We can accept it as a given that two countries cannot end their antagonism if their geopolitical interests remain in conflict. At most, they can improve diplomatic communication. The US and Russia have been in a bitter conflict for regional dominance ever since the EU and NATO grew to a point where they could attract countries that Russia might reasonably expect to remain within its orbit, like Ukraine or Georgia (in the latter case, establishing closer economic and political relations with Washington rather than joining any Western territorial organization). The only way for this conflict to end is if Moscow or Washington decides not to pursue dominance in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And Moscow is actually in the stronger position, with no reason to step down. Since the end of the Cold War, governments throughout the world have not been forced to align with one of two superpowers. They can do like Egypt does, and court both Russia and the US, receiving massive amounts of military funding, and, with less dependence on a single power, more autonomy to pursue their own regional interests. Turkey provides an excellent example of how a country that could once be described as a client state can now play alliances and redraw a regional map, destabilizing the situation from a US perspective and thwarting US pretensions of being the sole global architect. In this competition, Russia and (in other parts of the world) China have a huge advantage, because at no point do they have to be more powerful than the US—they simply have to keep growing and extending their influence, as it becomes exponentially more costly for the US to maintain control.

If Trump’s plan for Syria is any indication, he would be willing to reduce US pretensions in the Middle East, allowing Russia’s preferred leader to remain in place and settling on the less ambitious plan of rooting out ISIS. A similar approach in Asia would see him maintaining US guarantees on the territorial integrity of Japan and South Korea, but not trying to check Chinese expansionism or uphold the Exclusive Economic Zones that favor Western allies. In other words, Trump might be smart enough (from a chauvinistic perspective) to ease off on the increasingly expensive, increasingly ineffective Cold Warrior strategy of militarily projecting US global predominance that both Republicans and Democrats—including Hillary Clinton—have preached like the gospel.

The thought of an immature, foul-tempered real estate mogul having access to nuclear weapons is terrifying, but a Hillary Clinton presidency in which the US tried to maintain its military dominance in a world which made those pretensions increasingly impossible might very well have been more likely to spark a nuclear war. In the end, it shouldn’t be a surprise that in an insane society, a person reckoned as sane can do the most harm.

Of course, we have no reason to believe that Trump will stick to his guns, or that the Republican establishment won’t succeed in reining in their candidate and securing the continuity of American foreign policy. At the least, the possible implications of Trump’s proposals should be considered, but if he continues to recruit neocon warriors into his Administration, his presidency will resemble that of George W. Bush in foreign policy matters, engaging in ill-advised ventures to expand US dominance that actually result in increasing instability. His final decision for Secretary of State may give some indication of what path he plans to take, or he might continue to break the mold. It is also likely that a Trump cabinet will be less stable than the average.

The theme of economic exploitation is important to address precisely because there is nothing surprising to say about it. Trump’s protectionist rhetoric aside, neither candidate was ever going to put a stop to the endless roulette of hyper-exploitation and hyper-precarity that most people on this planet are subjected to. And no one outside the political mainstream has been effective at communicating an engaged critique of this state of affairs. Until we do so, a nauseating procession of Tsiprases and Trumps will ride economic insecurities to victory, changing nothing.

Ecocide, under Trump, will proceed a little more quickly than under Clinton, though I have a hard time seeing the importance of setting the Doomsday clock to start the countdown from 10 instead of from 9. We can safely consider a whole slew of international climate change agreements stillborn, which is a good thing, since they were a joke from the moment they were conceived. When the problem, in the crudest terms, is reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (leaving aside all the equally important matters of preserving as much wild space as possible so species have buffer zones), the world’s attention was redirected towards efforts to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a slower pace. How so many intelligent people could have dedicated themselves to such a farce, I do not know, though the CEOs of all the environmentalist NGOs made a bundle in the process. No institution of the existing world system has shown itself capable of even taking the first steps towards stopping climate change and mass extinction, and with a Republican victory in the country that is most responsible for climate change, they won’t even pretend to try. But now the farce is dead, and the choice is clear: governments and capitalism versus the planet and all living things.

Why the Left Shares the Blame

The left-wing supporters of Bernie Sanders were livid: Clinton manipulated her way to the Democratic candidacy, only to fumble the election, when polls showed all along that Sanders had a better chance of beating Trump. However, they should be happy their idol won’t have to go to bat, because he would have been an even bigger disappointment than Obama was. There is currently no compromise that capitalism is capable of making that will better the lot of the working poor. SYRIZA collided with this cold reality in Greece, and though the US has an easier time of getting creditors than the small Mediterranean nation, in the long run the equations are all the same. Specific policies can make a small but important difference in individual lives, without a doubt, but the bulk of the problem will remain unchanged or only get worse no matter who is president.

The validity of this judgment has been recognized across the world. After progressive governments in Greece and in France became the executors of major austerity programs, the prospects of far-left parties tanked. Many of these parties were connected to recent social movements like Podemos in Spain; they had been predicted to make sweeping gains, and then suddenly the dream was over. In the US, people of color and poor people were so underwhelmed by the results of Obama’s mildly progressive agenda that they did not come out in large numbers to defend the continuity of his programs. Low voter turnout among those exact demographics cost Clinton the election.

It was every bit as much the false promises of the Left as the racist populism of the Right that got Trump elected. The Left is moribund, organized labor is dead, single-issue politics and identity politics are mere adjuncts to neoliberal parties with a progressive veneer. The Left can do nothing to significantly mitigate the rampages of capitalism, improve the lots of immigrants and people of color, or stop the normalization of right-wing policies.

Historically, the term Left referred to the left wing of government, where the populist, anti-monarchist bourgeois delegates sat in the National Assembly during the government of the French Revolution. To this day, the Left and the Right are both governmental forces. They have no place within a truly anti-authoritarian movement that believes in the self-organization of society rather than the conquest of central power. If there is such a thing as an extra-parliamentary Left, it is merely an adjunct that operates from the margins on party politics, eventually rerouting street movements back into the halls of government.

It is true that terms change their meaning over time, but there is plenty of reason to believe that the Left still plays this exact same role, despite the horizontalist intentions of its more radical partisans. This is not at all to say that this is the only role of people who participate in radical left politics. Rather, I would say it is a key element that holds them back. An analysis with a critical view of the Left, that recognizes the importance of recuperation in the process of social control, is necessary if we are to make sense of the missed opportunities, the vanishing victories, the demoralizing slumps, and the loss of momentum of the past few years—defeats that belong to all of us. In the face of an aggressive right-wing onslaught, new ideas are worth more than familiar mistakes. The time of pragmatism is long past. In the far-flung camps of anti-austerity movements, environmental movements, no borders movements, and anti-police brutality movements, the pragmatists have little or nothing to show for their attempts to meet the institutions halfway or to seek change within the existing power structure.

One of the reasons to reject the Left that transcends semantics is the urgent necessity for a total rupture with the existing power structure. We need to understand that the businesses, the governments, and the institutions that are responsible for policing, climate change, wars, borders, wage slavery, debt, evictions, and so forth are the enemies of the planet and all who live here. If bargaining with the devil is a risky proposition, bargaining with an institution of power is a tragic waste of time. In a world where the rich and powerful systematically piss on us and say it’s raining, we desperately need a consciousness of antagonism. Even more than a class consciousness, we need a consciousness of living beings—seeing as the proletariat, the bastard child of capitalism, tends to reproduce the very values that brought it into being. The history of the 20th century shows class to be more of a unifying mechanism than the motor of a revolutionary dialectic. By basing the very identity of the exploited on industrial production, employment and thus economic growth, and inclusion within Western civilization, class politics provided sufficient common ground between workers and rulers for forward thinking capitalists and statesmen to disarm anti-capitalist rebellion through labor unions, the complexification of ownership and management structures, and the identity and duties of the citizen. The ecological crisis, the continuing legacy of colonialism and slavery, and the extremes of alienation produced by social technologies all converge to signal that the problem of exploitation cannot be addressed merely by changing our relationship to the means of production, since the problem arises from the logic of production itself.

In the first section, I argued that whiteness creates an identification with democracy, with Western civilization, with the project of colonization and domination, and that we must reject this. Just as we cannot reform whiteness but must break with it definitively, a rupture with the Left would create a protective distance from the loyalty to the existing institutions that has defeated our struggles time and time again.

Exactly at the moment when radical, self-organized social movements are at a loss for how to go forward, previously rejected left-wing formulations reemerge to draw people’s energies back into another doomed attempt at reform. It is often after people have conquered the streets or won some victory that was previously unimaginable that the reformist setback occurs. These moments of stagnation, of strategic uncertainty, are of vital importance for movements against capitalism: when we discover that occupying factories or plazas, creating assemblies in every neighborhood, and burning the police stations and banks in every city is not enough to put the power over our lives back in our own hands, this is the only time that we can collectively discover what revolution really demands. We actually are capable of organizing our own lives free of all coercive authority, but we need the patience and persistence to transform our rudimentary models of self-organization into the complex networks in which all the needs of everyday life can be satisfied. And we need to defend these initiatives every step of the way from efforts of repression or co-optation.

The plateaus that follow our initial victories could be the moments that truly revolutionary movements emerge, but instead they have become turning points where people give up on self-organization, hold their noses, and once more deposit their hopes with the latest progressive political party. And when those parties don’t deliver, the right wing sweeps in.

In both Spain and Greece, large numbers of people who had rejected party politics but still saw themselves as part of the Left were seduced into supporting SYRIZA, Podemos, or municipal politicians like Ada Colau. And this tended to happen at the moment when they saw no other easy way forward, when prior explosions of social strength had still not toppled an oppressive power structure. In Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia, progressive governments absorbed and subsequently institutionalized what had been incredibly active, combative, and fecund social movements, paving the way for a redoubling of neoliberal policies and capitalist development projects.

In the US, where voter turnout is lower, party loyalty less common, and the Left is represented more by NGOs than by any political party, the dynamic takes on a different form. Under a conservative presidency, the diffuse Left focuses on single-issue harm reduction projects, like trying to minimize the number of immigrants dying on a border that was designed to kill. As an election nears, the NGOs and Democratic operatives present in all of these movements swiftly revise the agenda and mobilize activists for an electoral victory, which, after the years of a Republican administration, seems like a necessary evil. Under a centrist presidency (e.g., Democratic), the conflicts between self-organizing elements (from anarchists to unaffiliated locals) and power-holders (NGOs, party operatives, self-appointed community leaders) rise to the surface as the former try to address the problem using direct methods and the latter counsel patience, impose an exclusively symbolic template for protest, and use the media and police to divide their opponents, separating a silenced but legitimate mass of constituents from the “outside agitators.”

The model really has more in common with the crude party machines of the 19th century than with the refined methods of social democratic recuperation honed in Europe, but it is nonetheless highly effective, and will continue to be so as long as people on the ground have no means of distinguishing sincere social rebels from the professional activists and party operatives who inhabit the Left. The North American situation shows that a firm rejection of party politics is not enough. The most active players in pacifying the social conflicts that are so close to boiling over belong to the extra-parliamentary Left and do not coalesce into new political parties like MAS, Podemos, or SYRIZA. It is enough that they prevent frontal assaults on the Democratic Party and its various reform efforts to keep these social movements from generating the autonomy they need, and with the nonprofit-industrial complex raining down money and constantly defining the landscape of the conflict, groups that are two or three organizations removed from the Democratic Party or any mainstream NGO can unwittingly become the mouthpieces for the latest strategy of pacification.

The Left and the Right are the two hands of the State, but they are by no means equal. In Spanish, tener mano izquierda, using the left hand, means being subtle, clever, avoiding direct conflict. The purpose of the Left, from the State’s point of view, is to co-opt and institutionalize rebellious popular movements. This is why the right wing can make secret deals with Iran, flirt with Russia, or out the identities of government spies with no lasting consequences, whereas the Left is always being scrutinized for signs of treason. The loyalty of the Left is always in question, in the mainstream, and they have to constantly prove their loyalty and their effectiveness by bringing more captives to the bargaining table. The extreme right in the US is responsible for far more domestic killings than all the leftist and jihadist groups combined, but they will not be treated as terrorists. Instead, the media and police will present them to us as extremists who got carried away, and keep the problem from being spoken about in a systematic way. People who actually rebel against the social order or criticize the pillars of state power will be prosecuted as terrorists and locked away for decades—even if, like Marius Mason, they’ve never hurt anybody.

The Left exists to harness the anger of the oppressed. When they went too far in the French Revolution, heads rolled, and the Jacobins who had tried to conduct rather than suppress popular rage were sent to the guillotines for their excesses. Those in power are all too aware of the danger of promising justice to the plebes. The labor union movement worked wonders in drafting a new peace treaty between Capital and Labor—many of the very first laws legalizing labor organizations specifically mentioned the need for an instrument that would allow the peaceful resolution of labor conflicts. That peace treaty has become obsolete, and soon the ruling powers will need a new one.

In the US, desegregation plus the destruction of black communities through federal urban development policy and the so-called War on Crime created a new peace treaty for race relations, held together by a discourse of tolerance and color blindness on the part of whites (amounting to a belief that if you close your eyes, racism will go away), and on the other hand the ascendance of a small minority of blacks into managerial positions in government (whereas before they had been excluded from government but enjoyed a high degree of economic autonomy in many cities). This peace treaty is also starting to fall apart, but thanks to the long period of liberal color blindness, historical continuity has been broken, and today only radicals can trace how slavery directly morphed into the present system (people at the center typically respond, What, you’re still talking about that?).

Key figures in the Democratic Party, currently facing an internal shakeup, are drawing a lesson from the electoral loss: they have gone too far to the left, and need to concentrate on appealing to “the working class,” a shameless euphemism for non-college-educated whites. Any other party in their situation would be doing the same thing. Due to the paramount democratic pressure to achieve electoral victory, only an outside party with no chance at immediate dominance could break with this dynamic to provide an independent voice, and their critique would be predicated on their continuing minority status. Instead of building up a new momentum only to see it institutionalized again, or worse yet, drafting a new peace treaty between a white supremacist system and its various subjects—between owners and owned—we should be thinking in terms of survival, self-defense, rupture, and revolution. It is hard to think of a historical moment when the psychological pressures of moderation were more counterproductive. The existing institutional channels for reform can give us nothing.

The struggles of the future cannot be about scaring white supremacists back into the closet, promoting technologies that—taken out of context—cause less pollution, bringing political correctness and superficial equality to long-standing patriarchal institutions, or seeking to balance the needs of Capital and Labor. The problems that Trump makes terrifyingly visible were already there. We need to abandon any identification or illusion of shared interests with the dominant system, attack oppression and exploitation at their very foundations, and start building the world we want, making no compromises with the system that never saw us as anything more than resources or means to an end.