Brunch is Canceled: Biden, Trump, and the Case for Revolution

from Black Rose Anarchist Federation / Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra

The 2020 presidential election has come and gone. While Donald Trump’s refusal to concede marks a departure from the established norms of U.S. bourgeois democracy, it has not amounted to the coup that many feared it would. Despite the authoritarian rhetoric that brought him to power, Trump never produced the sort of coherent ideological project which the forces necessary for a successful coup (namely the military and capital) would feel compelled to throw their weight behind. If anything, four years of Trump threatened to complicate and destabilize U.S. imperial hegemony and the smooth functioning of global markets, which the U.S. ruling class is wholly invested in preserving and reproducing. 

In light of his loss, Trump has made increasingly desperate plays at casting doubt on the election results; filing doomed lawsuits, demanding recounts, and making spurious claims of fraud. The GOP will buoy these claims for as long as it remains politically expedient to do so, but this won’t last forever. In fact many have already jumped ship as this expediency begins to expire. By now, everyone save for the most captured Trump diehards understands that come January 20th, Joe Biden will assume the presidency. 

Though Trump’s power-grab appears to have failed, his brazen attempt to steal the election has exposed structural vulnerabilities in the presidency, eroded confidence in the electoral system, fed into growing conspiracy theories and emboldened the far-right. It also provoked a state of alarm within popular movements. These destabilizing effects will last far beyond Trump’s term in office, presenting real threats in the coming period. In many ways Trumpism will live on. 

While the Democrats have hailed Trump’s failure as proof of a functioning democracy, nothing could be further from the truth. Not only does the Democratic party represent the same rotten system which brought millions into the streets this year and gave rise to Trump in the first place — their victory against him was far from a given. Despite what the polls predicted, Biden won only by a slim margin, nearly identical to the one that propelled Trump to victory in 2016. Down ballot, Democrats were unable to secure the Senate and even lost seats in the House. 

This should cast serious doubt on hopes of a Biden presidency resulting in the passage of anything resembling progressive legislation. Regardless of which party is in power, it’s only pressure from below in the form of militant mass social movements that give us a real chance at making substantial gains and advancing towards revolutionary transformation.

This election also took place against the backdrop of a deadly pandemic that has careened further out of control — a factor that seems to have played a decisive role in tipping the scales for Biden, while exposing and exacerbating pre-existing inequalities at the heart of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and the state. 

Both Congress and the executive have all but checked out on the question of providing additional economic relief. This as COVID cases spike to new and unseen levels across the country, causing our brittle private healthcare system to once again hurtle toward a breaking point. As is always the case under capitalism, the working class — especially working class women and people of color — will continue to be hardest hit by the ravages of the pandemic.

While we have little reason to place faith in the institutions of capitalism or the state to meet our basic needs, this year has shown the transformative power of social movements to force concessions and build momentum towards liberation. While we can win reforms with these movements, our ultimate aim should be social revolution.

The power of social movements was exhibited early on in the pandemic when workers in a variety of sectors demanded and often won protections in the form of hazard pay or safety protocols. Similarly, renters in major cities around the U.S. looked to tenant unions for guidance in organizing rent strikes, when it became clear just how slow the state was in acting to prevent a (still pending) wave of evictions resulting from mass unemployment. The proliferation of mutual aid networks has been another inspiring example of people’s ability to take matters into their own hands and build structures of community solidarity.

But no other event better captures just how much social movements have developed and just how radically they can change the present state of things, than this summer’s mass rebellion in response to the racist police lynching of George Floyd. The sheer size, militancy, and multiracial nature of the uprising gave it the force to move its central demand of “defunding the police” out of the realm of fringe politics and onto the agenda of national conversation. In many places the movement succeeded in actualizing this demand by exerting pressure on local governments. This pressure must be sustained if we hope to defend and build on these gains towards revolutionary transformation.

Make no mistake, the strongest social force in 2020 was not any political party or candidate, it was social movements. The question is, will these movements become emboldened or deflated by Trump’s exit from the White House?

We must do everything in our power to limit the coming demobilization of those who feel that the defeat of Trump signals an end to their political commitments. Our answer to this must be to join, build, and strengthen fighting organizations rooted in struggles around material issues. This means labor unions or organizing committees at work, tenant unions at home, student organizations at school, as well as popular assemblies and mutual aid in our neighborhoods. These organizations constitute a pole of popular power which can not only win concessions in the short term, but build the basis of a revolutionary mass movement which can transform society on the basis of libertarian socialism in the long term.

The moment we are in is one marked by precarity, alienation, and unease. We are in a transition, but it is unclear where to. The only certainty is that the struggle of working people, people of color, queer people, Indigenous communities, and others will continue. If we can sustain the power of this summer’s uprising by grounding it in organization, direct action, and a transformative vision of revolutionary change, then there’s nothing that can stand in our way. 

The state has failed us, but the future is unwritten; another society is possible if we press forward in organized collective struggle.

Join us as we move together toward libertarian socialism.

Black Rose Anarchist Federation
Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra

There are 60 Comments

jeezus fucking christ on a crutch, i didn't think these rosa negra dipshits could veer farther away from a recognizable anarchism, but i was wrong...
labor unions?! tenant unions?! student organizations?! popular assemblies?! these are all examples of "popular power"?! this statement could have been written by any of the thousand and one maoist or trotskyist cults from the 1970s, except in the 2020s we can look to their actual histories to see that these organizational forms they're touting *all failed* to provide a framework for "popular power" and "organized collective struggle" (whatever that might mean concretely to these bureaucrats-in-training) over the past century. each form -- especially labor unions, ffs -- contained the seeds for the creation of a self-selected cadre of activists (professionals in the struggles of other people) and managers, aka, political leaders. i mean who else is going to guide the politically naive folks? we can't have politically naive folks making too many mistakes, now can we? it's the self-sacrificially socially and collectively responsible thing to do to make sure that the unions and assemblies don't fuck up by allowing counter-revolutionary ideas to sneak back in...

and what the hell kind of anarchist says "the state has failed us"?! did these blowhards forget the first lesson of anarchism, namely that the state cannot possibly create or oversee anything socially positive? the foundational principle of anarchism is to reject the state -- all states, no matter their particular window-dressing. the state hasn't lived up to the expectations of liberals and social democrats... boo hoo. but it's done exactly what anarchists should expect of it: more consolidation of repressive power under cover of law, more active destruction of community autonomy, bolstering and facilitating the economic elite's capacity to extract wealth from working and poor people domestically and the landless internationally.

these black rose clowns are monumentally ignorant of the actual philosophy they purport to adhere to, using all the failed historical strategies of the 20th century to try to make the 21st conform to their retrograde programs. some anarchists have been trying to learn the lessons of our history so as not to repeat those failures. one important point of research is critical assessments of those failures, not championing them and just tweaking them for the consumption (and i do mean consumption) of millennials. making anarchist practice relevant to contemporary struggles for fighting repression and exploitation requires a harsh examination of the pitfalls and dead-ends of historical anarchist (and non-anarchist) projects, not using the same methods and just pushing harder.

They will remain harmless and irrelevant until they find an actual cult of personality figure.

What is the content of this libertarian socialism? Is it based on market relations? Will we still have to work for a wage or a salary?

judging from the dearth of actual anarchist analysis i think we can presume a positive response to all your questions

I just knew it would happen, Biden has chosen the first LGBTQ person to cabinet, thus winning the Idpol vote and support, and to integrate the neo-narcissist faction into the authoriteh! This is the insidious revolution they envision, this is their State reformist method.

"Biden has chosen the first LGBTQ person to cabinet"

actually trump nominated someone gay for a cabinet position, though they didn't get the job. so biden's nomination is not the first.

We're really self-limiting imagination through the political lense of revolution.

It's been done, and failed over and over. Because life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, and will continue to be so.

Conceptual separations offer no ability for us to read, embrace, and meaningfully engage with life's complexities.

How are you going to convince people to put their lives further at risk for another maybe, a less definite abstract for which to rule over them (ATR)?

We could stop being pawns, potential cannon fodder of a re-constituted political order (which somehow won't wind up some awful Americanized version of itself and current ugliness!!!)

What was absolutely amazing about 2020 is when the massive shut down happened. It proved we are important. It showed how much transportation, and not the fucking cows (ffs!) cause most of the pollution. I'll never forget the ebullience, the clarity of the sky overnight. That was before I saw the reports, and comparison pictures from metropolises. When we simply stopped working, and stayed home...it brought the economy to its knees in a couple weeks!

And that's why we had to go back to work. It was deemed acceptable for 200k of us to die off domestically in order to keep the machine going.

So, if you're going to think strategically using old models (millenarianism)...200k dying isn't enough to sway the needle! That figure didn't sway public opinion at all either, in regards to the lockdown protests.

Black Rose Anarchist Federation/Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra deserve considerable credit for attempting to assert their interpretation of anarchism in the larger world around them. This is an anomaly in the resolutely inward-directed and indifferent to the large world U.S. anarchist/anti-authoritarian subculture.

Unfortunately their need to identify exclusively with anarchism renders them unable to assert what they are about in any way that is distinct from other leftish or even left-liberal formations in a society that is ever-more rich in mass revolutionary social struggle promise. They are consistently not making a case that their interpretation of libertarian socialism brings anything to contemporary social struggles of wage-earners and enlisted people in the Armed Forces that won't be found in a more clear-sighted and aggressive form from other sources, people inspired by class struggle anarchism of the Makhno, Flores Magon, Lucy Parsons and Durruti stripe, to be sure, but also inspired by Marx and Engels, the Wobblies, the KAPD in the German revolution, and the Situationists.

Damn, I wouldn’t even pick your leftoid draft for fantasy sportsball as understudies for benchwarmers.

Flores Magón was just a liberal with a mustache.
A traitor and the face of the enemy. His followers and legacy is just the same old politicians in power.

https://propagacionanarquica.noblogs.org/post/2020/12/02/mexico-el-benja...

One could make a parallel and read alongside this article that recently got posted: https://anarchistnews.org/content/betraying-anarchy-xin-shiji-four-elders

and there he goes again, unable to resist deploying his one-trick pony routine. seriously, dude needs to get some better buzzwords if he wants the next generation to listen to him. wage earners and enlisted people are not flocking to social struggles because of blowhards like the fake anarchists of Black Rose and alienating ultra-left commie shitheads like old kev.
Makhno was discrete by co-authoring the Platform, Flores-Magon couldn't admit he was an anarchist, Lucy Parsons abandoned her anarchism by consorting and collaborating with Leninists, Durruti abandoned the revolution by allowing the Catalan regional government to continue functioning on day two of the revolution. Marx and Engels? no real-life wage earner in the first world takes their garbage seriously. the Wobblies are a caricature of their combative ancestors, the KAPD were consistently outmatched by their Spartakist rivals because German anarcho-syndicalists were every bit as idiotic as their Spanish comrades. the Sits had a few good ideas but threw their social significance out the window with their ridiculous technophilia and their ideological and sectarian attachment to the organizational form of workers councils. listing a bunch of highly problematic people without any critical understanding is exactly why people don't pay attention to hero-worshipers like Black Rose and kev. it's pompous and patronizing, and discourages personal engagement in actual struggles because everyone is always measuring themselves against the heroes of previous struggles -- because nobody is every talking about their failures. fuck that. facing the failures is the best way to insure they aren't repeated.
to find some kind of inspiration is radical history is one thing, but name-dropping is always petit bourgeois.

that should say Makhno was *discredited* by co-authoring the Platform

The Platform of Makhno and Arshinov was, in its day, an excellent proposal, and a fine effort to incorporate crucial insights from the Russian Revolution into class struggle anarchism. If the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists had incorporated this into their pattern of action the Spanish Revolution might have turned out very differently.

of course being attracted to hierarchy and the posture of combat, an ultra-left commie like kev would say that. the Platform was ridiculed and dismissed by all serious and knowledgeable anarchists at the time it was written as a crude and hamfisted attempt to bolshevize anarchism, with a commitment to ideological unity (conformity of thought), a militarized wing (clearly hierarchical and promoting tactical unity, to be obeyed without question), and even something like a central committee (with the appropriate lip service paid to delegates being recallable). Arshinov was a bolshevik before he became an anarchist, and he reverted to it after the Platform was rejected, voluntarily returning to stalinist russia. nobody with any brains takes the musings of an alienating and bitter ultra-left commie any more seriously than they do the blathering idiocies of Black Rose or any neo-Platformist clowns. he should try peddling his outmoded pseudo-anarchist but mostly bolshevik wares among real-life wage earners and enlisted people and he'll find out how awesome his analyses are. virtually all of his target demographic will ignore his nonsense when they're not laughing in his face.

Marx and Engels were "for-real, excellent revolutionaries"? When did they ever man any barricades?

What happened to the comment my comment was in response to? First it gets turned into some weird combination of capital and lowercase letters, then it disappears altogether? I admit the comment was stupid, but that's hardly uncommon on this web site, so why the censorship? Or did someone just decide to censor themselves?

The person who you were responding to is a long-time troll on this site whose presence is as a rule unwelcome, thus why their comments get removed before it becomes a vicious cycle of him mocking people for their body odor or perceived mental capacity. sorry about the confusion.

"I admit the comment was stupid, but that's hardly uncommon on this web site"
Oh look, mild mannered middle of the road nice intelligent BigMacNothankyou has taken on the mantle of populist arbiter and judge for the site.

is it just me or does kevin seem even more "unwell" lately?

also, honestly can't decide if I'm concern trolling or asking a sincere question...

probably depends how much he's been drinking when he decides to troll

"all serious and knowledgeable anarchists at the time..."

My, but we don't have a problem with fealty to Authority, now, do we?

Let's see if American Anarchists will go back to the Obama years where they did nothing... as we can already see the Americans made a mockery out of Anti-Fascism

"Let's see if American Anarchists will go back to the Obama years where they did nothing..."

Not only that's a fucking lie, as anarchy got huge during the 2008-2014 period, but it's also reinforcing the misguided notion that supporting Trump will bring us a better anarchy where in fact you just end up being a MOUTHPIECE, here, of a bunch of White racist, fascist scum who're already denying democratic process defined by the very constitution they were sworn with, i.e. a coup d'État.

Is a fascist dictatorship cooler than liberal democracy? I don't think so... unless you're maybe on the payroll of the *Right* people.

But wait.

Also anarchy under Obama and Trump was about the same all and all. There was the occupy effect during the Obama years but that could just as easily happened under clown cheeze. The problems of anarchism/anarchy are essentially structurally discursive in relation to the institutional and inherited legacy left which it should be leaving behind yesterday.

The Problem with Anarchists and Anarchy is you have to be prepared to be anarchists against the left and right, it is not a populist or popular position

American anarchists are a reactionary position, not a pro-active position, look how many people only talk about self-defense instead of attacking first and outside of the Camera and spectacle of being the Hero

The correct term is reactive, not reactionary. A reactionary is generally someone whose right-wing politics are based on looking back to some prior status quo that's being threatened by trends toward loosening strict hierarchies (based on gender, class, etc). It's an apt description of monarchists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-communists and anti-anarchists, white supremacists, and xenophobes.

"Not only that's a fucking lie, as anarchy got huge during the 2008-2014 period, but it's also reinforcing the misguided notion that supporting Trump will bring us a better anarchy where in fact you just end up being a MOUTHPIECE, here, of a bunch of White racist, fascist scum who're already denying democratic process defined by the very constitution they were sworn with, i.e. a coup d'État.

Is a fascist dictatorship cooler than liberal democracy? I don't think so... unless you're maybe on the payroll of the *Right* people. "

Sure, tell me where I said any of that

1. Trump is not a fascist and if you believe that what Trump has done is Fascism, you have to admit that Obama is a fascist and Biden will be a fascist

2. Anarchy got bigger by believing in the constitution and democratic order? bro, are you a constitutional anarchist? do you believe in upholding the democratic foundations of the constitution? yeah, tell me how anarchy grew bigger during Obama besides making a bunch of so-called Anarchists start defending the Democratic process and constitutional laws

3. tell me how Anarchy grew under Obama...

4. this Dictatorship is no different from a right or left government

5. Define Fascism and Fascists

narcissistic troll bully who panders to white supremacists for votes. I mean...it's dangerous, the one leftist fear i will credit is the fact that his rhetoric gave birth to domestic terror plots, even though i believe that wasn't the intention. He'll never feel guilty about it because he's a narcissist.

I don't respond to bad-faith "nihilist" despots in anarchist clothing.

and that's it

But isn't nihilism becoming acceptable. There is more pointlessness now with global warming, mass extinctions and covid, Nihilism is sorta intelligent and logical hombre?
You can still go out and have fun and drink lattés AND be a nihilist hombré.

There's a reason why I specifically put nihilism between quotation marks...

A hint: some assholes use nihilism as a pretext for being assholes and feel/look more intelligent.

They do have a higher percentage of intelligent folk amongst them, and they sometimes snap when confronted with the servile moronic ideologies of many of the commenters. Be patient wìth them, you might learn something hombré ;)

Why do you have nihilist written in scare quotes, anon?

Tienes miedo? Pues, calmaté tio, ten un queso. Todo esta bien.

: )

motherfucker, get your tildes right
hombré this, hombré that
stop replying to yourself
your whole life is in scare quotes

Donde esta la biliotheca?

Nihilism is nothing to make an identity out of, even for self-described ‘nihilistic individuals’, let me explain.

Ever since the ‘death of god’ (collapse of institutional christianity), existential nihilism has become the dominant defacto quasi-religion of the weak and docile masses, who engage in mindless hedonism (to numb the chronic meaninglessness of their lives) as well as the limitless distractions of spectacular society to prevent themselves from sitting alone with their own thoughts and facing up to Death Anxiety and profound inner psychological conflict.

En bref: si nous ne voulons pu vivre commes des esclaves, le nihilisme est donc une affliction que doivre etre passer a travers et vaincu.

"En bref: si nous ne voulons pu vivre commes des esclaves, le nihilisme est donc une affliction que doivre etre passer a travers et vaincu."

You did either a typo or patent translation mistake here. You'll find that French is a great language for spellcheck fascism and grammar nazis!

Also what does it say of slavery to a screen? Wooops!

And the discipline required to resist it is something that pretty much everyone in 2020 is struggling with to varying degrees.

Myself included.

Learning as many other languages as possible is important. It encourages internationalist co-operation against the system and opens up entirely new horizons and vistas of social life that would otherwise remain closed. My french and spanish aren’t perfect, but workable. Russian is next, or perhaps even one of the machine languages... like C++.

Anyways, Happy solstice whoever you are, and take care of yourself.

You have no idea how important you will become down the road.

10.41 Yes, and hasn't Death Anxiety been exploited since the birth of history?

Not quite.

I would argue for various reasons that early christian/muslim/jewish folk weren’t nearly as susceptible to Death Anxiety as post-modern man due to their conviction that there exists an after-life.

Primitive man was also much less susceptible to Death Anxiety, but for different reasons that I won’t go into here.

"Primitive man was also much less susceptible to Death Anxiety, but for different reasons that I won’t go into here."
That's because the average life expectancy back then was 30 and there wasn't much time to sit around and ponder ones future.
Anyway, recorded history is not archeological history.

I think "death anxiety" came with boredom, or people living longer yet more shallow lives, lacking activity that makes sense to them. Like it's only as a sedentary sheltered "loser" that I feel that I care more about the issue of dying. But when driven by some occupation that defines you and gives your life a meaning, death is the least worry you'll care about.

I ain't much about "living intensely" -which to me feels like another ideal that puts pressure upon yourself, and a likely source of shame- but rather to just live a life that pleases you, or gives it meaning.

Doesn't help me much, I have joyful anxiety, I worry because people categorise me as abnormal because I enjoy living intensely as a sedentary domestic loser, being famous and rich is clichéd and boring, adrenaline is boring, I can do all that inside my head. Death is just an organic fact. Heroes act on anxiety of death. Maybe I am insane?

Becker is a guy to read to get something of an idea of death fear but I actually think that would drove the fear of death was the rise of reified life via myth, story telling ect. It's not that humans came to fear death-plenty of archaic people still living don't fear it-it's that they came to fear THE END. That's the fear right there. Thus you get things like Terror Management as a psycho evolutionary response to said fear. People that usually get the fear under control go through meditative and other psychological processes that cleanse the mind of reified life attachments. This is essentially a HUGE part of anarchy in regards to making peace with death and physical reality.

I know this won’t go over well on this site, but what I’m trying to get at is that existential nihilism is, in the aggregate, more of a hindrance than a help, and is anyway usually more worn like an edgylogo on a t-shirt by shitty urbanite hipsters.

Imo it’s fine as a phase one goes through, as long as one eventually breaks on through to the other side, like the camel becoming the lion becoming the child.

Wow, now that's a perfect rapist line of argument!

While I may sound like I'm joking, the author of the comment I'm replying to might brutally *not* be joking.

Fuck rapists.

man = rapist, is totally a valerie solaris book ago?

no, i have not raped anyone. i have hurt people, yet what do you expect with the standard trolling = cool logic? get binaries out of your ass! It may take death in order for you to realize that you need to eat...but as long as you want to live, you will take your cruddy fingers off the keyboard and eat something.

clever anarchists, when will they learn, that one day they will die, and theres nothing they can do about it but survivalisms

-pig fucker, check your binaries, disavowed gender a long time ago in the favor of sanity peservation, because woman can also do pain, get over yourself

Look, bro. Re-read that sentence of yours and realize how one of the two potential meanings here is a blunt defense of not just rape, but any kind of despotic impositions of will upon others. Just watch out for the syntax, next time, and we'll be good.

It goes over very well here, there are no nihilists habitually frequenting this site.

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