Eugene V. Debs, quoted in “Debs : His Life, Writings and Speeches (1908)”
I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.
RBG, Like The American Empire, Is Dead
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, died Friday from metastatic pancreatic cancer. This will create yet another crisis in a country that already had *at least* four major crises that our entire political and economic system was totally incapable of handling. These include the collapse of the economy due to high debt and low consumer spending, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, an explosion of outrage and protest at police brutality and institutional racism which has been met with an explosion of police brutality and institutional racism, and ongoing environmental collapse leading to severe wildfires, increasingly frequent and destructive storms, earthquakes from fracking, wildlife die-off, on and on.
I’m not celebrating RBG’s death. I am celebrating the death of the illusion. Because it was one of the many illusions standing in the way of people realizing how bad things actually are and actually fighting to make things better. For years many on the left have been saying “Hey if our democracy hinges on one octogenarian with a cancer history maybe we need a better system”, and it’s been ignored and glossed over by people with shirts of Ginsburg with a crown on who laugh at objectively unfunny and exhausting “Notorious RBG” skits on SNL. We’re trying to get people to first see how bad our current system is and second to actually stand up to fight for it to make it better, and it gets ignored by people who focus on the hollow pursuits of electoralism and the graven image of the Supreme Court.
This isn’t even getting into the problems with RBG, there were many. She called Kaepernick’s protests “dumb and disrespectful”. She had cancer in 1999, and in 2009, and she still didn’t retire. Instead her supporters railed at anyone suggesting that maybe she should. She ruled in favor of a pipeline going over indigenous land in the Appalachians. She considered Scalia a friend and I’d be hard pressed to think of any more thoroughly and *competently* evil person in recent American political history, someone who took literal glee in finding ways to twist the law in the most sadistic and murderous interpretations possible.
Yet through all of this she was idolized and borderline worshipped by liberals in the US. To such an extent that they are horrified and miserable now that she has, predictably, died. Any criticism of RBG or of the SCOTUS system itself was shouted down. They pinned their hopes on her, a false idol, and now that idol has fallen. They will need to find something new to believe in, and maybe some of them will find something of value to believe in, and I celebrate that fact.
Political change comes not from figurehead individuals but from movements. This was true of Bernie Sanders, a point I kept trying to make when talking fellow leftists off the ledges after his primary defeats in 2016 and 2020, and it is true of RBG as well. If you have the individual but not the movement, the individual will accomplish nothing. If you have the movement, you cannot be defeated whether you have a figurehead for it or not.
However, in the US we receive extensive indoctrination and propaganda conditioning us to focus on figureheads. The ruling class has many reasons for that. If we look to a figurehead to lead us, we often don’t do the work ourselves. A figurehead can be stonewalled, subverted, or just plain assassinated. The ruling class has done all three in the past, repeatedly. Relying on figureheads weakens movements.
The same is true of the conservative side. Liberals, conditioned to believe in figureheads, believe that Trump is the embodiment of the far right movement in our country. They believe that he is an aberration, and that if we just could somehow get rid of him then everything could go back to normal. It is a mirror of their belief that if RBG died then the whole country would be doomed. Both beliefs are dangerous illusions that prevent them from seeing political reality. The entire conservative-fascist movement is not bound up in Trump, he simply represents it, he represents the movement that is already there.
Liberals need to build their own movement, preferably joining with or becoming leftists to do it, in order to effectively counter the conservative movement. They have #resisted doing this, preferring to put their trust in Clinton, Warren, RBG, and now I guess Biden? As long as these illusions #persist, they will continue to be stymied by the country’s continual conservative movement towards theocratic fascism.
It is certain to me that the Republicans will absolutely try to get a replacement through before the election, because it’s a win-win for them. If they succeed, then they will have a 6-3 conservative court deciding any of the legal disagreements to come from what will clearly be a very contested election. Any Senators who’d be endangering their seats in a re-election year by supporting Trump will benefit from those legal decisions the same as Trump will. Even if it costs Republicans control of the Senate, that’s still a 6-3 court to shut down any Senate decisions for probably the rest of McConnell’s natural life, unless we get real wild about restructuring our government. Personally I would like to get wild.
And if they fail to seat a replacement, the election disagreement decisions will still be 4-4 ties and if a higher court ties then the precedent of the lower court stands. Because of Schumer’s steadfast refusal to meaningfully resist Trump and his insistence on rubber stamping Trump’s federal judges, that will still be enough to ensure that the election court cases favor Republicans. Additionally if they don’t seat a replacement then that’s a huge GOTV motivating factor for Republicans, at least as much as it would be for Democrats, particularly because now they’ve got to protect Trump from the obstructionist machinations of Senate Democrats. It will energize conservatives to get as many Democrat Senators out of office as possible.
What this comes down to is the hard truth that salvation through electoralism is impossible. It always has been. Hopefully now people will see that and be able to move past electoralism. If not now, then in a few weeks when the election is come and gone and Amy McGrath hasn’t won Kentucky despite tens of millions of dollars in out of state donations. In a few weeks when Joe Biden hasn’t won the election despite a non-existent GOTV ground game in swing states and a campaign predicated on yelling at internet leftists and promising to work with Republicans if elected. A lot of people placed their faith and hope, on a distinctly cultish level, in RBG. They had shirts, posters, little idols, shrines, they called her queen. Now she is dead. They need a new place for that hope.
I too have hope, and have always had hope, that a leftist movement can arise in the US or in what remains of it, and build a better future. The hope in that movement does not rely on any individual. It doesn’t rely on Bernie, or on AOC, or on Nina Turner, or Howie Hawkins. Because of the cult-like beliefs of liberals in their figureheads they believed that when Bernie left the race and told us to support Biden that we would follow our figurehead and do it. Many have not, because Bernie’s value was as a representative of the leftist movement, and if he does not represent the movement anymore, he doesn’t represent us. Good luck to him in all his future endeavors but we’ve got to go on, on our own.
I also hope that with one less idol to invest their faith in, any liberals who could eventually radicalize and become leftists will do so, and will join us, and we can begin to work on a movement beyond hollow electoralism and voting for corporate candidates in rigged elections. The Supreme Court is lost, the US is lost, the institutions are lost, but we are still here. It is time to mourn what is lost, and to make new systems. We have no other true hope.
We are living in an empire that is in the process of collapsing. The first thing to do is realize and accept that fact. The second thing to do is realize that the end of the empire is not your end. Many people throughout history, including contemporary to us, have lived through their empire collapsing or their countries becoming failed states. Others have died in the process, but you can also die in a car crash, or a robbery gone wrong, or a sudden brain hemorrhage, or any of a variety of ways. You can die from cancer, at 87 or at 37. A hundred years from now you’ll be as dead from the empire collapsing as you’d be from a heart attack or from dying of old age in your sleep.
Would you like something to do beyond crying over an RBG bobblehead or bringing flowers to the Supreme Court building or voting for a lifelong imperialist with sexual misconduct accusations? Try to organize your workplace. Look into wildcat strikes like the recent teacher strikes. Support other strike actions that are ongoing. Donate to bail funds. Volunteer to drive home people who have been bailed out. Look into mutual aid groups in your area. Volunteer at a food bank, check out Food Not Bombs. Get involved with the DSA if you’re not sure where to start, not that they’re a perfect organization (nobody is perfect and so no organization can be) but they do have a lot of things going that can always use more support. Look into starting a brakelight clinic. Join protests, or bring supplies to protests. Get street medic training.
Most importantly, make connections within your community. This isn’t an immediate overthrow of the government. It’s going through the hard work of laying a foundation and building a movement. Once you have a solid foundation, once you have been part of building a powerful political movement, nothing will be able to stop it. And then as the American empire and the capitalist system collapse under their own internal contradictions, you will have something ready to pick up the pieces and to build a better world from the aftermath.
Additional resources:
Kentucky makeover: Amy McGrath challenges Mitch McConnell as a pro-Trump Democrat - July 9, 2019
"And you know what? Who stops them along the way? Who stops the president from doing these things? Mitch McConnell," she continued on MSNBC. "And I think that that’s very important, and that’s going to be my message – the things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done. He’s not able to get it done because of Senator McConnell."
U.S. Justice Ginsburg hits back at liberals who want her to retire - July 31, 2014
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a message for liberals who have been saying the 81-year-old should step down while Democratic President Barack Obama is in office so he can appoint her successor: Who are you going to get who will be better than me?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Pancreatic Cancer Surgery - Feb. 5, 2009
Ginsburg, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton, had surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to treat colorectal cancer in 1999.
Today, Otis W. Brawley, MD, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, issued a statement about Ginsburg's pancreatic cancer. "Justice Ginsburg's success in beating back a diagnosis of colon cancer nearly 10 years ago has inspired and given hope to many in the cancer fight. This new diagnosis [of pancreatic cancer] is unfortunate, and we take hope in reports that this was apparently an early stage of disease, and wish her well, offer our support and prayers, and want to encourage her in what we know is going to be a challenging course of therapy," Brawley states.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Kaepernick protests: 'I think it's dumb and disrespectful' - October 12, 2016
https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/10/politics/ruth-bader-ginsburg-colin-kaepernick/index.html
Of Kaepernick and others she says, she thinks their actions are "dumb and disrespectful".
"I would have the same answer if you asked me about flag burning. I think it's a terrible thing to do, but I wouldn't lock a person up for doing it. I would point out how ridiculous it seems to me to do such an act."
...
Of the athletes, Ginsburg said, "if they want to be stupid, there's no law that should be preventive. If they want to be arrogant, there's no law that prevents them from that. What I would do is strongly take issue with the point of view that they are expressing when they do that."
Mutual Aid Hub - find Mutual Aid groups near you: https://www.mutualaidhub.org/
DSA Get Involved - find ways to get involved in the fight for a better future through specific policies, not through following figureheads: https://www.dsausa.org/get-involved/
International Workers of the World - Join or support the One Big Union: https://iww.org/
List of Bail Funds for Protesters around the country: https://bailfunds.github.io/
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