The left needs to imagine winning.
Demanding nothing, wanting everything.
The Los Angeles rebels broke the spell. Under conditions of mass deportation, genocide, and war, there is no way that capitalist social peace can prevail for long. The conditions that sparked the LA Uprising continue to spread, even if a strained, tenuous sort of order has broken out—for the time being.
The way to support the uprising is to spread it, and the only way the uprising can spread is if we believe it will win. A revolt not just against Trump but against deportations and borders and cages and the whole rotten system that sustains them.
The stakes are too high for us to lose. So why are we so afraid to imagine winning?
Faith in the dead gods
For generations, it was an article of faith for the revolutionary left that history was on our side. Global capitalism would inevitably wreck itself through escalating crises; workers had only to organize to strike the fatal blow.
Per the Communist Manifesto:
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working-class—the proletarians.
By the 1960s, revolutionary theory was in crisis. The post-war economic boom created the mirage of an increasingly-affluent, co-opted Western working class; the supposedly victorious revolution in the Soviet Union had stagnated into sluggish bureaucracy. Half a century later, people still espouse the ideology of inevitable proletarian revolution, but never in good faith. When the left looks to the future, we see not the the abolition of state and capital but the rising floodwaters of a wrecked planet.
Enclosing the future
Capital has stolen the future and squandered it.
That’s because at the end of the day, the far-right is equally catastrophist. Elon is plotting his escape to Mars. Conservative speculators use the profits from gold bullion and MRE sales to build out underground doomsday bunkers. As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write:
“Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.”
There’s a vague techno-utopian dream of being salvation through space colonization and super-intelligent AI, but even the AI industry seems about evenly split as to whether artificial general intelligence actually poses an existential threat to humanity instead. The future has been foreclosed.
We need to steal it back.
Imagining victory
There’s a form of constrained radical imagination that’s actually predicated on defeat being a forgone conclusion. The planet’s doomed regardless, the thinking goes, so we’re just fighting to carve out a space for freedom among the ruins. Isn’t that the best we could hope for? And isn’t revolution an outdated, twentieth century kind of idea, anyway? The planet’s probably cooked, but maybe my collective, commune, or polycule can survive?
Folks, I think that whole idea’s nonsense. For one thing, it’s politically noxious. (It’s just the leftist version of the white American settler frontier mentality, when you think about it.) For another, I think it speaks to a wholly unfounded pessimism about the balance of forces.
Trumpian nationalism’s only gaining ground because the whole capitalist world system was strained to the point of implosion even before the Gaza genocide exposed the rank hypocrisy of American global hegemony. Global capitalism continues to centralize profits and socialize death. The climate refugees are at the gates and the best response that empire can muster is the host of The Apprentice cosplaying Pinochet. Los Angeles shows us the way forward. Anyone unable to imagine liberatory transformation emerging from these conditions has a criminal failure of imagination. Liberation not just for a communal house or a select set of comrades, but liberation for cities and continents and regions. Milwaukee. The Southeast. The Americas.
The vision is a habitable planet, resourced communities, autonomy and self-determination and peace. That you or I or someone reading this today might outlive empire and policing, the gender binary and nation-states, payday loan businesses and the housing market.
We need to know, to feel in our bones, that winning these things is within our grasp. Maybe not alone. And maybe not tomorrow. But certainly at the end of the path that we walk together in the months and years to come.
If we don’t think that’s possible, what’s the point of any of this?
Is victory really so hard to imagine?
What if we prepared to win?
