Audio Essay

gutmensch

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Gutmensch–‘good human’ in German. Not to be confused with ‘good German’, a term for those banal enablers of classical Nazism who would later, after the fall of Nazism, suffer from bouts of selective amnesia. Gutmensch, since 1968, at least, has been rebranded as a snarky term of disdain by right wing lexicographers for the global uprisings of that year. The point was to taint left politics as politically correct, bleeding-heart, attitudinal kitsch, supported by do-gooder, hypocrites. I bring it up to reference the Die Linke split and the turn to the so-called ‘social national’ underway everywhere.

‘Open’ vs ‘closed’ borders is a false binary.

Gutmensch as a straw man argument.

6:20

Left and Right.

AFD and the ‘moralizing left’.

Split from Die Linke.

Sarah Wagenecht

Wolfgang Streeck

“The materialist left, not the moralist left.”

8:40

Fortress Europe is being defended by lapsed leftists who use the charge of ‘Gutmensch’ as a cudgel to beat the bourgeoisified left and revolutionary socialists alike.

9:30

Rich people are more likely to act generously toward the poor.?!?

10:20

‘Fairland’ just means lebensraum or heimat.

MARS Motor is engaged.

13:50

Aufstehen–‘Get Up’.

The Red-Brown Alliance from Hell.

15:46

Melanchon On “stealing the bread from French workers” and “no freedom of arrival”.

16:52

A Corrective

Socialist Internationalism and Solidarity.

Our political philosophy is grounded in something quite different from such ideas. Socialist internationalism and the principle of solidarity that informs it is not a bleeding heart moralistic melodrama, it is a pillar of our ethics and a central strategic doctrine, a principle necessary for the success of our struggle that is also first in order of battle.

Socialist internationalism is the inviolable, essential principle that workers within states have more in common with workers in other states than with any national interest. They are linked together in a common struggle that overrides any national interest, especially as articulated by their national elites. This principle is most important in the core of capitalism, where fascism lives. We call it solidarity. It is inseparable from our larger identity, its importance so sacred that its violation is universally recognized as the most important failure of the left that led to World War I, its further debasement a central factor in the beginning of World War II, its importance today a bulwark against the spread of fascism.

This principle of solidarity is inviolable–never to be broken, infringed upon or dishonored.

If socialist internationalism was a religion, we could say to break this would be a heresy; its abridgment that which makes possible our evil doppelgänger in ‘national socialism’, which is where violating that principle leads. In the core countries within which fascism organizes, the abandonment of this principle can only result in the still-birth of the revolutionary movement and the opening of the door to fascism.

Solidarity is non negotiable–it shall not be bought, sold, exchanged or transferred.

Solidarity is fundamental to our revolutionary strategy.

It is a central doctrine.

When even ravers battle fascists on the streets, Michael Hardt is organizing a ship to rescue refugees in the Mediterranean, Portland, Oregon antifascists blockade ICE facilities, another caravan has departed from harsh environs to breach the northern wall and Philadelphia activists have established ‘resistance zones’; while all this is underway, the lapsed leftists of Aufagwegnacht want to debate the ‘social national’ by outflanking the AFD on pensions for workers who have lived in country for 35 years. That’s not a ‘class based proposal’ nor a turn to the ‘social’, that’s a national socialist proposal. To engage with it is to accept it as an argument, rather than an assault.

The principle of solidarity is not only essential, but first.

The Four Loci of Attack upend Marxist categories, but uphold them as well. The workers struggle is essential, but not the only struggle and rather than first, it is third in the order of battle. The other loci must shape the workers struggle, and channel it towards liberation.

This turn to the ‘social national’ is not only a failure of solidarity, but a strategic failure, too. In other words, it is a ‘moral’ failure, but worse, it concedes to neoliberals and fascists alike terrain that if given up fatally compromises the socialist revolution. That’s a strategic failure, not only a moral one, not only a violation of principle, but a departure from good politics. When you violate this principle, you abandon the revolution.

The turn to the social national is a violation of principle and therefore our ethics, our creed and above all strategy. This failure to theorize a way out of this false binary too often results in a conception of ‘the national’ not so much as a terrain of conflict that we contest but as the only terrain to contest anything. From this position comes the obliteration of the first necessary spark of a 21st century international revolution: The borders of the capitalist core.

To argue otherwise is to begin a discourse with fascism within a deranged framework of ‘immigration realism’ which is really nothing other than ‘race realism’ practiced by lapsed leftists. This is the sickening nonsense of the so-called moderate center of American politics that animates practically all discussion of borders: that this or that border is necessary and how to regulate the flow the only ‘issue’. Within this framework anti immigrant activism is ‘xenophobia’, an irrational fear of an other, rather than first and foremost institutional racism; Islamophobia is ‘religious bigotry’ rather than first and foremost an expression of racism leavened with Christian triumphalism imbedded within the very concept of the American nation.

Socialist solidarity is a principle held in perpetuity. What’s that mean? Forever.

END