Above photo: A photo of a campaign rally for Kamala Harris published on her official social media account on August 4, 2024. Twitter/@KamalaHarris.
The Gaza genocide has revealed the role of liberalism in upholding the brutality of the West.
On the eve of U.S. elections, the question remains: what comes next for those wanting to build a new world?
Currently, the staunchest of Black liberals are demanding their community and its allies disregard the interests of Palestinians by way of voting for their butchers under the guise of sparing Black and other marginalized people from their domestic antagonist, Donald Trump. In doing so they are ignoring the many crises already plaguing these communities, under Democratic leadership on both the state and federal level. 2023 was one of the deadliest years for police violence, homelessness continues to skyrocket, and the Biden administration continued the American presidential legacy of ruthlessly starving, bombing, and destabilizing multiple countries—including Cuba, Palestine, Libya, Somalia, and Lebanon. But these are accepted, naturalized outcomes of liberal democracy, outcomes that the Black liberal elite is willing to live with in exchange for their own prosperity and general escape from such conditions.
In fact, if they listened to, took seriously, and analyzed the conditions of working-class Black people, they would see there has been a continuous domestic and international war against Black Africans and other racialized peoples and the Democratic Party is at the outset. In addition, these cultural, economic, and political phenomena are cyclical indicating that they are not aberrations but the intended results of the dominant order. In other words, if mass shootings, police killings, climate change intensified or induced natural disasters, unemployment, organized abandonment, premature death, and perpetual war are happening routinely, these are systemic and therefore accepted outcomes pardoned by the ruling class and its aspirants.
If anything, the 2024 election season in the United States has demonstrated that the multicultural ruling elite—including but especially those of a liberal stripe—have no intention of solving the many crises of its own making. On the contrary, their role is to manage “through brutality,” the contradictions of a global necrocapitalist order. To suggest there are identifiable patterns cyclically reproduced by a colonial capitalist world order is not to encourage a sense of hopelessness but a sense of clarity, a grounding toward what can and cannot be accomplished within the given regimes of liberal redress.
The Zionist mass extermination campaign in occupied Palestine, with the open and active participation on the part of the liberal democracies of the West, exemplifies the reality that liberalism need not fascism to carry out its regimes of racialized horror intrinsic to Western civilization. Liberalism, in its own right, efficiently exports perpetual violence and war—through occupations, aerial warfare, and economic terrorism—that is largely proclaimed to be exclusive to twentieth-century, or more recently, Trumpian fascism. And yet, every region on the receiving end of Western liberal democracies’ deadly exports of democracy and freedom is left with mass corpses and new avenues of extraction and accumulation that enrich Euro-American cities.
Despite this, liberalism—due to its strategic attempts to position itself as the benign alternative to far right-wing tyranny—is widely believed to be a benevolent institution, political ideology, and therefore a willing ally to the concerns of and political struggles from below. However, a thorough internationalist investigation of the machinations and material outcomes, specifically as it pertains to the working poor, of liberal democracies paints a vastly different reality while also demonstrating the inefficacy of the ballot towards remedying these outcomes.
The Black Liberal Elites’ Role In Stabilizing A Multiracial Empire
Liberalism as a “globalized economic order” deceitfully guarantees freedom and “salvation” for all of humanity but contradictorily “necessitates permanent war” and manufactures “[intensified] inequalities between peoples and within populations.” It categorically does not possess the capacity to remedy existing struggles against destitution, premature death, and permanent global war. On the contrary, the essence of liberal ideology naturalizes all of these structures of oppression, treating them as congenital, ever-existing, and categorically impossible to eradicate, then smugly patronizing anyone who dares to imagine and act outside the scope of the liberal political imaginary. The conditions—i.e., the socio, cultural, economic, and militaristic fabric and demands—of the nation are what determine the outcomes. However, this always takes a backseat in favor of embracing the performative pageantry of the electorate.
This becomes very clear when examining the role of the Black liberal elite, as personified in Kamala Harris’ campaign, whose material interests operate as a stand-in for that of the masses of Black people.
Kamala Harris’s economic plan is being made in the image of corporate lobbyists (who worked under neoliberal lynchpin, former Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel). As well as former investors for BlackRock—the world’s largest investment firm that manages the assets of some of Earth’s most tyrannical and parasitic capitalists. In a just and sane nation, this would be a red flag, a clear breach of ethics—a clear sign of the interests of who a politician is in service of, and accountable to. However, in the U.S., this is just the political baseline, a naturalized and accepted fact of life in which politicians, through rhetoric, shallowly market themselves to the working masses while being controlled by the ruling class.
Poor people have been explicitly disappeared from mainstream politics, it is a given, a natural outcome of mainstream politics in the capitalist system that the rights of the poor have been surrendered. It is seldom even worth a conversation point on the debate stages. This is why, Harris can trot out a new economic agenda in an attempt to court Black men and much of the agenda mirrors one of Jay-Z and Sean Combs’ financial literacy schemes, where she is encouraging crypto investment, small business ownership, and vague mentorship programs as opposed to guaranteed unionized jobs, universal healthcare, and affordable or free higher education. It is the Black elite who politicians are in dialogue with, get their unoriginal ideas from, and market themselves to. But the Black elite, too, has historically detached themselves from the wider masses of Black African people. Hence, as the official spokespersons—or liaisons—of the Black masses, they primarily concern themselves with what would be beneficial to their advancement as a class. Black politics have been almost entirely capitulated to and monopolized by the aspirations, demands, and successes of the Black petit-bourgeoisie, regardless of how disconnected it is from the generational destitution and suffering that defines and organizes the lives of a significant portion of the U.S. based population.
The political processes of perpetual crises and containment are managed by the non-white, namely Black liberal petit-bourgeoisie. The non-white petit-bourgeois and its aspirants seek to convince the overwhelmingly racialized and poor masses that their legislative wins and subsequent career advances somehow trickle down and become the wins and advances of the majority. History, at least since the Civil Rights struggles (and, subsequent legislative gains) of the 1950s and 60s, demonstrates this is painfully untrue. It is also reflected in the continuing dwindling wealth gaps and intensification of intraracial class stratification—in which liberal reforms have been incapable of putting a dent. Liberal initiatives, whether the Voting Rights Act, DEl, Affirmative Action, or more recently, George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, have been widely ineffective at improving the conditions of masses of people it says, in law, it is supposed to serve.
However, liberal reforms are instrumental in maintaining a multiracial empire. For one, it serves as a means of maintaining instability, if these legislative concessions are constantly at threat of being overturned by the far-right, such a threat can always be mobilized to maintain their constituents’ mass obedience as is currently underway. The Democratic Party has been categorically unable and unwilling to enshrine/codify most, if not, all of these initiatives and reforms. But these concessions are also their claim to fame, proof of the neoliberal state’s ability and willingness to adapt and progress (as opposed to their far-right friends)—even if said progress comes about reluctantly as a means of maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of international law as well as capturing and taming mass political struggles (namely those struggles that contain organized labor and a veneer or threat of militancy). When socialist projects, for example, have failed to produce, secure, and sustain their efforts, to fend off the predatory pursuits of counterrevolution, it is widely seen as an indictment of socialism. However, the same standard is seldom applied to the political ordinances and institutions of liberal capitalism and its many pitfalls.
The liberal right serves as a sort of buffer between the colonial state’s preferred, always lurking, and historically permanent essence of far-right tyranny and that of its working-class discontents. The multiracial liberal elite maintains its position as a useful bulwark of empire through its unique ability to culturally appeal to the sensibilities of working people and ensure it is always in service of reformism.
The petit-bourgeois monopoly on political discourses and struggles has subordinated the interests of the working class and poor in service of their elementary intra-class squabbles. This can help explain the paralysis popular political struggles in the U.S. have experienced in recent decades, and an outright inability to recognize the limitations, ineffectiveness, and downright fraudulence, of national (and, at times, local) elections. An understanding of the capitalist political economy—and whose interests it operates in service of—could naturally pave the way for a reality where political struggle is governed by the interests and demands from below as opposed to being disciplined by fear or arguably more importantly, false promises of liberal enlightenment narrations of hope, freedom, and possibility—that again, have not yet and cannot be realized by much of the working-class and those designated to the outskirts of civil society.
The Permanently Counter-Insurgent Liberal State
In fact, the baseline, permanent state of U.S. politics, specifically but not exclusively at the national level, is that of right-wing dominance. The broadest understanding of American history only proves this—including the last 40 years of neoliberal hegemony, an explicitly brutal right-wing enterprise. A fruitful question we should all ask, is at what point has the U.S. political and economic system ever worked in accordance with the masses of its people? Think about it. During its Indigenous slaughter campaigns that made way for the creation of the modern nation-state? Or, during the worldmaking and world-breaking regime of racial-chattel slavery—in which stolen African labor was directly pinned against that of the labor of the white working poor? Or maybe the Jim/Jane Crow period which oversaw even more destitution and suffering for Black-African people than that of its predecessor? Or, any period since the early 1900s—sans the short-lived era of the New Deal (which was not only brief but exclusive i.e., neglected much of the racialized and poor in its material output)?
Many well-meaning people have tried to do good work holding political office. But how much does one’s morality matter in a capitalist political system that is beholden to the interests of the finance-corporate sectors of civil society? What one believes, or says they believe, is vastly different than what one does or is allowed to do.
Take for example the recently vulgar claims made by far-right conservative JD Vance regarding Haitian migrants “eating dogs” in an attempt to invoke a pogrom, being rightfully met with an outpouring of condemnation from liberal democrats and their constituents. But these same people are either silent, supporters, or active participants in the century-long legacy of Western imperialism in Haiti provoking chaos and underdevelopment which is the primary driver of the migrant crisis, to begin with. Biden’s administration has been under scrutiny by international organizations for the cruelty to which Haitian migrants have been subjected by way of thousands being incarcerated, deported-by-boat, and has openly supported Kenya engineering a military assault on Haiti furthering a destabilization crisis. This, too, should be subjected to condemnation, withdrawal of support, and proof of the liberal apparatuses’ complicity and participation in racialized violence—and not just the vulgar rhetorical expressions of it espoused by Republicans. Instead, what happens is Republican racist, misogynistic, and transphobic vulgarity is mobilized as a defense of the Democratic Party when how the former openly speaks of and thinks about the marginalized groups is how both parties have historically treated said groups.
It is, of course, much easier and kinder on the eyes, ears, and mind, to pretend the racial, ethnic, and class wars being waged against numerous global populations, is just a result of not having enough of the good guys i.e., liberal democrats in-office, instead of reckoning with colonial-capitalist political economy as a perpetual crisis inducing and death-making machine. Millions will aggressively rush to the polls to continue electing liberal democrats while they continue their inaction, indifference, and active participation in the suffering of the racialized and working poor. And, in the chance they do something that is net-positive, there exists the permanent, always lurking risk of being overturned by the inevitable next bad guys—whether that be Donald Trump or whoever succeeds him. And, the cycle repeats over and over again.
But the primary function of the Democratic Party establishment historically has been to capture, co-opt, pacify, and destroy even potentially radical moments and movements in service of colonial capital. Barack Obama’s 2008 candidacy was fueled by the anti-war movement which was absorbed, neutralized, and dismantled by the time he was elected. His presidency elaborated on and intensified many of the wars started by the neoconservatives before him. More recently, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ candidacy in 2020 was explicitly fueled by the urban rebellions against police violence earlier that year. Despite Biden being an architect of the colonial carceral police state and Harris being an upholder of such a state in California. These culminated in the absorption, neutralization, and dismantling of potential radical struggle. It promptly went from abolish, to defund, to these two career Top Cops are our only hope for racial justice.
The Democratic Party assumes a form that is seemingly tolerant to the political demands from below only to water down, betray, and violently dismantle said demands when the performance is no longer politically viable. And this leaves a trail of surrendered and decimated social and political movements in its wake. Anyone interested in progressive struggles should be concerned with and guided by the understanding of Democrats’ role in securing a permanently counter-insurgent liberal state and how corroboration with the party has overwhelmingly annihilated said struggles.
Thus, the American political ethos cannot be summarized as the good guys vs bad guys—but the demands of colonial capitalism off the backs and at the expense of human and ecological life alike. At what point do we, collectively and organizationally, opt out of this process that has delivered only flimsy, if not, horrifying results? What if the inaction, indifference, and ineffectiveness of the Democratic Party to provide any pathway for once-and-for-all confronting, defeating, or even merely making it harder on the perpetual threat of far-right infringement on all matters of cultural, political, and economic life itself, is not merely a failure. But instead the permanent, ontological function of American liberalism and its role in the capitalist duopoly. What if a perpetual crisis of the electorate every two to four years is all they have to offer? What, then, is there for the oppressed to do?
An internationalist perspective and understanding of U.S. politics could ground popular political struggles because the machinations of colonial capital become clear. Suppose a nation’s elected officials on behalf of the demands of its political economy betrays and/or violates rights, treaties, and international law concerning imperialized nations. In that case, it is only a matter of time before said betrayal and violations return home. But a lot of Americans actively ignore, endorse, and participate in imperialist violence under an unspoken (though at times spoken) agreement with the state that said violence remains on the outskirts of civil society. But recent retaliatory state-sanctioned violence against the struggles on college campuses across the U.S. as well as the more organized left struggles of the last century demonstrates this is nothing but a shallow, conditional agreement.
I can only imagine that if we collectively understood permanent global war, genocide, and racialized houselessness are core tenets, or in other words, a necessity of the capitalist political economy, we could better diagnose the crises of our time and move accordingly. Liberalism has, overwhelmingly and historically, not been an ally, a friend, or even a convenient tool for advancing progressive political struggles but a brutally violent, carceral, and murderous adversary. It is clear that the fascist right is not the only foe but so is the (neo)liberal right who, too, seeks to secure the United States’ unjust claim as a global hegemon even if that means leaving a trail of the blood of the world’s colonized and poor in its wake. What are we—those of us of conscience on the Left—going to do to ensure this is the last or at least one of the last national election cycles where we are unorganized and subsequently ill-prepared to offer a viable alternative to the capitalist duopoly? How can we respond, what can be built to direct people, in the wake of the neoliberal State’s incapacity, incapability, and unwillingness to permanently halt far-right infringement?
The Irrelevance Of The U.S. Left
The inability to impede the neoliberal right’s continued rightward turn is indeed also a result of the communist left capitulation to the Democratic Party establishment—a legacy that spans back at least to the CPUSA doing such a thing to help Franklin D. Roosevelt get elected. Only for said communists who rallied behind him to be purged from the ranks of the liberal establishment and said establishment subsequently politically shifting right once he took power. We can learn a great deal about this legacy, as we witness the absolute toothlessness of contemporary left-wing organizations many of whom are compromised by the State. We are in the afterlife of the counter-insurgent purges that have plagued revolutionary struggles from the early 20th century delegitimizing, ostracizing, and rendering irrelevant the communist left, Cold War liberals’ capturing of Civil Rights, and the systemic massacring of Black Power.
The formal left, largely, does not exist as a legitimate, oppositional, political force in the United States. This has been the case since at least the 1970s—following the state-ordained annihilation of the Black Power period. So it is partially, if not, largely due to systemic forces beyond any individual person, or organization’s control. The petit-bourgeois liberal capture and subsequent monopoly on political discourses, and the ideological hegemony electoral pragmatism holds on political struggle—both in the imagination and in practice—have resulted in millions of people making the Democratic Party establishment their political home. The American left has categorically failed to fulfill the role of an organized, viable, and sustainable alternative to such a monumental historical sign of defeat. There should be an ideological and political war waged on said monopoly, but it is also worth interrogating and contending with this phenomenon as a consequence of the failure of the previous generation, and our continued failure to escape the conditions of political paralysis.
Towards Setting A New Standard
To paraphrase Du Bois, the “evil party with two names,” will surely “be elected despite all I can do or say.” Either way, mass suffering, namely for the global poor, will continue. It is not my goal to merely dissuade people from voting but to counter reactionary liberal narratives overstating its structural importance in the face of the seemingly never-ending threat of racial fascism—specifically in the terrain of national politics where the average person has very little influence on the daily happenings. Instead, I am more interested in those with us with little power and wealth moving with intention and creatively manufacturing avenues for improving ways of life and living today. Utilizing every possible tool at our disposal—including the ballot—to more effectively discipline those who have the power to determine who lives and who dies.
I am imagining a type of society, that is not a place of perpetually acting reactionarily to cyclical, manufactured, and expressions of systemic tragedy, to injustice, but instead involves the citizenry (and those on the outskirts of such a sociopolitical category) assuming their rightful roles as world-historical political agents and being proactive, plotting, strategizing, and getting ahead of the inevitable next capitalist induced catastrophe. While also finding means of sustenance that does not rely solely on goodwill from the State or its agents—but instead our communities. And, again, if this involves utilizing the ballot—this should be done only after a democratic process of collective and constant dialogue, debate, and decision-making. Trying to practice democracy locally, within our communities, towards constructing an actual democracy, away from the current dominant electocracy. Instead of waiting for election season, as many consumer-citizens of the American republic do, to be politically active and aware, using the in-between years between elections to agitate, organize, and prop up our own candidates who will be directly accountable to us, or be disciplined by communal power.
The consent to and acceptance of the holocaust in occupied Palestine does not have to be our standard. In fact, we can forge a new one. One where permanent war and genocide are a non-starter. Maybe, and only then, liberal democrats will think twice before trotting out uninspired corporate neoliberals to be the public face of managing the plenty crises produced by necrocapitalism—knowing our collective refusal of permanent destitution, suffering, war, and mass death. The least we—those of us conscious but do not possess the military capabilities, resources, or merely the heart to take up arms against global empires of our day—could do, as June Jordan proposed in 2002, is not participate. To not consent. To set a new standard. One in which mass death, both at home and abroad, is morally, ideologically, and politically unacceptable.
Of course, you should care about the Palestinian struggle not because it could be you but because no one should be subjected to the genocidal procedures of colonial imperialism. With that in mind, it seems clear that the liberal state is etching towards an outright world war. The precedent has been set on the part of all Euro-American nations that the slaughter of thousands in record-breaking time, is both an acceptable and natural offense. The last year, or to even take it a step further, the last 500 years of Western civilization have demonstrated that nothing is sacred, or off-limits, in pursuit of capital accumulation and the maintenance of global dominance. If there is not a counter-precedent set that values the preservation of life, sovereignty, and sustenance for everyone; if there is not a permanent radical mass shift in the public consciousness and what we, as the public, will allow; if programs of defense are not established; and, international ties among the World’s colonized and poor are not forged: the outcome will be even more deadly than it has already been. And it certainly has already been deadly.
Author’s Note: The “burning house” in the title is a reference to Martin Luther King Jr’s., infamous quote told to Harry Belefonte, where he expressed he fears and regret regarding his advocacy for integration into the liberal project of the United States and said, “I’m afraid we’re integrating into a burning house.” MLK was beginning to understand liberal integration as a limited and incomplete solution to remedying the anti-Black crimes of chattel slavery and Jim Crow.
Joshua Briond is a writer, cultural worker, and graduate student based in Charlotte and Chicago studying Black Marxism(s), political economy, and counterinsurgency. He co-hosts the podcast Millennials are Killing Capitalism, and is the author of the forthcoming book, Taming the Revolution: White Power and the Fear of Black Freedom for Pluto Press.