The Left and the 2024 election
Chris Cutrone, Jorge Mújica, and Eddie Liger Smith
On October 30, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion at the University of Chicago on the then-upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election. The event’s speakers were Jorge Mújica, Chicago labor organizer and member of Morena;[1] Chris Cutrone, founding member and teacher in Platypus and lead organizer of the Campaign for a Socialist Party; and Eddie Liger Smith, founding member and executive of the American Communist Party. Panelists were asked to respond to the following prompt: How should the Left approach the 2024 election? Would a Harris administration offer new opportunities for the Left? Would a Trump administration? What is to be made of third-party candidates? An edited transcript follows.[2]
Opening remarks
Jorge Mújica: Jorge Mújica: immigrant, Mexican, one of those awful people Trump talks about. We eat cats and dogs. I’ve been organizing in the labor sector for all my life — 30 years here in the United States. I work for a workers’ center where we organize mostly latino immigrants, many undocumented. That helps me bring some perspective to this talk. It is not the same thing to be a student at the University of Chicago as to be an El Milagro Tortilleria worker earning minimum wage. So I get the benefit of getting their input.
Your perspective on how to approach an election has to do with context. In the wording of the presentation, it says, for instance, “the alleged threat” of Donald Trump. It’s not alleged; it’s definitely a danger for this country — for everybody, not only immigrants. The context here is: Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Additionally, in Illinois, it’s not even fun to vote, because we know the Democrats are going to win. If the Left really wanted to influence the elections,it should be working in the seven or eight states that are “in contest” — where every vote counts.
So we vote for Jill Stein or Claudia de la Cruz. What is that going to change? The influence of that vote is going to be almost nil. De la Cruz will maybe get 80,000 votes nationwide; that’s usually the result. I got more votes 14 years ago when I ran against the Democratic Party candidate in the Democratic primaries in District 3. Is that the real responsibility of the Left — to support independent candidates? Is it really pushing for some kind of change? We can elect a Green Party candidate for a public library in Berwyn if we live there. If not, what else is there to do?
The real problem with this election is the Democratic Party doesn’t even know how to address its own voters. They are not capable of debating Donald Trump. He’s a clown, a media personality, but the threat is real. It is either Harris or Trump.
This lack of popularity or loss in popularity has come about because of Israel invading Gaza and massacring thousands of people. Should the Left condone that? Absolutely not. But the hammering of the Democratic Party from the Left, with all the correct reasons — is that going to affect the election? Is the Left going to be responsible for Trump winning? Donald Trump is real fascism. He is not joking.
I had a meeting last night — a presentation to 175 workers. I presented to them the list of labor-related principles or ideas in Project 2025:[3] no labor unions anymore, no right to organize labor unions, firing labor organizers without any compensation, no protections for workers in considered-protected activities, firing strikers left and right. They’re going to be fired and replaced permanently. We survived one Trump presidency, but it was a fluke. Eight years later, Trump has a serious team. If they talk about mass deportations, they mean it. No, they can’t deport 11 million people on the first day. But Barack Obama deported 3 million people. So in one, two, three years, Trump could deport 3–6 million people. We can’t allow that to happen.
The Left, for years — despite all the problems with the Democratic Party presidency — have thrived in the labor movement, in the immigration movement, in so many fields, because of administrative policies. In the legislature it’s impossible to pass any good law, but administrative policies have been beneficial to immigrants and laborers. A Trump presidency means that we go on the defensive: cancellation of TPS;[4] cancellation of DACA,[5] the Dreamers program; cancellation of Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement.[6] All those administrative things that the Biden administration did are going to be undone by Trump. Project 2025 is a real plan; they have the means to implement those policies, and they are scary.
What’s the Left going to do? Nearly nothing we can do. The national perspective is not that good. Should we keep hammering Harris? Of course. There is genocide in Gaza. But if criticizing the Democrats means giving a one-point lead to Trump, we have to consider. Trump is the guy who moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Why don’t we criticize Trump instead of just hammering the Democrats? Do they deserve a hammering? Of course, but why don’t we hammer Trump more?
Chris Cutrone: Why I want Kamala to win:[7]
I don’t want to be a target.
If Trump wins, “cis-gender straight white males” will be blamed — perhaps also “gay” ones like me. We have had 8 years of attempted reeducation of the population to try to prevent the election of anyone like Trump ever again. Schoolchildren have been told in no uncertain terms that they are guilty for our bad, bad society. Trump paints a target on me.
Evidently, cis-gender (straight) white males are the largest market for masochism. They are gluttons for punishment. Also for sadism. At least in fantasy. But I’m not — not so privileged. It’s a turn-off, actually. But, evidently, it turns on so much of politics.
8 years of Trump is enough; 12 might be too much. I have tried to make it into a teachable moment, but if no one has learned by now, they never will. I am not that much of a masochist. There was a viral video early on titled “Stop making me defend Donald Trump.” I am frankly sick of still having to do so. Not defending Trump, but defending the truth against Democratic Party — and mainstream established Republican — lies. As I said earlier this year, if you are in the right, you shouldn’t have to lie. And they have lied about Trump.
I have tried to take Trump as expressing the historical crisis of neoliberalism and potential change in capitalism. I have written entire books about it — a learning opportunity. Evidently, it’s not over yet.
If Trump wins, we could have 8 more years after him of J.D. Vance. If Kamala wins, we nip all that in the bud. — Don’t we? If Trump is stopped, that’s the end of Trumpism, isn’t it? — But won’t Trumpism continue after Trump? Might it be Vance in 4 years for another 8 after all? Who knows? But both are betting on it: one as hope; the other as fear.
One of the candidates is lying more than the other. — They’re both lying.
But in one case I might want the lies to be true — not in the other case.
They blame Trump for COVID. But after Kamala said she would not trust the safety and effectiveness of a vaccine developed under Trump, her Administration forced people to take it. Both the epidemic and the suffering caused by the measures supposed to prevent it increased immeasurably under Biden and Kamala. They also censored any dissent from it. They called this “trusting the science” — and denied any evidence to the contrary. Anthony Fauci came out of retirement a last time to preach shots and masks after getting COVID this year — before falling to a mosquito carrying West Nile Virus.
Kamala is going to “build that wall.” — Do I want that? No. But it might be an inevitability. After all, it started out as a Democrat promise in the Clinton era, contra Republican neoliberal open borders policy. — As late as 2019, Bernie himself said that open borders is not a “policy of the Left” because it undermines workers and strengthens capitalists. But I hope she’s lying about that just to get elected, due to the unpopularity of recent events. — Democratic Party New York City Major Eric Adams was targeted for prosecution after he criticized the Biden Administration’s immigration policies. But I don’t mind the hundreds of Venezuelans and Haitians sheltered in my neighborhood. They actually make me feel more at home amidst all the rich white people. They are here to join the working class — part of any potential future for socialism in the U.S. Perhaps the Democrats let in enough people already, so that now they want to close the door again.
Kamala is running for President as a prosecutor. Do I support that? No. But there has been a reversal, from the promise of criminal justice reform just a few years ago under Trump — when Kamala encouraged “defund the police” protesters and rioters — to a more law-and-order policing mindset — with Trump cast by her as the very quintessence of criminality. But he markets his mugshot grinningly.
Kamala is going to be “strong” on foreign policy, militarily backing both Ukraine and Israel — even as the current Administration’s policies have failed to end both wars — assuming they want to. They’ve trapped Putin in Ukraine and are trying to bleed him dry. And the U.S. is not going to stand in the way of getting rid of Hamas and Hezbollah, especially since the latter are responsible for hundreds of dead Marines, albeit 40 years ago. Their families remember. Trump is derided as dangerously unpredictable and unreliable to U.S. allies. But is he? Trump might not change anything, or even represent changing anything, but Kamala promises more of the same. Trump vows to stop the wars — both of them — and prevent future ones. “Make America Great Again” means making peace. Is it a lie?
Protesters blame Biden and Harris for not controlling Israel. But maybe it’s not about who can control them, but who can be controlled. Netanyahu seems pretty good at playing the U.S. and its politicians. And perhaps Trump is no different. But at least his pride can be hurt, and he will not hide behind apparent institutional and geopolitical insurmountablilities, by which the Democrats unblinkingly and shamelessly justify everything they do — and fail to do. — Is there no alternative — no alternative to “genocide”? But there are genocides, and there are genocides: not all are created equal.
Economically, the Biden Administration has been equally an abject failure, erasing wage gains with inflation. They claim Trump will raise inflation with his tariffs, which is kind of rich coming from them. Trump promises to lower inflation dramatically, specifically by driving down energy costs through supporting fossil fuel production and use. But Kamala says proudly that the U.S. is drilling and pumping oil and gas at levels higher than in Trump’s first term. Not that the Democrats want to bring prices down — no, they want to lower consumption, at least by the working class. People will adapt or die.
Kamala claims that Trump will destroy Obamacare and wreck the already strained U.S. healthcare system. But Trump maintained and expanded it and promises to only improve and not eliminate it. It’s a cost-benefit analysis for him — as it is for her.
Kamala says Trump is supported by the nefarious Project 2025, while Trump disavows it and says his agenda is different. But Obamacare was based on the same healthcare reform proposal that Project 2025’s authors, the Heritage Foundation, had originally drafted.
LGBTQ? But this is a fraught issue, even in the “community.” There are many divisions and conflicts, which the Democrats suppress and pretend don’t exist, to hold their voting constituency together, and which Trump is happy to leave alone, apart from some “common sense conservatism.” He criticized DeSantis for going after Disney on gender. When he was President he even proudly held up a rainbow flag — albeit upside down. But in the meantime that flag has been replaced — by what exactly, no one knows.
Have I left anything out? Oh yeah, “climate change.” But no one wants to hear about that. Not when blowing up Nord Stream 2 released more methane into the atmosphere than anything else on record. Not when not only the U.S. but the world depends on American economic recovery.
I grew up in the 1970s and have heard it all before about environmental catastrophe and capitalism. As back then, it is still now an expression of pessimism and nihilism, appropriate to the political times.
I represent the cause of socialism and Marxism. My interest is not in this election or any other in capitalist politics, but in the task of educating young people in the need to change the world.
To do this takes time and energy, and incredible patience and resilience — which can be tested and even broken, not by long hard struggle, but by silliness and stupidity. What Trump has unleashed in response to him has been stupid and silly — and yet it is in deadly earnest. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a reality I can attest to from personal experience.
Trump has made not himself but his opponents farcical. And yet it is all taken very seriously. They are ugly, not amusing. Clowns can be frightening — especially sadistic clowns. But which ones, and how? Insane Clown Posse endorsed Kamala. Of course they did. The clowns I face are the Democrats. The Republicans are a more distant threat, however real. Yet I have to go unnoticed by the Democrat clowns, and avoid attracting their attention while living under their noses. I’ve lived in Chicago my entire adult life — the town of John Wayne Gacy: unfortunately, it makes all too much sense that he lived here. It is home of International Mr. Leather. Makes sense. Suburban Illinois gave us Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, the disgraced wrestling coach who helped shepherd the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act through Congress — signed by Bill Clinton. Sad clowns, all. Sad in their silliness. Silly in their sadness. Kamala and Walz. Trump and Vance. Ren and Stimpy. Itchy and Scratchy. Cats and dogs — eating each other. But I don’t want to be a target.
I have always said that Trump’s critics have misread him, taking him literally but not seriously enough. Actually, they’ve just lied about him. What they have taken seriously is not Trump but their own preoccupations — their obsessions — and feelings. I am tired of dealing with hurt Democrats. They have made it impossible to think or even to live properly — to feel anything besides anxiety and depression. They have become the most grim humorless people, holding a grudge and seething with anger and a lust for revenge, all while proclaiming “Joy!” at the prospect. And, unlike Trump and his supporters, they actually have the power to act on it. — I don’t want to be a target.
I would like to say that I am bored of it, but really I have gone numb with fear. I am worn out — worn down after more than 8 years. I am not alone. I was never a fan of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine thesis on “disaster capitalism.” But who can deny that the last gasp of neoliberalism has been just that, and for the last 4 years on the greatest scale yet? But we are not supposed to notice. They are doing it while pretending not to. It’s the denial that’s frightening. Gas-lighting: they are scaring us into submission. And it works. The cowed working class keeps its head down and goes quietly to and from work, thankful for their jobs, just trying to survive it all. Will they register their protest anonymously at the ballot-box? Not nearly enough.
I want Kamala to win so I can get a break from the madness, an end to the intimidation and blackmail, the manipulation and the mind-games. What they promised 4 years ago: getting back to normal — going back to the “new normal.” That is the reason — the only reason — anyone will vote for her. Dare I hope for it? But they have lied about everything else, so why should we believe they’re not lying about this, too? Will they finally leave us alone? The promise of an end to the drama might be enough to elect Kamala. I want it to be true.
But it is a lie.
Eddie Liger Smith: I’m speaking mostly for myself here; these aren’t necessarily official positions of the American Communist Party (ACP),[8] the party I belong to.
These elections don’t matter; I’m not going to vote. In 2016 I voted for Jill Stein. In 2024 I just plan to not participate at all. There’s a rational kernel to the argument the Democrats are making against the Green Party: there’s this rhetoric from the Green Party that we’re going to build dual power this time, but it never happens. All their energy and focus is directed towards elections, holding the carrot with the stick.
They’re never going to let us win a bourgeois election; this is a lesson I had to learn firsthand in 2020 working for the Bernie campaign. I was in Iowa; there were Leftists busing in from all around the country to come help us. I watched as the Democratic establishment descended on Bernie and crushed his electoral hopes because he posed the mildest social-democratic reforms that European and Scandinavian countries already have. If they will go that far to destroy Bernie Sanders, imagine what they would do to a really radical candidate.
There’s truly no winning through the bourgeois electoral system. We always talk about building dual power — organizing people at the point of production, as the Marxist view would say. But who’s doing this work? Who has the courage to walk up to some random working-class person who probably supports Trump and tell them, “Here’s why I think it’s in your interest to be a communist”? When I first got to the Left — when I first realized that something about our system needed to change and dedicated myself to doing something about it — I didn’t see a lot of that. I saw infighting; I saw a lot of organizations that were completely rooted in academia and would go to the protest movement, recruit people who already agreed with them, and get them to pay dues.
For years I said we wouldn’t turn Midwestern Marx, the institute I helped found, into our own party. It seemed egotistical. But after four years of voicing my critiques of the Left, and after Carlos Garrido published our critiques in a systematic form,[9] I noticed that we had people behind us, and behind this group that we work with called Infrared, thinking the same thing — that had the same critiques and were willing to go to the working class and do the hard work. It is easy to be doomer-istic when nobody is doing that work and you’re not engaged in it yourself. When you throw yourself into it, you find that the American working class isn’t as reactionary or indoctrinated with McCarthyism as you think. Maybe your grandfather who watches Fox News all day — I know mine, I’ve given up on reaching him.
But the younger generation doesn’t have this giant block in their brain where dialectical materialism and communism should be. It’s a matter of doing the work, and that’s why we started the ACP. I’m excited for our labor policy to roll out soon and for the things that I’ve been working on in terms of meeting workers where they’re at — at the point of production in major, heavy, blue-collar industries in this country. “We’ve gotta go to the blue-collar workers!” Nobody’s actually doing it. Actions speak louder than words, and that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re bold and brash and putting ourselves out there — that’s social media, and how you have to operate in that world in order to reach people. More than anything we’re trying to do the real work of reaching communities and workplaces — that’s where our focus should be.
The time and energy we put into this bourgeois electoral system could be spent organizing, educating. This is the failure of the Greens, or even the Party for Socialism and Liberation: they’re recruiting people to the Party, telling them that the revolution is right around the corner, running Karina and Claudia in 2024. With the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) it’s even worse: go support Biden and Harris, and the revolution’s right around the corner. It’s like a house of mirrors. You get people interested in Marxism, and then after four years they’re burnt out. This stems from them not following a real Marxist-Leninist or working-class-based organizing strategy.
Democrats and the Republicans serve the same system. People will often say, “the Democrats are better; look at their rhetoric.” That’s the point! The Democrats have people like Bernie and AOC, who take people who want to be socialists and filter them into the Democrats. The two biggest organic uprisings in the last 20 years in America, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the George Floyd uprisings, started out as radical — very anti-Wall Street and anti-U.S. police state. But then the Democrats came in and co-opted everything. Professor Danny Shaw works with us at Midwestern Marx; at Occupy Wall Street he was trying to do anti-Libya War protests. People were spitting on him because it had been fully co-opted by the Democrats. The liberals reoriented all this radical energy back towards the system.
If you want to go vote for Stein, Harris, or Trump, I really don’t care. I’m going to try to organize you into a union or the ACP anyways.
Responses
JM: Indeed, don’t lie. If you believe what you believe, that’s fine, but don’t lie. The problem is that that’s a logical argument. Trump and his followers are not about logic. But we are not able either, as the Left, to compare the discourses. We’re not even able to respond because we keep trying to respond logically. That’s not the battlefield. We have lost it. We keep using the same discourse — it convinces 20 people at a time. We can’t convince 200 or 2,000. That’s a big problem.
Who goes to the blue-collar workers? I do! I’m not trying to build a party. I’m trying to organize workers, teach them, and support them in enforcing their own rights. Company by company? Well, yeah. I wish it were million by million. But this kind of work — now that we’re talking about the two uprisings — is what allowed us on May Day in 2006 to have Freedom March, a general strike.[10] We paralyzed Chicago that day. And it wasn’t with rhetoric or with the intention of creating a party; it was just by addressing common problems of common people, common workers. And, of course, the Democratic Party ended up co-opting it.
CC: I want to bring up the other movement that took place in the last twenty years, the anti-war movement. There was an anti-war movement during the War on Terror. If you wanted to know which counties would vote for Trump in 2016, the most reliable indicator? It was those most impacted by the war. So, an incredibly unpopular war is one rational reason that people might have voted for Trump. As Trump always likes to say, he was running as a Republican, not as a Democrat, because it would have been impossible to run as a Democrat. Running as a Republican, of course, he has to appeal to his base. He says he would do it differently running as a Democrat.
He wanted to do a couple of things: renegotiate the trade environment unilaterally rather than through multilateral things like the TPP[11] and end the wars. That’s one of the reasons why the establishment was and are still hostile to him. He promises to end the war in Gaza and the Middle East more generally. He wanted to make a deal with Iran. In a recent interview he said it was useful to have John Bolton around because you could scare people with him. This guy wants to bomb everything in the world, right? You bring him with you to the negotiation and you get results.
This is something that the Democrats and the Left have tended to lie about. A whole generation went through 20 years of war; their families were affected by it. That’s the working class, and that’s a big cultural divide — the people who went through the war and the people who didn’t. That it’s a base of Right-wing populism is tragic. But what alternative is there? Because the Democrats don’t really offer an alternative, right? Obama came in and promised the end of the war. He promised it! Samantha Power said, “We soon learned the wisdom of continuity in U.S. foreign policy,” and, “The problem with Trump is that he’s incapable of learning that wisdom.”[12] Well, thank God! Right?
I’m glad, Jorge, that you mentioned 2006, which was national, not just Chicago. It brought tears to my eyes. That was big, and it was in the context of the anti-war movement. It showed another potential path for change. That was the time when they promised comprehensive immigration reform, which, I have to say, as a socialist, as a Marxist, and as someone interested in the working class, I’m not too sanguine about, because it would produce a three-tier system, which is much harder to organize across than a two-tier system.
Trump promised to deliver on what both parties had promised but had no interest in resolving — only exploiting it as an issue. Even immigration, the most infamous of his things: what did he promise? He promised to do the deal! You can see Kamala doing the same with “Build the wall.” Obama was deporter-in-chief. It was a pressure tactic to get people on board with immigration reform. But the chips that they played with in these negotiations — The working class, the immigrants, the vulnerable. Both parties do it, so don’t just blame Trump.
ELS: I agree with a lot of the points that Chris made. I see and interact with a ton of MAGA people in my community; their support for Trump is more rational than we would think. It stems from the fact that he promised to bring manufacturing jobs back, cut down on illegal immigration, and end the wars. I’ve got one person I’m working on right now, talking to about communism, who thinks Trump’s cryptocurrency is going to replace the U.S. dollar and then get us back on the gold standard. Part of me almost wishes that Trump would win so then I could say, “See? He didn’t do any of the stuff you thought he was going to do.” But there’s something to be said about passion. This MAGA guy, who happens to be one of the best wrestlers in American history, talks about revolution! He starts saying, “These politicians, they don’t need to be voted out, they need to be put in jail!” And I say, “Yeah! We need the spirit of 1776 again!” You need to be passionate, to be confident in what you’re saying.
My dad always told me, if you say anything with confidence, people will believe it, no matter how stupid. That’s something Trump understands. I’m not saying we need to push stupid stuff, but if you have something substantive to say, say it with passion. What else could Martin Luther King and American heroes do? They knew what they believed in was true and they said it passionately. During the Bernie campaign people would say, “We want a Bernie Sanders policy with Trump’s balls.” People don’t want to hear, “would you please allow us to tax the rich a little bit to pay for healthcare, Kamala?” If you look into Bernie’s history, too, he used to be so based. He was in Vermont, a red state for years, and he said, “I’m going run as an independent, go to the unions and the working-class people, ask what they want, and get it done. You want the potholes fixed on this road? That’s what we’ll do. You want a new public park? Here.” He was able to flip a red state into one that was voting for an independent socialist year after year.
When he got national, things started to change. The Democrats got their hooks into him, and again we see the role that the Democrats play. Now Bernie’s just part of this strategy; he’s just the left flank of the Democratic Party in order to help them co-opt real, radical energy. We need a place where people can put that radical energy, which is what we’re trying to build with the ACP.
Q&A
Jorge and Chris, I was wondering what you both think when you hear Eddie talk. I’ve spent a lot of time with the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) (SWP)[13] — it sounds like I’m listening to them. Obviously they have a different ideological history, but there seems to be a connection to “we need to go to the workers,” rank-and-file strategy. Do you recognize the past in what Eddie’s saying, even though it also seems to be future-forward?
JM: As Eddie said, we are never going to win an election in a bourgeois electoral system. So why are we building a party?
ELS: Not to win an election.
JM: Hah! Right. Why are we trying to create a party? What is that party going to do? Political parties, by definition, are instruments to win elections and to govern. So why have a party if you’re never going to win an election? Since Upton Sinclair ran for governor in California and got a third of the vote, nobody’s been more successful — not even Debs. But he didn’t really have a party, he was an independent candidate.[14]
I’m Mexican. I belong to a Mexican political party that acts here in the U.S., and we have more members than any Leftist U.S. party — 45,000 members in the U.S. Any of these days we are going to start winning seats in the city council in Chicago. Morena — it’s a party, and a party’s mission is to win elections. And if we cannot win them, why organize a party? Of course we need an organization; why does it need to be a party? Why are we not a part of the mass movements that are out there?
ELS: How many elections did the Bolsheviks win? Or any successful revolutionary socialist party in history? The goal of a party is not necessarily to win elections, it’s to meet those mass movements — like Occupy Wall Street, and the George Floyd uprising. Rather than the Democratic Party meeting these people in order to push them toward neoliberalism, you have a Marxist or communist party that meets them and explains, “The system has an inherent contradiction between the wage laborers and the capitalists; their material interest is always to drive your wages and benefits down.” If we just go and try to build these mass movements, the Democrats are going to co-opt them. This is the critique that Lenin makes of trade-union opportunism. If you don’t offer a larger political project, what are we offering them?
There’s a revolutionary history here in the United States: we had the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement. Something’s got to give, but how do we influence that positively without a party? I guarantee you that the Groypers[15] have a party. Nick Fuentes and them — they’re more organized than you think. You need a party that can be, as Lenin said, a fighting organization for the working class. That’s what a communist party is. It’s not to win elections — unless you can. But the Bolivarian Revolution was not just Hugo Chavez entering the election and winning; it was a massive uprising that got them to that point. Overthrow in 1992 failed. It wasn’t until 98, as the movement continued, that Chavez came back and was put in power. But there’s no organization that we can operate, collectively and in an organized faction in these political spaces, besides a party.
JM: That’s more or less the point I was trying to make when I say I’m Mexican. What happened in Mexico was a movement that produced a party. They saw they could win the presidential election, so they moved to a party. But the movement was taking over the whole country! I know the bourgeoisie did not allow them to win; they won straight out, massively six years ago and five months ago. But a party was the last part of the movement. It was hundreds of thousands of people moving without a party to the point where, today, we have problems within Morena trying to make people understand what the heck a party is — they keep conceiving themselves as “movement.” Yes, you’re a movement, but you still need some kind of structure to win elections, not what Karl Marx said and Lenin said. This is 2024. We have to learn from 100 years.
ELS: There have been a lot of successful Leninist revolutions since Lenin.
JM: Tell me which communist party has ever led a revolution.
ELS: The Communist Party of China. They’re still in power. The Communist Party of Vietnam; the Communist Party of Laos.
JM: No, not in Vietnam. And not in Cuba, and not in Bolivia, and not in Argentina.
ELS: I don’t get the point. Those were revolutions.
JM: — and I was a member of the Mexican Communist Party.[16]
CC: I agree with Jorge that you have to have a movement in order to motivate forming a party. A movement is not ready to aim for power or take power from the get-go, so the question is the coherence of the movement. A lot of the problems of the Left stem from the fact that it’s ideologically premature, meaning it starts with ideology. It is unwilling to challenge its own preconceptions, dogma. Marx wrote in 1843: “We’re not coming with a new dogma, we’re going to explain the confusion of the existing dogma of the would-be reformers.”[17] Critique of ideology.
The Left has been around long enough that the Left is now an ideology, and it’s an obstacle as an ideology. We have to be more open-minded with respect to the movement. With respect to the movements that already exist, it’d be tricky; I’m not sure there’s an existing movement, or movements, going in a direction of socialism or overcoming capitalism. Not from the get-go. Jorge, I like the way that you formulated it, which is that you help workers claim — defend — their rights, because a lot of what exists now in capitalism actually depends on people not asserting the rights they already have. There’s a lot of pseudo-revolutionism, which is to say, you think there’s an obstacle that isn’t really there, or you mistake what it is. The laws are not necessarily an immediate obstacle; there are ways of working around them. Certainly the capitalists do all the time. And organizing the working class requires working in the gray zone of the quasi-legal; it’s a question of whether they’re going to enforce the law or not.
A lot of the labor movement that exists is pretty much captured by the state. Jorge, you brought this up and I want to push back on this: it can’t depend on the NLRB.[18] Where I teach, they’re getting ready to go on strike. The reason? They’re afraid that Trump’s going to get elected, and that the NLRB’s going to say, “You’re not allowed to strike.” Are you organized enough to be able to go on strike even if they say no? The organized labor that exists is not fit for the task.
ELS: The conditions are more ripe in this country than people make them out to be. Jorge, you bring up Cuba and how there wasn’t a need for the party in Cuba. We can’t just go to the agricultural workers, give them guns, and start taking on the U.S. government. We have to operate politically and have some kind of vehicle to reach people and to show the failures of the unions — which is what the Bolsheviks did so successfully. The only vehicle to do that in America is a party, unless you want to be a lonely anarchist.
I’m curious about the Democrats’ effort in the last four years to bring manufacturing back. In Ohio, they’re building this big microchip factory, selling it as a jobs program. It’s very few jobs, and they’re trying to automate as much as possible. A lot of the industrial policy seems driven by competition with China. Are we trying to start a war with China? How do we get away from an industrial policy that seems vaguely martial and bring it to building good jobs?
JM: The United States lost, by its own doing, since the free trade agreement in 1994.[19] It was the tacit acceptance that we don’t do industry in this country. We keep talking about it, but then we’ve referred to “Make America Great Again.” My father was an industrial worker, the only one working in the family. He bought a house, a car, and we went through education on one job with a good salary. That’s the great America they want back. It’s not possible. It’s discourse more than anything else. If you can build an airplane in Mexico, you will build it in Mexico because it’s cheaper. Period.
And at the same time, we are hyper-technological. Of course technology’s never going to substitute humans; Robert Owen opened his mill on January 1, 1800 and there are still jobs. Mechanization didn’t do away with jobs. That affects people, but there’s always jobs available — just a different kind. That’s a dislocation of the dream of having an industrial job here.
ELS: I support reindustrialization and the bringing back of manufacturing jobs to America. It’s impossible to get the Democrats to accept that position. The reason why is that the Democrats and Republicans are controlled by finance capital, which is separate from industrial capital. In Marx’s time, the most powerful people were factory owners, manufacturers — industrial capitalists. Since that time the credit system has developed and concentrated to the point where we have a global financial system with the IMF and the World Bank and all these western financial institutions at the center. Marx talks a lot about the difference between the accumulation of real capital and fictitious capital. Our ruling class is accumulating fictitious capital. They’re accumulating paper money, not even attached to any real commodity since 1971. You see this with the stock market, too — nothing but a paper representation of the actual, productive economy.
The people who run our economy gamble with it. Speculation is gambling with the actual, real economy. They don’t give a shit about manufacturing jobs or how things are going in the Midwest; they’re just serving their donors, who happen to be finance capitalists. China understands. Michael Hudson has a great article called “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs. China’s Industrial Socialism.”[20] They’re accumulating real capital; they’re investing in manufacturing, in new factories, in industry. This is why everything’s made in China. Meanwhile, our ruling class makes its money off rents and interest payments on debt. The cost of living is going up; the cost of renting is going up; all of us are drowning in some kind of debt. Real, industrial jobs that actually produce the material things that we value in society are being outsourced to countries where they can drive the wages down.
How can we re-shore jobs while competing on wages? We can’t just pay workers what they’re paying them in China.
ELS: With a planned economy.
CC: Hold on. The U.S. is still, with a fraction of the population, the same size economically as China. The U.S. still has the highest per capita productivity workforce in the world. I’m afraid that a lot of my Marxist friends have oversold the idea that the real economy is destroyed and it’s just paper. There is a real economy, and, as I pointed out, the world actually depends on the U.S. economy doing well. Why do people buy U.S. Treasury bills? Because it’s considered a safe investment. Why do people buy real estate in the U.S.? It’s safe.
There has been a restructuring of the economy. We live in the Midwest; there is a Rust Belt. But there was also a lot of movement of industry to different parts of the U.S, like the South. Back in the day there was movement from the Northeast to the West. One of the things that we have to be careful about with doomer-ism is assuming, “the U.S. is just in decline.” You can say it’s been in relative decline for a long time. People started saying that in the 1960s: relative decline because of the rise of Germany and Japan, and now relative decline because of the rise of China. It’s not exactly a zero-sum game. China itself is plateauing, now outsourcing manufacturing. Our future in terms of the struggle for socialism does not hinge on this.
After the Great Recession, in an accelerated way after COVID, there was going to be a reconfiguration of the global economy. The redistribution of income upwards has not only been national but international. The wave of immigration both to Europe and the U.S. — it’s the destruction of the middle class in the Third World, leaving behind, in the Third World, extremely rich, kleptocratic people and very poor people. In other words, the immigrants that have been brought in in the last four years — they’re not here just to get a welfare check; they’re here to join the economy. There’s going to be an economy. One of the calculations that they made was that this would be a vehicle for economic growth. Of course what they mean by growth is exploitation. The growth is dependent on the exploitation, but the exploitation is also dependent on the growth.
Trumpism without Trump — Biden represents a lot of Trumpism without Trump. Kamala will represent a lot of Trumpism without Trump. This is a post-neoliberal moment. It’s not the growth patterns put in place in the 90s, starting in the 70s. They have to try different things now, change their strategy. It’s not about asking, “Do you maintain these industries? Do you offshore these industries?” There are gonna be new industries too.
Historically there were socialists vying for candidacies. Whether that’s instrumental or not, the Bolsheviks made decisions about whether or not to boycott the Duma. Could there ever be a place for the Left in bourgeois parliamentarism, or is that dead in the water? Has capitalism tightened its grip to the point where whatever was recognized as latent there, even if inadequate, is completely gone? Eddie, you even say, “I was working on Midwestern Marx, and we reached this critical mass where it became time for a party.” Jorge is pointing at this: why is it time for a party?
ELS: I reached 300,000 people, and I had them begging me, “What do I do?” I don’t want to call my social-media posting a mass uprising, but every day I have hundreds of people asking, “What do I do?” It got to the point where I can’t tell these people anymore, “Join CPUSA and do your best.” There was too much energy and too many good, competent people who wanted to get stuff done. With the hundreds of members that we have in the ACP, I can finally tell people to join something where I know they’ll be organizing workplaces, their communities.
But to what you said, I do think the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, or MAS[21] in Bolivia, where whatever political party is running in the elections — they’re deeply connected to the unions. The coup on Evo was tried recently; the unions were able to shut the whole country down. We don’t have that yet in the U.S. But, if you have that deep level of organization and connection between the workers and the party — that they feel that the party is actually a true political expression of what they think — you actually can win an election. It’s through the mass movement being able to shut the economy down. I would also argue those revolutions are incomplete. You still have CIA-backed goons starting riots and sabotaging the socialists in Venezuela and Bolivia. Every time they try to have an election, there’s a U.S. propaganda effort. Just arrest Juan Guaido. Quit letting him run around.
Electoral strategy allowed them to get partial control of the state, but more needs to be done. In Venezuela they understood this; that’s why they created the National Assembly — more bodies where people could be more directly involved with the government. That did change things, but 75% of the Venezuelan media is still owned by billionaire oligarchs who trash the socialist project. Nationalize those!
But Venezuela isn’t the U.S. Is that applicable here?
ELS: We almost have different countries within the U.S, because of all the different cultures. It’s a little different in smaller countries like Venezuela — not to say they have all the same ethnicity or same culture across Venezuela. In the U.S., where the culture in the Appalachian South is not the same as California, you need a unique organizing strategy for each part of the country. Do I think those different chapters can be unified under one national body? Yes. But if you don’t have some level of autonomy, they’re not going to be able to reach their communities. We’re in the belly of the beast of the empire. We have to show people what our country is doing to others and how it’s not beneficial for us.
I’ve known about the Infrared project for a couple years now. I know you, Eddie, said that you’re speaking on behalf of yourself, but — to what extent is the ACP actively pursuing a Right-wing, maybe far-Right, path. Jackson Hinkle, for instance, has been accused of being far-Right. He recently posted on X, “they killed Jesus.” [22] Which was interpreted by many as blatantly anti-semitic. I know his response was something like he was talking about a force of injustice throughout history, he wasn’t talking about Jews —
ELS: He was talking about creditors. He’s been reading Michael Hudson. This is what he told me — that a lot of the negative things throughout history have been perpetuated by creditors, people who make their money by loaning money with interest. Hudson made the argument that it was the ruling class at the time who killed Jesus because he was a radical. Jackson was trying to say, it’s the financial institutions and the ruling economic class that killed Jesus.
If you think we’re a Right-wing party, you should read our program and tell me which policies are pro-worker and which ones are “Right-wing.” I don’t think you’ll find any Right-wing policies there. But this shows the importance of a party. You have someone like Jackson Hinkle — 2.7 million people following (on X) this guy who calls himself a Marxist-Leninist. Now, Jackson gets a little individualistic, adventuristic, a little pandering to Trump supporters — that’s part of the reason why he has a massive following. How is somebody supposed to learn if they don’t have a party to correct them or to enforce discipline? After that tweet, there was a discussion in the Party, where Hinkle said he was going to avoid doing anything like that in the future. He’s shown complete willingness and humility. A party is the perfect mechanism to take someone like Hinkle and forge them into a real force who can mobilize the massive audience that he has that so many of us on the Left have been completely unable to garner.
CC: This is not the way to build a movement, meaning that there’s something inherent in the form. Having an audience is maybe contrary to the way you have to appeal to people to organize them. Being an audience of podcasting, you’re basically a consumer of a cultural commodity, of an aesthetic style. Indeed, there’s what I mentioned earlier about it being premature. To get a real movement going, you need people who have different styles, different tastes — who are not going to agree at that aesthetic level. You’re going to need to cut across the existing cultural divides that the capitalist parties play up.
We are living in a market-commodity form of politics. What works for capitalist politics can’t work for organizing a socialist movement, and podcasting fits perfectly into the state of capitalist politics. One sets oneself up to get an audience — or gets an audience by accident — and then tries to turn that into a political movement. It can be a populist political movement, but it can’t be a socialist movement in the sense of the actual organizing that has to happen. That’s going to be on a different basis. What did you say? You’ve stopped trying to convince your grandfather who watches Fox News?
ELS: Yeah. I’ve given up on him.
CC: My mother can’t stand Fox News. If I put it on for 15 seconds, she’s like, “Turn that crap off!” She can’t stand the voice of Laura Ingraham or Sean Hannity. But she’s going to maybe vote for Trump anyway. So it’s just not about that; this is not a measure of political support. It might be a measure of getting votes, but what are these votes really based on? My mother might not vote for Trump; “cats and dogs” might have done it. But we have to go for more substance than that.
These kinds of orienting issues like the Gaza War — very sensationalistic, there’s an audience for it in the U.S. Is it the basis for a socialist movement? It is not, because we’re not in a position to affect it. Even if the U.S. really leaned into Israel, it’s unclear that it would have much of an effect. They have their own domestic arms industry that they have been building up. And the Europeans are there to support Israel — China too — if not the U.S. We can get an audience, but that’s different from organizing a movement.
Eddie, your political history is interesting. You voted for Jill Stein, you campaigned for Bernie Sanders, and now you’re open to speaking to Trump supporters insofar as they might be workers that could join your cause. What happened in the intervening years?
Most of you think that the elections can be a distraction. There was an agreement between Jorge and Eddie that there’s a Democratic Party co-optation: Day without an Immigrant (2006), Occupy (2011), George Floyd (2020) — co-optation followed each. As someone old enough to have been at these, they were ripe for the leadership of the Democratic Party. My students interested in politics are tired of the Millennials telling them, “The Democratic Party co-opted what we were trying to do.” It’s dishonest because the Left doesn’t take responsibility for what happened. What failed? Was it that they were just mired in the Democratic Party? Are there any lessons that we’ve learned over the last decade? You said that now it’s the time that people need to go to the workers. That sounds a lot like the SWP in the 1970s. What was learned? Why would anything be different now?
ELS: One of the huge problems — from my experience in the Bernie campaign — was opportunism. People who I thought were dedicated to the cause because they wanted things like Medicare for All just went ahead and worked for Joe Biden. They wanted to be Democratic staffers the whole time. I got offered a job with the Biden campaign, and I laughed in their face. Then to see all these people who had been my superiors working for them, I thought, “they really didn’t care about healthcare; they just wanted this as a resume-builder.” Opportunism is a big thing; you need a really competent and dedicated core group of people. This is the common trend in any successful revolution.
Character is what politics comes down to. It’s being intelligent enough to see through the lies— what are you going to do about it? I will die for the ACP. I will sacrifice my life, 100%; I’ll live in solitary confinement for the rest of my life. This is the attitude that we all have in the executive board. I lost my job; I was fired from the university for my politics because people were organizing letter campaigns demanding that they fire a communist.
I’ve sacrificed enough for this already, but I don’t care, because I would rather die than live in a system where my tax dollars are being sent to kill babies. We need people who are willing to put their careers or their lives on the line for this. Everybody sees the system is messed up, but do we have the character to actually stand up and do something about it, say “No, this is wrong,” and do the hard work of organizing even when it seems that, right now, any kind of revolutionary change is far off? There are weeks when decades happen and decades where weeks happen, to use another quote from Lenin in 1917 that’s still relevant today — there are a lot of them.
CC: I’d say, be careful; don’t sacrifice unwisely or prematurely.
ELS: Right. Carlos and I made a pact: we’ll do everything we can not to die. Che Guevara going to Bolivia was stupid; going to the Congo was stupid.
CC: Or even to lose one’s job. In other words, there are ways of doing these things.
JM: That’s why we don’t convince anybody. That’s rhetoric. I thought I was going to die before I was 25. I was in jail several times. I was tortured. I was a political prisoner. I went up to the mountains. I didn’t convince anybody. Period. What do you have to tell the worker who loses his job trying to get a better wage? That he has to sacrifice himself and build a party because capitalism is wrong? It’s not only the Democratic Party that doesn’t know how to talk to people; it’s also the Left. How do we address people’s concerns, not our concerns?
I don’t give a damn about the big difference between three miniscule, Leftist parties. I have to pay rent. My wages stink. I have to blame capitalism — of course it’s the culprit — but I’m not going to talk to workers about bad capitalism vs. liberalism vs. the failure of Bernie Sanders. That’s why we’re unconvincing. I didn’t have to talk about Marx and Lenin yesterday when I addressed 175 workers; I just told them what Project 2025 is and let them convince themselves: mass deportation on day one. It won’t be possible, but that’s something I have to be concerned about. The problem of surplus value, and inflation — I gave an example on inflation to El Milagro Tortilleria workers last week. The company gave them a $0.50 raise. I told them, “For your wage, 50 cents is 2.7%. Inflation is 2.8%. You are not being given a raise.” They felt insulted, so now they are launching a campaign to fight for one more dollar. That’s a movement.
I don’t have to quote Das Kapital. I believe in it; I’m a Marxist. I was educated in the Left. I was a member of the Mexican Communist Party, the Socialist Mexican Party,[23] the Unified Socialist Party,[24] the Party of the Democratic Revolution, and now Morena. That’s the evolution of Morena, so now I am Morena. Not my fault. The party changes.
CC: Trump likes AMLO.[25] You didn’t hear that?
JM: That’s going to be a problem. A Marxist-Leninist, feminist, woman president of Mexico[26] leading while Donald Trump is in the White House. I don’t know how he’s going to deal with her.
She said she would continue on good terms with Trump.
JM: She’ll do what Mexico always does: deal with the U.S. What else can you do? Close the border from the southern side? Join BRICS?[27] Interconnecting economies are not a joke. We can talk about anything we want to talk about when we dialogue, intellectually speaking, but governing is not the same as talking in this room.
On October 1, when Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in, I started crying, because she repeated, in front of one million people gathered at the Zócalo, the program of the Mexican Communist Party as it was in 1974. Now it has become a government program. She repeated it point after point, and I said, “what the fuck.” We won after 50 years, give or take.
Was that the goal though?
JM: Of course it was a goal! Any political party’s goal is to win the election and govern. We launched a presidential candidate from clandestinity. We were not fired from our jobs — we were shot at. We were kidnapped; we were tortured; we were disappeared. There were the night flights to drop people in the sea. That’s what we faced, not McCarthyism. You were not put on blacklists, you were killed. That was 1974.
Jorge, it seems like you come out of a more pragmatic, generous-towards-electoralism tradition. Coming from Mexico, where you just had a major electoral victory, you’ve seen the difference in different administrations towards the people’s capability to organize in the short and long term. How do you see this propensity on the Left to denigrate electoralism? What is the solution if it’s a problem?
JM: I ran against a Right-wing Democratic congressman in 2010 to make a point, not to win. It was impossible to win — a Mexican immigrant running for U.S. Congress. Not a Mexican-American, but a Mexican-Mexican born in Mexico. 18 years later, there are two latino congressmen in the Midwest: Chuy García and Delia Ramirez. So it worked.
I ran for City Council in Chicago as an open socialist when the word had not been heard in 55 years. Of course I didn’t win, but the next year Bernie Sanders ran (2016) and won against Hillary Clinton in my ward. You can participate, but what’s the intention? We elect three Morena members to the City Council of Chicago — what the heck are they going to do? I don’t know. Twice I ran, and they were mostly ideological, propagandistic campaigns.
Now, if you really believe that you can win a majority in City Council in Chicago, start running candidates — two by two by two in each precinct. Forget about dispersing across 50 wards; go to one particular ward and win there. And then win the next one, and the next one. In 50 years, you can win something. You have to be clear on the objective.
ACP member in audience: I’m glad you figured out the ACP electoral strategy.
CC: About the election, there are two sides. One is that the Left pretends to be more than it is. It is a fringe on the capitalist parties and on the Democratic Party. That’s the negative side. The positive side is that it focuses one’s attention; it’s a possibility for exposing the system. Whether intentionally or not, something about the Democratic Party was exposed in the 2016 Bernie campaign: the skullduggery.
A lot of the Russia-collusion hoax came from the idea that the Democratic Party had been hacked by Russia. Turns out, probably not. Hillary was embarrassed by the exposure of the dirty tricks against Bernie, and that was seen as somehow helping Donald Trump and also being the fault of Russia. They engage in a kind of a demagoguery, and then commit themselves to standing by it. A piece of the puzzle of the Ukraine War is that the Democrats think they’re fighting Trump in Ukraine. There is a delusional character to it. There’s a means-ends reversal involved; they come to stand for the deep state, its prerogatives.
ELS: I am curious: I haven’t looked into Project 2025 deeply. Can we be sure that this isn’t just the new Russiagate from the liberal media in order to attack Trump? Everything I’ve seen from him is him trying to distance himself from it.
CC: It’s not his policy program, but it is some kind of a resource for the Republicans.
JM: It is written by his team.
CC: There is crossover. What did Trump say about Steve Bannon? “I’m my own strategist.”[28] Which is true. Steve Bannon was a Ted Cruz guy; he wasn’t a Trump guy. Trump didn’t represent the Tea Party or the Ted Cruz faction of the Republican Party. It’s guilt by association. Both parties do it. Kamala is supposedly a Black Lives Matter, defund-the-police activist. That’s just par for the course. I wouldn’t put it in the Russiagate category, because the Russiagate hoax was more destructive, more dangerous, more problematic. Even people otherwise in the Democratic Party complained about it. Stephen Cohen, a Russian historian — around the 2016 election he was saying that the U.S. was talking itself into a position that would lock in hostility towards Russia.[29]
It’s been eight years, children. This is like before you were born. No, it’s not before you were born; it’s before you were paying attention. All you’ve known is Trump. That's shocking to me — that all you’ve ever known is elections with Trump, and that this might be your first election. It’s a bit sobering, a bit daunting. So it is important for us to remember four years ago, eight years ago. And the deep state is a real thing; they don’t like him. They do expect politicians to take recommendations. There is a question of civilian authority over the permanent bureaucracy. Trump has opened a Pandora’s box with that. He certainly didn’t mean to, but it has happened. |P
Transcribed and edited by Benjamin Katz and C. Philip Mills
[1] Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (National Regeneration Movement), founded in 2011; the ruling political party in Mexico.
[2] Video of the panel is available at <https://youtu.be/8IbzY1kaG2c>.
[3] 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, eds. Paul Dans and Steve Groves (Washington: The Heritage Foundation, 2023), <https://archive.org/details/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL/>.
[4] Temporary Protected Status, established as part of the Immigration Act of 1990.
[5] Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a 2012 executive policy restraining enforcement of immigration policy against those who illegally entered the U.S. as children.
[6] A program implemented by the Biden administration granting temporary deportation protections for undocumented workers who report workplace abuse or labor-law violations.
[7] Chris Cutrone’s remarks were published as “Why I want Kamala to win,” Platypus Review 171 (November 2024), <https://platypus1917.org/2024/11/02/why-i-want-kamala-to-win/>.
[8] The ACP was founded in July 2024.
[9] Carlos Garrido, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023).
[10] The El Gran Paro Estadounidense (Great American Strike (or Boycott)), also known as the Day Without an Immigrant, was a one-day national boycott, on May 1, 2006, against proposed immigration legislation at the time, seeing upwards of 1 million participants. 400,000 people marched in Chicago.
[11] The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a 2016 trade agreement between 12 countries, including the U.S., from which Trump withdrew in January 2017.
[12] See, for example, “Samantha Power: There Must Be Continuity in American Foreign Policy,” The Circus (October 28, 2019), <https://youtu.be/tYqwqDzCjOM>. Samantha Power was a member of President Obama’s National Security Council from 2009 to 2013.
[13] The SWP (U.S.) is a Trotskyist party that took a “turn to industry” in 1978.
[14] Sinclair ran in California’s gubernatorial elections as the candidate for the Socialist Party USA in 1926 and 1930, and for the Democratic Party 1934, respectively winning 46,000, 50,000, and 880,000 votes.
[15] An online movement of individuals who align with pundit Nick Fuentes, a self-described reactionary.
[16] Partido Communista Mexicano, founded in 1917 and dissolved in 1981. It was succeeded by the Partido Communista de México, which was founded in 1994 as the Partido de los Comunistas Mexicanos (Party of Mexican Communists), and renamed in 2010.
[17] Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge” (1843), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm>: “I am therefore not in favor of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their ideas.”
[18] National Labor Relations Board.
[19] The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
[20] Michael Hudson, “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs. China’s Industrial Socialism,” Michael Hudson (April 14, 2021), <https://michael-hudson.com/2021/04/americas-neoliberal-financialization-policy-vs-chinas-industrial-socialism/>.
[21] Movimiento al Socialismo — Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (Movement for Socialism — Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples), founded in 1997; it is the current ruling party in Bolivia.
[22] Jackson Hinkle, X (October 2, 2024), <https://x.com/jacksonhinklle/status/1841473795820814446>: “Never underestimate the evil lengths they will go. After all, they killed Jesus.”
[23] The Partido Mexicano Socialista was founded in 1987 and dissolved in 1989 when it merged with the Democratic Current, a political faction formed in 1986 within the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party), to become the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution).
[24] Partido Socialista Unificado de México (PSUM), founded in 1981 via the merger of four parties: Partido Communista Mexicano, Movimiento de Acción y Unidad Socialista (Movement of Socialist Action and Unity), Partido del Pueblo Mexicano (Party of the Mexican People), and Movimiento de Acción Popular (Movement of Popular Action). PSUM merged with the Mexican Socialist Party in 1988.
[25] Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President of Mexico from 2018 to 2024.
[26] Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.
[27] An intergovernmental organization established in 2009 by founding members Brazil, Russia, India, and China, joined later by additional members South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates.
[28] Margaret Hartmann, “Trump Declines to Say He Supports Bannon, Declares, ‘I’m My Own Strategist,’” New York Magazine (April 12, 2016), <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/trump-downplays-bannon-role.html>.
[29] See Stephen F. Cohen, “Incessant Kremlin-Baiting of President Trump Is a Threat to US National Security,” The Nation, January 25, 2017, <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/incessant-kremlin-baiting-of-president-trump-is-a-threat-to-us-national-security/>.
