Democracy and the Left

Andy Gillitz, Sebastian, George Shulman, Grayson Walker

Platypus Review 182 | December 2025 – January 2026

On September 10, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion on democracy and the Left at New York University. The panelists were Sebastian (Revolutionary Communists of America¹), George Shulman (professor emeritus at NYU, whose work focuses on the relationship of race, political culture, and literature in post-war American life), Grayson Walker (co-founder of the Infrared Collective and the American Communist Party²), and Andy Gittlitz (author of I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism (2020) and co-host of the Antifada podcast). An edited transcript follows.³

Opening remarks

Sebastian: When we talk about democracy, we’re not talking about democracy in the abstract, we’re talking about bourgeois democracy: democracy under capitalism. This is a system of class rule. The working class has voting rights, but these only go so far. On top of undemocratic rules and institutions like the Supreme Court and Electoral College, the working class is barred from active participation in democracy just by their living conditions. The working day leaves people physically and mentally exhausted. To the degree that people do vote, every few years they get to choose which representatives of the capitalist class they prefer to represent them.⁴

Look at the growing unpopularity of what Israel is doing in Gaza: majority disapproval since at least March. A worldwide mass movement and polls showing that this issue will potentially cost the Democrats the Muslim vote in states like Michigan have not been enough to cause either party to change tune. Under both parties, life has gotten worse while the rich have gotten richer, and the banks were bailed out with the tax dollars of the working class. This is what is responsible for creating Trump on the Right, as well as Sanders on the Left — both appealing to huge layers of the working class.

Sanders, despite raising the hopes of a generation, led his movement twice into the dead end of the Democratic Party. With no working-class option on the Left, decades of built-up anger were channeled to the Right with Trump. We’ve seen the same thing around the world: Left leaders calling for reforms, finding themselves blocked, and usually capitulating to the liberals. Jeremy Corbyn in Britain in 2019, Podemos in Spain, SYRIZA in Greece in 2015, and we may be seeing that with Melenchon in France right now. On the Right, populists tap into this overwhelming anger and misdirect it against immigrants, the LGBT, etc. Boris Johnson in the U.K., Marine Le Pen in France, Javier Milei in Argentina, the AfD⁵ in Germany, and Trump aren’t appearing because fascism is impending or because democracy is doomed; they are responding to a collapse of the liberal Center, unable to offer any stable standard of living for working-class people anywhere in the world. The Right is able to tap into this anger because the Left has failed to. The way to defeat the Right is to create an alternative for the working class that can offer real explanations and a real way to fight back.

Regardless of what we think about it, the working class attempts to use democratic rights for better conditions and for reforms, but this system is designed to prevent them from fundamentally changing anything. This is a lesson the working class has learned before and is learning today — we want to accelerate class consciousness, not reinforce illusions in the system. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tarred the label “socialist” through their association with the Democrats, playing into the Republican red-baiting, painting people like Kamala Harris as communists. Are we any closer to the Green New Deal or Medicare-for-All than when they first came onto the scene? The working class of this country has won the most important reforms of the last century on the backs of militant unions: the eight-hour workday, Social Security and the right to retire, workplace benefits, and basic workplace-safety laws. But no right or reform is safe as long as capitalism continues to exist.

The Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) brings communist ideas into every union, workplace, school, and campus, using the lessons of history and past movements to put forward the most effective tactics in every struggle. That is the role of Marxist theory and Marxists in the movement. We want to build a revolutionary party that can use the rigged system of democracy under capitalism as one tool at our disposal to win the support of the working class, with the aim of overthrowing capitalism entirely. We want to replace the illusion of democracy with real workers’ democracy — a system where the overwhelming majority really make the decisions and run society.

George Shulman: You sound a lot like I did 40 years ago. I’m going to speak as a political theorist, not as the Marxist I once was.

Democracy has never existed universally. Every regime professing to be a democracy has set up rules, restricting democratic rights to the propertied or aristocrats, men rather than women, and whites rather than people of various colors. In the last 200 years — since Marx — formal democracy has been expanded. That formal expansion is a kind of illusion because there’s substantive, daily inequality that continues, and the freedom of some is conditioned on the exploitation or domination of others. Marx wanted to make formal equality substantive, to establish social relations that were genuinely reciprocal among people who recognized their mutual dependence.

I want to talk about American exceptionalism, which was an idea invented by socialists and Marxists in the 1930s to explain why they were having so much trouble in the U.S.⁶ The entire constitutional system is oriented to protect property, capital, and whites. I’ve learned over the last 40 years that the so-called “working class” is thoroughly racist. The real “working class” in this country is women and people of color, but most Marxism still thinks about the whites who voted for Bernie. The Left has never come to terms with race. American politics is stuck.

In reaction to black, feminist, and queer struggles since the 50s, 45% of the country is now committed to defending racial and gendered hierarchy, some large percentage being working people who don’t have college educations. It’s not misdirected anger; they are invested in racial and gender domination. You can’t explain Trump by a thesis of de-industrialization, austerity, and suffering. Since Nixon, with a few burps on the way to Ronald Reagan, a mass majority have taken blacks and women’s alignment with the state to be at the expense of white men.

Trump does not accept the central premise of a democratic politics: the peaceful transfer of power. If you can’t accept losing an election, then you are in a different political game. Republicans, as bad as they were, maintained the formality of democracy. I imagine myself asking, does the Left really need formal democracy? We’re in what Gramsci called an interregnum,⁷ a period in which old gods are dying and new ones are born. Gramsci thought socialism was the new god, and capitalism was the old one. It’s not clear to me which god is dying. We’re in a Weimar Republic moment. If people don’t vote for Harris, it will be the last election that we have.

I started as someone who would never vote for Hubert Humphrey,⁸ because he was an imperialist and a capitalist. By not voting for Humphrey, I elected Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who did enormous damage to the fabric of society and actual people. The differences between the parties may not seem so great, but in terms of food stamps, healthcare, treatment by police — they matter. Even if it’s formal, the democratic space needs to be kept open so we’re not put in jail. We require that space to be left, or kept, open as a condition of doing our work: creating radical social movements.

Grayson Walker: Marxism isn’t a veil of tears by which all cosmic injustices are rectified.⁹ It’s not about every form of oppression in the abstract; it’s a language that the working class uses to articulate its actually existing class struggle. Democracy is something that the workers’ movement can find expression in and will to wither away. This process that Lenin describes in State and Revolution (1917) involves the reduction of the state to its bare-minimum function so that it may oversee the development of the forces of production as rapidly as possible and safeguard the rule of the proletarian class against the ossified, formalistic procedures of bourgeois democracy that strangle authentic forms of proletarian organization such as the soviets.

This is different from what political pundits usually mean by democracy, referring to little more than the consensus of three-letter agencies, think-tanks, corporate media, and NGOs, who excuse every violation of democratic liberties “in defense of democracy.” To paraphrase Stalin in his last speech, the bourgeois democracies are throwing overboard the democratic liberties that they previously were for, that the working class fought and died for.¹⁰ Democracy is indeed oppressive and hostile to working-class politics — if we mean liberal democracy. The ruling class in America destroys even the formal liberties of the Constitution, which gives us the same breathing room that the professor wisely talks about. We need to preserve this breathing room, but it is being destroyed by the same institutions that are rallying us behind “democracy” against the “fascist threat.”

For Lenin and Marxists historically, democracy has more in common with what we call populism than it does liberal democracy. Marxists are talking not about the proceduralism of bourgeois liberalism, but Mao going to the countryside and rallying the people against these things. The democratic struggle means supporting popular forms of sovereignty that can give expression to the interests of the working class and the masses. In this sense, Marxists are defenders of bourgeois freedoms. This puts them on the side of defending the Constitution, of defending the basic rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, against the security state: the unelected, unaccountable agencies — formed historically to oppose communists — which MAGA calls the deep state.

The “MAGA Communist” meme that Infrared coined was about this specifically. It’s not Right-wing tailism; it recognizes what the professor said: we are waging a different form of struggle. Trump — MAGA — is not playing by the basic rules that have governed democracy previously. But that should be a given for Marxists. MAGA allowed for the articulation of an independent politics outside the Republican–Democratic divide. We can win over and direct this anger and discontent with liberal-democratic forms in a way that is historically progressive. The Bolshevik Party engaged in electoral politics, but they also were outside of it. They recognized that you have to build dual power, soviet power, which they elevated to statehood at the expense of the official democratic forms of the Constituent Assembly.

Many Left-Communists — not to strawman you, Andy, but anarchists especially — deride Marxists for leaving the state alive. For Marxism, the disappearance of the state is not willed by any actor; the state disappears in the sense of overflowing productive forces outstripping the form of the state which relies on the coercive mechanism, or even deliberative mechanisms like democracy. Democracy at its fullest extent is equivalent to the abolition of the state form.

Andy Gittlitz: Feel free to strawman me; I'll try to do my best to strawman myself. Marx defined communism as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”¹¹ The purpose of the organized Left, to which the majority of sects are oblivious, is to recognize and record this movement, providing it with the strategic data to intervene, collaborate, and achieve higher levels of collective power. Representative democracy triumphs with social atomization: it is the limited power of the greatest number, and the fuller power of the greatest limited number.

As a result, the great ideologies soon abandon faith for numbers. Nowadays the American nation is no more than a few thousand war veterans. What Marx and Engels used to call “our party” is today in the wildest dreams of the DSA, PSL,¹² RCA, and ACP: a few million voters and a couple thousand militants. This is the so-called “mass party.” Ideology draws its essence from quantity: Pavlovian conditioning. Madison Avenue got Americans in the 1950s to salivate when they heard the word communism. They say, “the proletariat has a raw deal, but the communists are using black liberation, queer liberation, feminism, environmentalism, wildcat strikes, and the anti-war movement as a front, so we have to stop them.” But then, a wonderful thing happened. Children were born who get no bad vibes when we hear the word “intifada.” We get sexually aroused by the word “revolution.” We get high on socialism, and we puke at the sounds of Harris and Trump.

When we think of mass politics today, we think of demonstrations. I never know what the “issues” are at demonstrations; they’re decided by people who like to go to meetings. All we should want from those meetings are demands that the establishment can never satisfy. What a defeat if they satisfy our demands! Demonstrators are never “reasonable.” We always put our demands forward in such an obnoxious manner that the power structure can never satisfy us and remain the power structure. Then we scream, righteously angry, when our demands are not met. Satisfy our demands and we lose. Deny our demands, and, through struggle, we achieve the love and brotherhood of a community. At the earliest stages of proletarian rupture, goals are irrelevant compared to tactics and actions. People are always asking me, what’s your program? I hand them a Mets scorecard, or I tell them to check the yellow pages. “Our program’s there.” Fuck programs. The goal of revolution is to abolish programs and turn spectators into actors. It’s a do-it-yourself revolution, and we’ll work out the future as we go. Castro said, “The goal of the Cuban revolution is to turn every individual into a legislator.”¹³ Representative democracy is the enemy.

What the Leninists, with their conversion of Marxism into a natural science, fail to understand is that language does not radicalize people. What changes people is the emotional involvement of action, the creation of new situations which previous mental pictures did not explain. The movement is a school, and its teachers are TikTokers, streamers, podcasters, bloggers, ravers, rebellious athletes and pop stars, and the students fighting cops at sit-ins, occupations, and in courtrooms.

Let us take a brief moment to remember the spirit of May 28, 2020: the burning police precinct in Minneapolis — the signal to the U.S. proletariat that the state was vulnerable to attack — and the millions who immediately leapt to loot, burn, and party in the streets. Let’s remember Trump hiding in a bunker, and Democratic politicians and cops alike kneeling in supplication to a mass working-class party. What vanguard party initiated this mass insurrection, the largest in American history since the general strike of slaves that freed themselves at the end of the Civil War?¹⁴ It was not the DSA, PSL, anarchists, or some Discord server posing as a new communist party; it was friends and neighbors of George Floyd, who went to his killer’s workplace and burnt it to the ground.

Previous revolutions aimed at the seizure of state authority, followed by the takeover of the means of production. The youth international revolution will begin the mass breakdown of authority, mass rebellion, total anarchy in every institution in the Western world. Tribes of zoomers, lumpen, armed women, workers, peasants, and students will take over. The CrimethInc dropout myth¹⁵ will infiltrate every structure in America. The revolution will shock itself by discovering that it has friends everywhere, just waiting for the moment. There will be no more jails, courts, or police. The world will become one big commune with free food and housing, everything shared. People will farm in the morning, make music in the afternoon, and fuck wherever and whenever they want to. At community meetings all across the land, Timothée Chalamet’s rendition of Bob Dylan will replace the National Anthem.

Responses

S: It is correct that language does not radicalize people — it’s material conditions that do. If you ask people who identify as socialists or communists what radicalized them, the most common answer is “everything.” It’s wrong to overfetishize spontaneity. A revolutionary movement — when the masses take history into their own hands and go into the streets — will not be called by any party. With Black Lives Matter, we see the problems of a purely spontaneous movement. One of the biggest attacks made on the movement was the looting. The people looting weren’t the movement, but people who took advantage of the chaos. We can’t have a disorganized struggle for power.

The most common result of a revolution is defeat. A revolutionary situation is not going to last forever. A party needs to be built in advance, having earned the trust of the working class in advance, and be able to make a successful revolution out of that. The point of studying theory is that we learn the lessons of history, so that we're not going blindly into future struggles.

GS: Where I diverge has to do with what all of you call “bourgeois democracy.” I would call it rule by men and whites. “Bourgeois” does not capture the nature of the aristocracy, nor of the oligarchy that has ruled the country. Rather than “class struggle,” I'm inclined to say “democratic struggle.” The demand for equality includes addressing issues of economic inequality, but that doesn’t get at the range of hierarchy, injury, and suffering that people experience.

Since World War II, there has been a deep state, a national security state, invested in what I call “counter-subversion.” It names people and practices — queer sex, communists, interracial couples, blacks simply living — and it counters what it calls “subversion” in the name of protecting something like true Americanism or democracy. The Left asks itself if it can inflect, take over, or modify these institutions. There are two answers. One says, “if you get involved, you end up ineffective,” and then you will criticize Ocasio-Cortez for not being the standard-bearer that we had hoped for. The other argument is, build a parallel universe: black, front-line communities, labor unions, churches — alternative institutions to the dominant society. We need to be open to both.

I stopped being a Marxist when I concluded that there’s no such thing as “material conditions,” that “material” is only produced by splitting it off from culture. There is no such thing as a “material condition” without language — no access to reality. We live through our imagination of reality as we make reality. Language is what shapes and directs people. American public opinion radically changed for the first time since the nation’s founding after George Floyd was killed. 70% of whites said there was systematic racism; the usual number is 25–30%. The burning of the police station returned all those numbers to their usual ratio.

AG: That happened first. That was the first moment of the uprising.

GS: I would say it was the end of it.

AG: That makes no sense. It was the first day.¹⁶

GW: Democracy is being treated abstractly. The point is that proletarian dictatorship is different. It doesn’t come at the expense of democratic forms but is a supplement, in the same way that we say bourgeois democracy belies a dictatorship by a definite class. We should support the democratic struggle, but that means fighting on behalf of those forces which are also trying to preserve the basic breathing room afforded by the Constitution for a socialistic substance. In actually-existing socialism today, the People's Republic of China’s party dictatorship does not exist at the expense of the state government; they are parallel structures. But they are different because communist and socialist politics exists as an answer to the inadequacy of bourgeois formalism.

GS: Are you defending the Chinese state?

GW: Yes. The Chinese state represents a form beyond liberal democracy. I would agree that we’re at an interregnum, but the disappearance is of the inadequate, bourgeois, liberal-democratic form, crushed under the weight of dictatorship by finance capital. The goal of socialists is to defend this breathing room while at the same time building dual power, which is why I disagree with Andy’s rejection of the party form.

AG: The party forms that we have on the panel, yeah.

GW: My agreement with the Left communists is that the party form needs to be adapted to the digital age, but not at the expense of the traditional, tried-and-tested means of proletarian organization. The class struggle isn’t something that Marxists dream up. The party is just a name for the advanced guard of the class-conscious proletariat. The party-form should not be viewed as being at the expense of forms of spontaneity; it was only the Bolsheviks that raised soviet democracy to statehood.

GS: And then crushed the Soviets.

GW: No, they did not. It was the reactionaries who stood against the Soviets, for the Constituent Assembly, for the continuation of the war, for the continuation of landless peasantry.

AG: The tried-and-tested Leninist form failed. In 1917 there was the Winter, or February, Revolution — that was spontaneous — and then there was a counterrevolution. Professor Shulman, I agree with almost everything you have to say.

I have to defend the slander that looters weren’t part of the uprising. The same people that burnt down the precinct — the initiator of the nationwide uprising — were also looting the Target across the street. But those resources were pooled outside in the parking lot and distributed freely. That looting became the structure of the mutual-aid network in Minneapolis that still exists today. I saw someone rob a bar and pass out cash from the register. These were not opportunist looters. It’s disturbing that the vanguard of the proletariat doesn’t know what happened in the largest proletarian uprising of our lifetimes.

In its transformation from the International Marxist Tendency to the RCA, the most important part of their program has been lost in the move. Democracy was not created in a single enlightened burst around 1776, just as there was no Big Bang that created the universe. The great IMT theorist Alan Woods understood the thoroughly anti-dialectical misapprehension of a determined universe expanding and contracting based on natural laws.¹⁷ The Big Bang was only one cosmic event among many, whose results, to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping on the French Revolution, are too early to appraise.¹⁸ Proletarian democracy is as ontological as the human metabolic system; reality is created moment to moment, generalized in mass ruptures, whose pretext and context are, contrary to Marx, often by our choosing. So I call on the RCA to continue the noble work of the IMT. I skimmed their newspaper, and I didn’t see anything about the Big Bang lie and the profound significance of this point.

Q&A

What should a Leftist today learn from 1917? What is the relationship of the dictatorship of the proletariat to what Marx would have called “the battle of democracy?”¹⁹

S: I want to argue against what was said about the February Revolution. First, you have a spontaneous revolution that overthrows the Tsar and puts in place a Constituent Assembly: a democratic system immediately dominated by the liberals, defending capitalism, not able to fix the economy, to end World War I, to address any of the peasant’s problems. The October Revolution was not a counterrevolution. The Soviets sprung up organically in the struggle, developed out of general-strike committees. These were institutions of workers’ democracy; I need to argue against both the ACP and the professor on this.

Workers’ democracy was not crushed in Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power. Russia was an isolated country that was highly underdeveloped. The basic condition for socialism is superabundance, but Russia was a country that faced poverty, especially after and during WWI. The way Trotsky describes it is, if there’s not enough to go around, lines begin to form and a policeman is needed to maintain order.²⁰ Stalin represented the bureaucracy as it consolidated itself and became more conscious of its privileges and aims — this was where Soviet democracy was crushed. This is different from the situation today; few countries are as backward as Russia was in 1917.

Can we chalk up the failure of 1917 to the objective backwardness of Russia? Don’t we have to account for the failure of the Revolution to spread around the world?

S: The revolution did spread: two revolutions in Germany, a Hungarian revolution, a mass movement in Italy — later crushed by fascism. It’s not just technology. What is needed is a party, like the Bolsheviks, of revolutionaries, prepared in advance, who have studied the history of past revolutions, who know what to expect to the degree that it’s possible.

GS: Do we want to spend our remaining time talking about the Russian Revolution?

GW: It’s a big deal. If the Bolsheviks were not successful, Marxism would’ve been consigned to some footnote of history. The Bolsheviks incriminated what was previously a matter of ideologists and theoreticians — and a successful social-democratic party, but that could not exhaust the limits of liberal democracy (of the West, actually) in its logos.²¹ What 1917 teaches us is that we are not Mensheviks if we are communists. We cannot restrict the form of democracy to the bourgeois-democratic form. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the party dictatorship — it’s synonymous. It was the proletarian dictatorship of 1917 that elevated the working class’s own spontaneously developed organs of class rule to the level of supreme state power. The Bolshevik Revolution didn’t fail. It’s clear that the spark lit by Lenin in 1917 has continued to animate not only 1.5 billion people in China, but an entirely new historical index that brought the capitalist world to its knees.

GS: I was part of what was called the New Left. The New Left called itself “new” because it rejected how you guys talk. It rejected a certain kind of Marxism with a teleological history and an implicit or avowed authoritarianism, disguised in the name of the people. The New Left wanted to capture the energy of the soviets through the idea of participatory democracy, but without the party form. Listening to you guys talk about Russia, saying its revolution was a success given the gulags that it or China created — honestly, I find it shocking. I realize there’s some need to resurrect this stuff; I’m not sure what the need is. It seems to me that it distracts us from engaging our actual circumstances. Contrary to what you said, Marxism or different Left approaches survived despite the Soviet Union, not because of it. A Marxist party claiming knowledge of reality to instruct the benighted masses in what’s good for them is a catastrophe. The party form, in its Leninist form, is inevitably Stalinist. [GW nods.] You need political forms that are more consistently participatory. That’s why I emphasize the democratic now and not the Marxist.

AG: As a member of the newNew Left, I largely agree. People are not ignorant. They know that Actually Existing Socialism is the totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucracy: a new ruling class, a new deep state. Instead of dwelling on this laughable parody of Leninist, Maoist, and Stalinist sects disguising themselves as proletarians or populist vanguards, we have to realize that we get our understanding of what Marx meant by the dictatorship of the proletariat from the unorganized workers that disguised themselves as students and lumpens to make the greatest contribution to class struggle in 150 years. He was referring to the Paris Commune. If we want to look at Marx and not pretend that Stalin and Lenin were writing as Marx under a pen name, that’s the basis of proletarian democracy and proletarian dictatorship.

You are all small-d democrats —

GW: I’m not a “small-d.” Public record.

AG: I’m a member of the Democratic Party.

Small-d democrats presuppose a certain revolutionary consciousness of the people that are going to exercise power. Does the working class’s exercise of democratic political power necessarily lead to socialism? Why did socialists think that the working class was the revolutionary subject of history?

GS: There isn’t any necessary relationship between people who work and socialism, which Lenin saw. Lenin said, unless there’s a party, people will be stuck; i.e., unless there’s a politics and a narrative, they will be stuck.

AG: The proletariat is the class that seeks to abolish itself in class society. That’s what revolution means. Although I support working-class struggle, the AFL-CIO or a bread-and-butter working-class demand is not in itself revolutionary.

GW: Marx himself talks about the class which is unable to even be a class. It doesn’t have a class interest like the bourgeoisie does, only a general interest in overthrowing the existing state of affairs. But that isn’t something that communists have to dream up for them. The working class articulates that organically — but not always in a revolutionary way. The task of communists is to go down to the people.

AG: Down. You have to go down because you’re up.

GW: We are engaging as students at NYU. We are intellectuals. We have to return to the basic Maoist slogan of “practice, theory, practice.”²² If it doesn’t meet the actual expectations of people, if it doesn’t give form to their grievances, it must be rethought. The rejection of any mediated form of working-class politics is just a rejection of working-class politics. The role for communists is to have a party that represents working-class interests; that’s only defined by being a working-class faction in politics. Yes, that does mean being incriminated in reality.

What have the eight years since 2016 told you about democracy? Also, I was surprised that all of you were critical of the Constitution aside from Grayson.

GS: The Constitution is Janus-faced. It is a minoritarian document; it protects minorities. Having something more democratic in this country would require completely rewriting the Constitution — not the Bill of Rights. The last eight years have been terrifying. The fact that we live in a country with 48% of the population voting for Donald Trump is a scary thing.

GW: Trump is not our guy. At the same time, I don’t see how the Democratic Party is preferable to what Trump represents. The duty of communists is to preserve the integrity of the state form that gives us the right to organize. It means resurrecting the Popular Front. But we have to understand what that strategy meant in the 19 —

GS: How are you going to vote in November? Are you going to vote?

GW: No. Absolutely not. — Popular Front, the Comintern’s policy, meant allying with forces preserving democracy against fascist threat.²³ In the U.S. today, this doesn’t take the form of allying with the Democratic Party —

GS: Even Stalin said that they should ally with the liberals, the Constitutional Democrats, and the Republicans, and you’re not going to do it?

GW: The difference is that the Popular Front in Spain was organic. It was on the basis of democratic forces.

GS: There is a popular democracy in this country. A multiracial democracy has, with great difficulty, emerged at popular levels. The Democratic Party is not a great vehicle, but if it gets crushed now, that’s a big deal. Your popular front — that’s been happening for the last 40 years. It can be crushed by a regime that closes down the spaces that enable that organizing.

GW: The Democratic Party is at war with people’s basic ability to organize, to speak freely. It’s drumming up a war and aggression against China and Russia. It is increasingly the preeminent party of fascism in America. The Republicans are just controlled opposition. Both parties are subservient to a banking class which is speaking through them. We are on the side of bourgeois freedoms.

GS: No, you’re not. I can’t believe I have to defend it — I’ve spent my whole life hating the Democratic Party — but they are the ones who are defending voting rights, they are the ones who are defending abortion —

S: They did a great job with that.

GS: Do I sound deluded? They are not defending it the way I would, but, relatively speaking, they are defending it more. You’re young and absolutist, but all of politics is in the margins. Make a note to yourself — 40 years from now, I want you to look back like I look back on voting for McCarthy rather than Humphrey.²⁴ Make a note to yourself about the historical significance of not voting this November. It will be staggering.

S: You don’t need a fascist dictatorship to get clubbed by riot police. And it’s wrong to characterize Trump as some kind of unique threat. Trump is another figure representing the ruling class, but also a symptom of the failure of the center to offer anything to society. Trump can only exist because he’s able to falsely present himself as anti-establishment.

GS: But meanwhile, what are you going to do?

S: The anger in society is not going away. If something on the Left is not built, the Right will continue to absorb that anger, whether or not Trump wins this election. To simply back the Democrats now is at best postponing Trump, and it is not a guarantee that any rights are protected. Look at what happened with abortion rights under the Democrats: they used this as an election issue for decades, refusing to make a serious attempt to codify it. If we seriously want to defend the marginalized sections of the working class, what is needed is an alternative for the working class to either party.

GS: Between now and November.

S: The question is longer-term than “between now and November.” We are going to keep returning to the debate, every election, until an alternative is built.

Trump is unique. He’s transformed politics. The world around us is being remade through democracy. The Left is going to have little to do with how democracy is remaking the world. This panel was trying to pose how capitalism is recreated through democracy, and what it means that democracy can demand authoritarianism. How should Marxists or intellectuals on the Left critically engage with that phenomenon?

AG: Bonapartist-type figures emerge from this electoral process, and then, once in power, they’re largely checked by the system they claim to be against. I’m not saying that Trump in all his absurdity isn’t lethal; I’m saying that the stupidity of power is deadlier than stupidity in power.

To answer the pressing question about what to do in November, I’m going to vote for the candidate who is in favor of expanding the Supreme Court, locking up the fascists who tried to overthrow democracy in 2020, and labor unions: Joe Biden. I encourage everyone here to do the same. He was unfairly removed in a coup by Kamala Harris and the globalists that she represents.

GS: I’d like to stay, but I have to watch this debate.²⁵ I agree with everything said — it was the democratic will that crushed communists and homosexuals. Democracy can do anything. It doesn’t inherently do things that are universally beneficial. That’s why it’s so scary. That’s why you have constitutions: to make sure it doesn’t fuck itself over or do crazy stuff. I guess the idea is to help people do less crazy stuff.

The red thread here is a concern with the formalization of democracy — bureaucracy, institutions, and elites. But Stalinist bureaucracy, the welfare state, and the two-party system didn’t directly follow the American Revolution. How would you draw the line regarding where democracy soured?

S: U.S. democracy for most of its life was working as intended: as a brutal system of class rule. From the perspective of capitalists today, it went wrong with people like Trump and those like him around the world. Because there’s no way to offer any meaningful change without disrupting the capitalist system; all you can offer is demagoguery. Empty promises end up infinitely more popular than “nothing will fundamentally change.” Whoever wins this election, we will see more attacks on the working class, more crackdowns on protests. Either party will do this because both of them represent the ruling class. We’re going to see more strikes, more class struggles, as life continues to be hard and people try to demand better conditions. The working class, the striking workers, have no party of their own. That needs to be built. When these struggles come, the RCA will be there, supporting the working class, and putting forward Marxist perspectives for the future as well as tactics needed to be successful in these movements.

GW: The way that the American state projected itself as above any partisan nature ended around the Cold War, when communism was accused for the first time, by the President, of being a criminal conspiracy.²⁶ Thereafter you have the administrative state. Formal democracy suddenly gives birth to these agencies: the Department of Homeland Security,²⁷ the FBI, the OSS,²⁸ and then the CIA. Much of the New Left is a CIA product of the Congress of Cultural Freedom.²⁹ The U.S. government was so spooked that the Left had garnered the support of America’s intelligentsia (Langston Hughes, for example) that they decided to bankroll artists like Jackson Pollock — and Adorno and Horkheimer, who had valuable things to say. The government tried to articulate a synthetic Left that could be against the Soviet Union — against Actually Existing Socialism — but wouldn’t pose an actual threat: endless critical theory that diverts the working class away from its own goals.

If we are Marxists, we have to revisit what it means to struggle for socialism in the U.S., which means building an independent working class power, not wedded to the Democrats or Republicans, to build and raise dual power to the level of political authority. Only a communist party has historically been able to do that. We can talk about the failures of 20^th-century socialism, but the fact remains that only those Bolshevik-style parties had any success: the ones that could challenge global capitalism in a world-historical way. It continues to do that. China today — one can simply say they’ve reverted to capitalism, but this is a misguided notion.

S: That’s precisely what happened.

GW: If you don’t want to accept that China is socialist, at least accept that it freaks the hell out of the Wall Street elites in this country. That should show there’s some legacy of Bolshevism that remains relevant to people in the 21^st century.

AG: Bourgeois democracy and bourgeois power is nothing more than bits and pieces of feudal power. The bourgeois revolutionary criticism first eroded aristocratic authority, then trampled it down and smashed it to pieces. But this demolition job was never carried to its logical conclusion, namely, the abolition of class power. Once the weightiness of myth and belief in authority were gone, the only forms of government left were burlesque terror and idiot democracy. When we think about politics in terms of what our groups provide in leading the working class, or having discussions amongst Leftist intellectuals, we’re actually moving farther away from not only politics but power. The CIA doesn’t have to fund a psyop to convince people that communism sucks, because the Soviet Union, China, and Leftist sects are doing that well on their own. When I think about democracy in power, I think about the mutual aid groups I’m a part of. They're not powerful, but people like them, people get fed by them, and they operate together well, because they’re operating for a goal, for a common purpose. The Left groups I’m a part of are disorganized, pie-in-the-sky, and resentful. They don’t like each other. They don’t really like the working class; they think the working class is stupid. Maybe I’m just unlucky and haven’t found the right group yet, but that’s my experience. |P

Transcribed and edited by Benjamin Katz, Clay Mills, and Allen You

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1 Founded in 1992 by Ted Grant as the Committee for a Marxist International. It was renamed to the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) in 2004. In 2024, the IMT re-established itself as the Revolutionary Communist International, the Revolutionary Communists of America being its American section.

2 The Infrared Collective was one of two organizations which jointly founded the American Communist Party (ACP) in 2024, the other being the Midwestern Marx Institute. Infrared was originally established as the YouTube channel of political commentator Haz Al-Din. See Ben B. and Clint M., “‘The epoch of empires’: An interview with Haz Al-Din,” Platypus Review 163 (February 2024), <https://platypus1917.org/2024/02/01/the-epoch-of-empires-an-interview-with-haz-al-din>.

3 Video of the panel is available at <https://youtu.be/bQxb86UTmCo>.

4 See Karl Marx, “The Paris Commune,” in The Civil War in France (1871): “Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.”

5 Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany).

6 “American exceptionalism” was coined by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s, pejoratively referring to American Communist Jay Lovestone’s position that revolution was not imminent in the United States due to a variety of nationally-specific factors.

7 See Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

8 Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic candidate in the 1968 U.S. Presidential election. A vocal proponent of the Vietnam War, his nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was accompanied by popular protests and riots across the city.

9 Grayson Walker’s opening remarks were published in an expanded form as “Marxism and democracy,” Platypus Review 174 (March 2025), <https://platypus1917.org/2025/03/01/marxism-and-democracy/>.

10 Joseph Stalin, “Speech of the 19^th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” (October 14, 1952), in Works, vol. 6 (London: Red Star Press Ltd., 1986), <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1952/10/14.htm>: “Earlier, the bourgeoisie presented themselves as liberal, they were for bourgeois democratic freedom and in that way gained popularity with the people. Now there is not one remaining trace of liberalism.”

11 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Idealism and Materialism,” in The German Ideology (1845–46).

12 The Party for Socialism and Liberation.

13 See Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 126.

14See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The General Strike,” in Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Party Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935).

15 See CrimethInc., “Dropping Out: A Revolutionary Vindication of Refusal, Marginality, and Subculture,” Rolling Thunder 2 (Winter 2006): 12–23, <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-dropping-out>.

16 Protests began on May 26, 2020. The police station was set on fire on May 28. See Gabe Gutierrez, David K. Li, and Dennis Romero, “Minneapolis police precinct burns as protests rage on after death of George Floyd,” CNBC (May 29, 2020), <https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/minneapolis-police-precinct-on-fire-amid-protests-after-george-floyds-death.html>.

17 Woods and Grant co-wrote the book Reason In Revolt: Dialectical Philosophy and Modern Science (1995), arguing that the Big Bang theory was unscientific and contrary to dialectical materialism.

18 This apocryphal quote is typically attributed to Zhou Enlai. When Kissinger asked him in 1971 about the legacy of the 1789 French Revolution and the 1871 Paris Commune, Zhou allegedly mistook him to be referencing the recent May 1968 riots in France.

19 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Proletarians and Communists,” in Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm>: “We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.”

20 Leon Trotsky, “The Soviet Thermidor,” in The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), 121: “The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption. . . . When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order.”

21 [Ancient Greek] Reason, calculation; the word; the inward thought and that by which it is expressed, etc.

22 See Mao Tse-tung, “On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing” (1937), <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm>: “Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level.”

23 The Communist International adopted the Popular Front policy in 1934, calling for the alliance of all democratic forces against the threat of fascism. Between 1928 and 1933, the Comintern had instead maintained its “Third Period” thesis, anticipating imminent world revolution; it treated the non-communist, social-democratic parties as a principal obstacle to that revolution, labeling them “social fascist.”

24 Eugene McCarthy was the popular candidate in the 1968 primary elections for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. Hubert Humphrey was preferred among delegates who were not bound to their states’ popular votes, and ultimately won the nomination.

25 The presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was held on the evening of this panel.

26 President Dwight D. Eisenhower passed the Communist Control Act in 1954, outlawing the Communist Party USA and criminalizing membership. Also notable are Eugene Debs’s 1918 conviction under the Sedition Act for opposing World War I, and the 1919–20 Palmer Raids, which aimed to arrest and deport suspected anarchists, communists, and socialists.

27 The DHS was established in 2002 in response to the 9/11 terror attacks.

28 The Office of Strategic Services was established in 1942 to coordinate U.S. espionage during WWII. It was dissolved in 1945 and superseded by the CIA.

29 An anti-communist cultural organization founded in West Berlin in 1950. It was later revealed that the CIA was a key backer in its founding.