).
- 2.
See Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012).
- 3.
Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 176–78.
- 4.
An example of official cruelty, supported by both major parties, is the devastating US economic war on Venezuela (see venezuelanalysis.com); countless mass shooters in the US replicate such heartlessness in their individual vendettas. See Henry A. Giroux, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (San Francisco: City Lights, 2018), ch. 4 (“The Culture of Cruelty in Trump’s America”).
- 5.
See Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth-System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
- 6.
John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), ch. 9.
- 7.
Communist Manifesto, last sentence of Part II.
- 8.
For concrete measures, see https://bio4climate.org/ (Biodiversity for a Livable Climate) and Ashley Dawson, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (London: Verso, 2019).
- 9.
See Giroux, American Nightmare and, on eco-fascism, Klein, On Fire, 40–49.
- 10.
See for example Howard Ryan, Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing Against the Corporate Juggernaut (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, with Ida Hellender, Bleeding the Patient: The Consequences of Corporate Health Care (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2001), and Judith Dellheim and Jason Prince, eds., Free Public Transit (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2018).
- 11.
See G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (seven editions, 1967–2014).
- 12.
See Laurence H. Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976–2014 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015).
- 13.
See Victor Wallis, Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on U.S. Politics (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2019). On the problematic nature of the concept of “race,” see Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012), ch. 4.
- 14.
Victor Wallis, “Intersectionality’s Binding Agent: The Political Primacy of Class,” New Political Science 37:4 (December 2015) (slightly revised as ch. 8 of Wallis, Red-Green Revolution). See also Michael D. Yates, Can the Working Class Change the World? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
- 15.
Victor Wallis, “The Plague of Tokenism,” Green Horizon, no. 28 (Fall/Winter 2013/2014); available at http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/05/12/the-plague-of-tokenism/.
- 16.
See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), and my review in Jump Cut (ejumpcut.org), no. 59 (2019); also Wallis, Red-Green Revolution, 188–90.
- 17.
A revealing precedent to this was a recorded 1971 phone-conversation (released in 2019) between then-President Richard Nixon and future President Ronald Reagan, in which both used vulgar racist terms to refer to African diplomats. Democracy Now! August 2, 2019.
- 18.
The unrestrained promotion of such viciousness is illustrated in this August 2019 news item: “A North Carolina billboard that went up last weekend advertises a local gun shop underneath the images of four familiar young congresswomen of color: … the same four congresswomen Donald Trump has spent the last few weeks targeting with racist attacks on Twitter and in campaign speeches.” https://thinkprogress.org/billboard-gun-shop-threatens-democratic-congresswomen-8179be91d794/.
- 19.
The “Russia” accusation was used in the 2016 presidential nomination race to stigmatize disclosures about unethical practices of the Clinton campaign and again in 2019 (after an early debate among 2020 contestants) in an attempt to discredit criticisms lodged by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard against Senator Kamala Harris. For critical analysis, see reports by former CIA officer Ray McGovern at consortiumnews.com.
- 20.
Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 141ff.
- 21.
On the structural pressures embodied in Trump’s policies, see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark, “Imperialism in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review, 71:3 (July–August 2019).
- 22.
For a critique of certain leftists’ acceptance of economic expansion, see John Bellamy Foster, “The Long Ecological Revolution,” Monthly Review, 69:6 (November 2017). On problems with solar power, see Dustin Mulvaney, Solar Power: Innovation, Sustainability, and Environmental Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
- 23.
See John Bellamy Foster, interviewed by Vaios Triantafyllou, 9 February 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/a-green-new-deal-is-the-first-step-toward-an-eco-revolution/.
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Wallis, V. (2020). Conclusion. In: Socialist Practice. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35066-6_13
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