The Great Polarization
There is a polarization going on in the world right now.
It was represented by the election of Joe Biden, which should have been a landslide. Instead, Trump actually gained lots of ground.
It is represented in the fact that Rossana and Lori Lightfoot were both contenders in The Chicago Reader for the best politician in Chicago and Cook County.
Biden and Lightfoot represent a return to normal.
Rossana and Trump provide two opposing views of moving forward.
We are seeing these debates play out in all facets of life: our personal relationships with family, discussions with friends, workplaces, and especially within our political organizations.
This polarization is profound.
In 2016, we still hadn’t recovered from the Great Recession of 2006.
Instead, capitalism provided “ways around” the tremendous job losses and wage cuts by providing gig-work.
Worse, this was in the context of an economy that was still hobbled by wage stagnation from the economic crisis of the 1970s, where stagnant wages were made up by credit debt.
Now, in 2021, the pandemic has opened up horrifying statistics like “Two-Thirds of New York City’s Arts and Culture Jobs Are Gone”.
Any analysis of what the Left has to do in the next 2, 4, and 10 years has to keep this in mind.
We’ve entered a new level of desperation and radicalization.
I write this because I think there are sections of the socialist left that want to exclusively or primarily repeat the electoral lessons from 2016–2020. In other words, I’m afraid some socialists are trying to return to normal.
I think electoral politics will need to be a component of how we move forward (and that it will involve the Democrats in different degrees and capacities).
But unless we understand this economic underpinning, we won’t know how else to move in the immediate. Electoral work alone will not provide for people that are desperate today when 66% of their job sector disappeared.
In this context, we also better understand the explosion of the anti-racist Uprising, abolitionism (which is another way of saying “revolutionary politics”), and mutual aid. These are not just abstract phenomena that came and went. They are rooted in these material conditions and these conditions are not going to change anytime soon.
These same conditions also re-mobilized the far-right.
I don’t see a world where we quickly “go back to normal” or “go back to 2016” if in 2016 we still hadn’t gone back to the economy of 2005.
If we don’t take this seriously, it will be the far-right that collects itself and triumphs in moving forward, while our side is stuck in the past.
