Revolutionary Roads and Marxism Today

Grusha Gilayeva: Recently Verso published your new book, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads:Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism. It is a follow up to your Marx at the Margins (2010), which dealt with how Marx’s thinking about national self-determination, ethnicity and non-Western societies changed over the course of his life and work. The new book closely examines late Marx’s so called ethnological notebooks including material on the Iroquois tribes in North America, Indian and Russian rural communes, ancient Celtic communities in Ireland, etc. Together these books reveal the complexity of Marx’s thought beyond any form of reductionism. And yet, why should we read Marx today and which Marx?

‍Kevin Anderson: Marx as the greatest and most important critic of capitalism is coming to the fore again since the beginning of the 21st century or at least since  the Great Recession. So this book should probably not be read in isolation [from his other work]. The other discussions, such as the critique of political economy or analysis of the fascist threat from Marxist perspectives need attention too. My book is rather a response to some of the critiques of Marx of the past half century starting around the time of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). In the academy and in intellectual circles more broadly when Marx is brought up, people aren’t going to normally say “well, I like capitalism and so Marx is wrong” or “well, isn’t capitalism working really well? whether we like it or not. Therefore Marx is wrong and outdated.” In [American] universities it is more likely to hear that Marx was a white man of the 19th century who didn’t grasp gender, race or even colonialism, definitely not sexuality in the sense of LGBTQ+ issues or indigenous issues — all those contemporary concerns that motivate a lot of the radical movements. Marx is often judged to be outside those discussions. Then there’s a smaller but growing group that identifies more with Marx but says “we have to look at class and economics instead.” These groups, let’s say Bernie Sanders supporters and the DEI people, argue with each other. I’ve heard people in academia say, “Why is it that these white males always want to talk about class?”

I come out of a tradition of Marxism that already was talking about linking these issues way back, around World War II. It was a small tendency [organized around CLR James, Grace Lee Boggs, and Raya Dunayevskaya], but on the basis of that intellectual foundation, especially that provided by Dunayevskaya, I’ve always looked at Marx as this multi-dimensional thinker. I did serious research on it starting about 25 years ago. In the last decade a bunch of other scholars and I have tried to show that there’s the late Marx where a lot of these issues come to the fore, for example, that he wrote about the Civil war in the United States, where the issues of race and class are discussed. It’s not that we want to prove that Marx wasn’t as bad as we thought and we should just go ahead with our movements as they are now. Of course, Marx always has a very deep critique of capital and class, so

my research is saying that by dealing with Marx we’re forced to look at capitalism, we’re forced to look not just locally but also globally. We have to just look at these large theoretical ways of understanding the world but at the same time it doesn’t exclude being very specific about a particular society, a particular struggle, a particular ethnic or gender or sexual orientation, so we have to somehow combine all that. 

There has been a lot of critical and radical thought that has tended  to exclude capital and class from serious consideration. A few years ago, I was putting together an undergrad interdisciplinary program and I couldn’t find any courses on class at UCSB. I’m in the sociology department, and there wasn’t a regularly taught class on class or even social stratification. And throughout the university there wasn’t a course with the word “class” or even “economic inequality” in the title taught regularly to the undergrads. The same thing is true to some degree in the American Sociological Association’s annual program. I hope that my work and that of other people like Heather Brown, Kohei Seito, August Nimtz, Marcelo Musto, David Smith, and Andrew Hartman (with his new book Karl Marx in America) is beginning to change the conversation. Today, you can’t so easily say the kind of things that Cedric Robinson says against Marx in his [Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical tradition, 1983] book without having at least a footnote that Marx may have been really problematic on some of the issues early on but then in his later writings he may have overcome that.

Grusha Gilayeva: What is the relationship between the different Marxes and the fight against fascism?

Kevin Anderson: There are a lot of left-wing theories of fascism but I think two of the best ones: the theory of colonialism and the tradition that Trotsky started to develop and that you can see also in people like Erich Fromm — although people don’t realise that there’s a connection there. So let’s start with the second one. According to Trotsky and Erich Fromm what differentiates fascism from earlier reactionary movements is that it has a mass base in the lower middle class, the petty bourgeoisie. So fascism has a populist appeal in that sense. Then we as left-wingers have to look at that social base and try to draw it away from fascism towards the left. The theory of racialized colonialism — I think Aime Césaire is among the first ones to have said this — maintains that what Hitler did in Europe was already practiced to a great extent in the colonies. You can look at what King Leopold did in Congo, which would be the most obvious example. The British and French weren’t that far behind in their brutality. The whole racial aspect of the project of colonialism, all that racism and racial antagonism, combined with the modern racialized from of anti-Semitism which had been brewing deep inside Western culture, came to the fore in fascism. These two theories don’t talk to each other very much but they should. They also kind of replicate the broad contemporary debates on the left I’ve mentioned. 

‍Grusha Gilayeva: In your book you also argue that Marx changed his understanding of revolutionary transformation as starting from the periphery rather than the capitalist core. Why do you think he did that?

Kevin Anderson: Of course, there were uprisings against colonialism that go way back, but let’s take a couple of them. Certainly in Marx’s own time in the 1850s there was the Taiping Rebellion in China — that’s not really anti-colonial but still it’s in that region that was a semi-colony. You also had the Chinese fighting back at the time of the two Opium Wars. You had the Sepoy uprising in India in 1857-58. However, with the possible exception of the Taiping Rebellion, these didn’t have a social agenda in terms of greater equality, greater women’s rights, the kinds of things we associate with the left wing, and they were not yet national liberation movements. But by the late 1860s and 1870s [anti-colonial uprisings] took on more of a character that we could consider to be left-wing or progressive. 

Marx had always supported Ireland but by the late 1860s he openly supported the Fenian movement — part of which later became the IRA — and its left-wing nationalism. In those days, Fenians were somewhat distant from the Church and fighting for peasant emancipation as well as a national emancipation. Then you go over into Russia, which in his eyes had been a reactionary country: it acted as the counter-revolutionary force against the Austro-Hungarian uprising in 1848, and Marx saw it as the gendarme of Europe. After the peasant uprisings of the 1850s, the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the concomitant land reform in Russia the Populist movement emerged by the 1870s. It was the Populists [who saw peasantry and not the working class as the agent of the socialist revolution in Russia] who began translating Marx’s work, and it was being widely discussed. At the same time, after the suppression of the Paris commune in 1871, the Western European labor movement was in decline until the Second International was established six years after Marx’s death, in 1889. 

If you look empirically at the revolutionary possibilities in the world from around 1869 to Marx’s death in 1883, besides the Paris Commune that was quickly suppressed in 1871, a huge revolutionary ferment is taking place in Ireland, Russia. and also India. In the cases of Russia and Ireland there is also a left wing element to peasant movements that Marx thinks is very important. 

Grusha Gilayeva: Can we talk about the contemporary context then: is there some kind of method to assess the revolutionary potential or the direction the revolutionary sequence can take? For the late Marx, as you explain clearly in Marx at the Margins, it could not easily begin in England, despite the fact that it was the center of 19th century capitalism and had the biggest working class. 

‍Kevin Anderson: This is the trickiest part for me and I didn’t fully develop this in the new late Marx book itself. Marx says in several contexts that the English workers have the largest trade unions; they are by far the largest industrial working class in the world, as no other country could even come close to the level of industrialization Britain has in the 1860-70s. Thus, this is where the revolution has to take place if it’s really going to overthrow capitalism. At the same time, he says that the English workers have various things that hold them back. One is the prejudice against the Irish workers inside Britain which is, in his words, almost as severe as the racial hatred the poor whites in the Southern states of North America have towards the formerly enslaved Blacks, something that divides the working class. Therefore, the English workers have to be stimulated from outside by supporting the uprising in Ireland. Then in the late 1870s, early 1880s Marx begins to think that the European revolution may start in Russia and spread into Germany and Austria-Hungary, and then the French with their revolutionary tradition are going to step in somehow. In this way, the pressure but also the inspiration from outside is going to do it. But some people interpret this [turn in Marx’s thought] in a quasi Maoist sense — the English workers are racist and reactionary and everything is going to have to happen from outside. But I think he wouldn’t be spilling all this ink about the English workers if he didn’t think there was a revolutionary potential. And after all, Marx is involved with the English workers. They have revolutionary possibilities, but the revolution is more complicated and is bound to happen internationally.

How do we know this almost for sure? Because while in 1869-1870 Marx writes about how distorted the consciousness of the English workers is, only about six years before that he’s praising the English working class and their consciousness to the sky. Why? Because during the Сivil War in the United States the English workers didn’t support the English intervention in the South to split it off from the USA and to get the cotton flowing black to England. The workers opposed  intervention on the side of the South even at the cost of losing their jobs, as the US Civil War threw the textile factories into a huge industrial crisis as they couldn’t get the cotton. Thus,  he couldn’t have in six or seven years just decided that now English workers were utterly  reactionary. Thus, the point is not that late Marx stops thinking about the socialist potential of the working classes in places like England, France, and the United States but that he complicates [his understanding of the revolutionary process] in terms of what the difficulties arising in the way of developing that revolutionary consciousness as well as motivation and program of victory. He also sees different revolutionary possibilities around the world more widely than he ever had before.

Grusha Gilayeva: As we talk about these complicated contradictions I would like to bring up the concern with the role of Russia in contemporary capitalism because as you’re saying somehow Marx was attentive to what was going on in Russia. It wasn’t industrialized, it was quite reactionary and he saw it as a form of imperialist power. Thirty five years after Marx’s death the Russian empire collapsed under its own contradictions exacerbated by interimperialist WWI and was replaced by the Soviet Union, which served as a center of attraction for socialist and communist movements in the Third World along and in competition with China following Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s. Putin’s Russia which emerged from Yeltsin’s mutilated market democracy is still seen on the left as some sort of progressive anti-imperialist force. What is your take on Russia’s role in contemporary capitalism and politics in light of its full scale invasion of Ukraine?

‍Kevin Anderson: I think one of the things we have with

Putinism, the ideology of the present regime in Russia, is this odd mixture of the old slavophile nationalism of the 19th century and Neo-Stalinism.

You could say that today both Stalin and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the greatest enemy of the Soviet Union, are great heroes of the present-day Russian state. Is Russia an imperialist power? Yes. Its power is mainly regional, so it’s not like in the 1950s when the Soviet Union was a huge power both militarily, politically and economically. It was also an attractive model to some people. I don’t think any of that exists today. But even though China is the second economic power in the world, Russia is the second military power. Even though its technology is a bit old, Russia still has all those nuclear warheads and the capacity to deliver them. 

But there is another important thing that you are hinting at in your question and this would apply to the entire BRICS group. Even though these countries are a counterweight to US hegemony, what does that mean? Their policies are generally neoliberal. What would that mean for a country in Africa, for example? Instead of having the French foreign legion they’re going to have the Wagner group. Isn’t that a great improvement? This is not Che Guevara, not even Mao’s Cultural Revolution which, as horrible as it was, at least claimed to be changing human relations in some kind of radical way. No, it’s like we want a bigger piece of the pie, but we want the pie to be exactly the same flavor and frosting and everything. Of course it’s the weakness of the left that leads it into this kind of thinking. 

It makes us unhappy to see the US helping Israel to just pummel Iran and nothing seems to be able to counter it. There’s a yearning for somebody to challenge the United States and its allies. People who’re upset with US imperialism see Putin going into Ukraine and China flexing its economic muscles and not getting into US tariffs. There’s a reason that people would say, “That’s good, at least they can’t do everything they want,” but there’s no positive program in that. 

That goes back to why Marx was so excited about Russia by the 1870s. Of course, he saw the intellectuals being in touch with the revolutionary movements that were forming, translating  Capital and debating it, but his interest in the village commune or mir does not mean that he thought the peasant uprising would be simply added onto a socialist movement in the West in order to weaken the system a little bit. What he saw in the peasant commune was an actual communist project in potential. Now he’s very careful to indicate that he doesn’t think the Russian communal village could be defended and developed solely on its own basis by kicking out foreign and capitalist influences. He says pretty clearly that it’s in alliance with the revolutionary labor movement of the West, and with modern technology…

‍Grusha Gilayeva: You name indigenous communitarian societies along with peasant communes among potential revolutionary subjects late Marx investigated. What does that mean for the revolutionary strategy on the left today? Given that in Russia, for example, the number of indigenous people has been steadily declining?

Kevin Anderson: Well, everywhere. I mean there are exceptions like Bolivia which has I think an Indigenous majority which might speak languages other than Spanish as their first language. To be precise, it is The rural populations that I am talking about, because the Russian village was not [what we mean today by] an indigenous community.Various forms of pre-modern communism that persist in different ways is something that’s so interesting. When people move into the cities from rural areas they carry with them different sensibilities. If you look at Turkey, Erdogan’s power is often explained by his reliance on the recently urbanized rural population which is seen as endorsing political Islam, bans on alcohol,  and covering women’s hair. If that’s true, there’s that side of rural and even some Indigenous populations, but there’s also the other side — a greater sense of collective identity and social solidarity as opposed to bourgeois individualism. These newly proletarianized populations bring with them their own forms of cooperation and solidarity. 

It’s also related to an old argument even within the Western proletariat — who is the most revolutionary worker in a place like Chicago? Are these the skilled German-American workers like the Reuther brothers — and especially those further to the left of them — who were second or third generation industrial workers: they were skilled, they’d been in trade union movements, they’d read socialist literature. Okay, there is something to that — the “advanced” workers as they would call it in the socialist lexicon. On the other hand, what about people like my former comrade Charles Denby, author of Indignant Heart, a Black Worker’s Journal? He arrived in Detroit in 1943 in the middle of the war; he doesn’t even know what the word “strike” is. But there’s a lot of Black workers coming up from the South and they’re really angry because  they think they’ll be free in the North and they’re shocked when it turns out they’re not free. So Denby starts a strike by saying that the workers need to all quit their jobs at the same time because there’s plenty of work down the street and they force management to agree to their terms. Which workers are the more revolutionary ones? In this situation, new Black workers. But I think we need both. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if we didn’t think keeping a lot of these discussions and traditions is important for social movements because neither of us are pure scholars, not related to activism. At the same time, I think

we have to recognize that some of the most revolutionary struggles come from people that don’t even have the socialist vocabulary.

Grusha Gilayeva: I’m just wondering whether we can extract some kind of method or criteria from the trajectory of Marx’s thought as you delineated. When it comes to thinking about subjects and allies in the struggle for revolutionary change. Lenin used Marx’s letter to Meyer and Vogt to make a claim that the proletariat of an oppressor nation had to support the struggle of the oppressed nation for self-determination. Do you think we need to go back to Marx in order to legitimize such claims and or do you think Marx is useful to find a method to make such distinctions?

Kevin Anderson: I mean Marx is not an authority figure anymore, probably not anywhere, though maybe more respected  in a few large countries like Brazil or India, and of course a few smaller ones. There’s still a lot of intellectuals and social movements who are Marxists there. I’m  leaving aside China where Marxism is more about careerism rather than real adherence to Marxist thought. Lenin may have been the first to  point to the term “national liberation movements.” Is it a nationalist movement? It’s anti-imperialist, but is it liberatory? Is it reactionary? Or is it the combination? Marx and Engels already in the Communist Manifesto use the phrase which supposedly opposes all nationalism: “the working men have no country.” And yet in the Manifesto’s concluding pages they also  insist that the working class needs to support Poland and its quest for independence as a nation. Marx doesn’t say it, but I think in my book A Political Sociology of Twenty-First Century Revolutions, gender is often used like a very good litmus test. It’s one of the ways of distinguishing the more fundamentalist movements like the Iranian Ayatollah’s or the Muslim Brotherhood, which are anti-imperialist and support the Palestinians, but because of gender, among other things their socio-political content is conservative at best. And then we have explicitly left-wing movements which are really easy for the global left to support, like Rojava in Syria. But when gigantic uprisings like the Arab Spring happened, they were not explicitly left-wing but they certainly weren’t fundamentalist or Islamist. These young people and even the ones that came from the Islamist groups weren’t as in Iran in 1978. “Islam is the solution” wasn’t the chant on the streets in Tunisia or Egypt in 2011. When we look at various anti-imperialist movements we can often use gender — as well as class, of course — to help us make an assessment.

Grusha Gilayeva: In Political Sociology you also make a point about the connection between the struggle of the Palestinian people against Israel and the struggle of the Ukrainian people against the Russian aggression. How is it possible to make this connection? It seems to run counter to the mainstream position of the US left. While there is consensus that Palestine should be supported, when it comes to Ukraine, the view is totally different. 

Kevin Anderson: Well, just empirically, we can talk about severe repression in places like Myanmar/Burma right now, where the uprising is being violently attacked militarily. But even there, the military is not saying we’re going to get rid of the Burmese people. Whereas both the Israelis and the US under Trump on the one hand, and the Russians and the Belarusians on the other hand, are denying the whole peoples their right to existence. Russia says: “Ukraine doesn’t even really exist as a country. It never existed. Ukrainian is just a dialect of Russian. And those that do think they exist are all fascist and Nazis anyway. And for that reason, they need to be wiped out.” And Trump and the Israelis are increasingly saying that they may expel all the Palestinians, not only from Gaza, but also the West Bank, drive them nobody seems to know where, but drive them out, if not worse. So it’s understandable that our left would be concerned with Palestine because we fund and militarily advise and support through our government and all our institutions the war in Gaza. It’s also understandable that in the mainstream corporate media Ukrainians would be the heroes for geopolitical reasons. But these struggles are very similar. 

I’ve seen the small left among the Ukrainian community. And there’s a small left in the Russian exile community.

I see these leftwing Ukrainian groups making resolutions about Palestine, but I don’t see the pro-Palestinian groups in the West  making resolutions and showing support to Ukraine. Quite the contrary, I see them saying nothing.

That’s very unfortunate. But that’s the battle that has to be conducted if we look more globally. After the infamous meeting at the White House between Zelensky and Trump the rug has been yanked out from under Ukraine by the US. Without that support from outside, we might see a substantial part of Ukraine’s territory slowly taken. I don’t think they can be conquered, but they can be partitioned. 

And it’s really horrible because the lack of support drives the Ukrainians and pro-Ukrainians away from the left. The more someone like Zelensky says “we support Israel because their project in fighting terrorism and violence is the same as ours,” the harder it is for the left to support Ukraine. Certainly the Trumpists seem to have no trouble seeing the similarity between Ukraine and Palestine since they want to crush both of these. I wasn’t exaggerating in the book when I said that these are fights for the very existence of these nations. And we see Trump on the wrong side of both. Maybe that’ll wake people up a little bit. 

I think it’s a sign of the reactionary nature of the times that even the left can’t do more. I can remember the times of 1968 in Czechoslovakia or 1980 in Poland, and  how larger portions of the global left were supporting Poland and Czechoslovakia than are supporting Ukraine today. The left itself was much larger then. And of course, when the left is larger, that means it has more of a social base. You have a group of just a few thousand people tied strongly to a particular set of politics, you can implicitly or explicitly support regimes like Assad’s Syria or even North Korea and you won’t lose that many. But if you have a base in the working class or another large social force, they’re going to quit your party as happened with the French Communist Party after 1956 and 1968.

‍Grusha Gilayeva: Do you think that there is a tendency on the left to equate the state with the people? Many on the left see that Vladimir Putin somehow represents the Russian people regardless of all the rigged elections that he staged. Zelensky also embodies the will of Ukrainian people and Hamas, quite curiously, also embodies the will of the Palestinian people. But this tendency does not apply to the US where nobody denies that the divide between the part of the people and the government could not have been broader. 

‍Kevin Anderson: This way of thinking goes back at least to Stalinism. The Stalinists very clearly said that certain peoples are almost permanently revolutionary and certain are reactionary. For example, the Chechens were considered to be reactionary, and therefore they were deported towards Kazakhstan. There’s a speech by Stalin in the early 1930s where he says the Russian, not the Soviet people are the most revolutionary. And of course, if we are revolutionary, then if we go into Ukraine, we must be doing good stuff. So there’s this tendency to marginalize, and I think the further we get from the so-called Western center, the easier it becomes in the eyes of the dominant global cultures to do so. It’s hard for people, because of Orientalism and so forth, to see the Palestinian people as differentiated. I work a lot on Iran and it’s very hard for people [in the US] to see the Iranian population as differentiated in that sense. 

This is a big problem, and of course, this is where class becomes really important. All societies that I know of in the world today have ruling classes. As far as we can tell, China may have the greatest economic inequality of any of the really powerful nations. They’ve got many actual billionaires too, while the overall population is much poorer than in the Western countries. So the economic divide in China is actually greater than in France or the United States. We also know from the Gini index that South Africa is number one in economic inequality. Even in the 1960s we didn’t hear much about class in connection with anti-imperialist movements. And Ukraine is not even opposed to the imperialism of the EU and North America, while Putin claims he is. There’s one additional reason this is unfortunate because— if we could ever get larger than we are — as a left, it would be very hard to go around saying that we support democratic socialism but can’t say anything about what Putin is doing in Ukraine, or that you can’t criticize the Iranian regime because it’s the wrong time to do so when they’re under fire from Israel and the US. This is related to what kind of society we would  like to have. One  reason why when I was young we supported Czechoslovakia was because we said that we opposed the official USSR socialism. If you don’t do that kind of thing you really have a murky intellectual and political project that you’re putting forth in the end.

One last thing: In the US we’re part of this giant imperialist apparatus; our government was for decades constantly judging other countries— with Trumpism it’s become more cynical though — saying they’re undemocratic and so on. In response, the left too feels that we therefore have no right to criticize China or other states as if doing so is unsocialist or unmarxist. But should our analysis of class, gender, or race/ethnicity stop beyond the borders of the US, the EU and Japan? Or are we allowed to apply it in places like China or Russia or the Middle East? Of course we are.

Otherwise, here will always be left-wing or progressive forces that we don’t hear. Instead we need to support them in every single country in the world. Doing otherwise would amount to r breaking with Marx and the best of the Marxist tradition. 

Grusha Gilayeva: I’m glad that you’ve mentioned Iran because the position towards what’s going on right now is something that is very difficult to work out. On the one hand, you have some sort of a reductionist anti-imperialism that would say that doing anything to Iran’s regime is supporting the US presence in the Middle East. Then there is another reductionist position which is shared by a part of Iranian emigres who’d support any sort of intervention and regime overthrow in Iran, be it the obliteration of the whole country itself. There seems to be two opposites and both of them don’t seem to be quite right.

Kevin Anderson: Of course. I can’t think of any other country in the Middle East that has had more popular uprisings over the past century starting with the constitutional revolution of 1906 up through the period of Mosaddegh in the 1950s, the elected though militantly nationalist government, the great revolution of the 1978-79, and then several very large social movements including the  Green Movement  in 2009 and the the 2022 women’s and Kurdish-Baluchi  uprising. We have to think about the complexity and different forces in these movements in Iran. But I don't think the Iranian population is going to react positively to getting bombed. Netanyahu gave a speech where he praised the 2022 “woman, life, freedom” movement and then pointed to the fact that the Israeli air force has women pilots and one of them was bombing Iran right then. I think he actually saw this as an attempt to appeal to the Iranian population. We know the left in Iran is smaller than it once was.

There are also labor movements in Iran of course, and as I mentioned, important women’s and ethnic movements. 

Grusha Gilayeva: You already mentioned recent protests against Trump amidst his military parade on June 14. How do you evaluate these protests? Do they signal the urge to go back to some liberal status quo or do you think there is a potential for connecting this movement to other struggles also beyond U.S. borders?

Kevin Anderson: Of course, there’s that potential because the leadership of the Democratic party has just really discredited itself first over Palestine and now you can see there are a lot of them being silent over the U.S. intervention in Iran. If you look at the anti-Trump movement of 2017 — I went to the big Women’s March rally in Los Angeles and the mayor, senators they were all up there, they were all speaking. [This time] in California there weren’t any major politicians that associated themselves with the demonstrations. In some states that happened, but here Democratic politicians kept their distance. But it’s not just the march but people on the streets fighting to support immigrants. Having the troops here in Los Angeles is just such a provocation and there’s a certain element of the population that is out there picketing every day because we don’t want those troops here. 

Of course, the protests face the problem of large institutions with the Democratic Party holding it back. So what are the institutional or social bases for opposition? The universities? Harvard finally started to resist but there’s been so much capitulation by universities especially on the Palestine question. Why can’t the universities say something about Palestine? Because state universities in California need support from the legislature, if they speak out on Palestine the state is going to cut their budget and the universities know that. So what are the two largest organizations that don’t get funding from financiers on Wall Street, that don’t get funding from liberal foundations, that don’t get funding from the government? The trade unions and the churches. The Black church and the other progressive churches, even to some degree the Catholic Church under the last two popes, have been vocal on immigrant rights and labor rights. When you think of the way Trump’s administration fired all those federal government workers — this is what every worker fears. And Elon Musk is for them the worst nightmare of an employer. We have the youth and the Latino communities big time on the street but I’m talking about those two because these are well organized, well funded groups with their branches in all the states.

There’s a lot of hope. Especially  after the May Day marches I started to realize there’s going to be a lot more pushback. I’m at the University of California and I’m just assuming even worse things can happen to the University of California than what’s been done to Harvard. I just think they’re waiting to do it so it’s going to be really horrible the next few years. We should also look at rural America, which has been a big base of Trump supporters at least electorally, but notes that it’s seldom more than 60%. Those opposed to Trumpist fascism can feel isolated. But one thing that happened on June 14th was that protests happened in these kinds of areas. For instance, in the tiny rural town of Glens Falls, New York there was a fairly large demonstration. Anti-Trump people in those areas where all they see are the Trump posters and stickers now realize they are not so few. People face a lot of repression — look at what happened to California Senator Alex Padilla who was dragged out of the news conference and handcuffed…. That scares people. But think of all the people in a small town where most employers are Republican and they tend to like Trump: so you go to that rally in a small town, you’re exposing yourself and even if you wear a mask they’ll still figure out who you are if it’s a town of 15,000 people. People are going to face that on the job, getting fired, especially young people. We’ve been through some of this before, but never at this scale.

The current situation with Iran is creating a lot of difficulties for us because it’s sucking part of the Democratic party into supporting Israel even more  and, at the same time,  giving fuel to the more campist parts of the left. On the other side, there’s a broad swathe of the population including Trump’s base who oppose a third war in the Middle East. How can one say that the United States should get involved and this time it’s going to go different? I heard a military expert on NPR this morning saying that to get to the facilities underground you have to actually send in commandos and that they may have to be U.S. commandos. I think we don’t yet live under a fascist regime but I would consider Trumpism to be a fascist movement, albeit one that  hasn’t taken over the society completely. It’s moving quickly though, the opposition is also coming out in the streets. Not doing anything is not an option so whether we have a real chance of success or not we have to still do it. 

Kevin B. Anderson grew up in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area and attended Trinity College, Hartford, during which time he became active in the social justice movements of the late 1960s, including Students for a Democratic Society, Hartford’s Other Voice, and the Black Panther Defense Committee. In the 1970s, he became a Marxist-Humanist and a scholar-activist, driving a taxi for five years in New York, where he was active in the Taxi Rank & File Coalition. He received a PhD in Sociology from City University of New York Graduate Center in 1983. He lived in the Chicago area for 25 years, during which time he taught at Northern Illinois and Purdue Universities and served as Literary Agent for the Estate of Raya Dunayevskaya. Since 2009, he has been teaching in the Sociology Department at University of California, Santa Barbara, he has also been active in social justice movements in the Los Angeles area, where he works with the International Marxist-Humanist Organization. His authored books include most recently The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: On Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso 2025). He is also the author of Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (University of Illinois Press, 1995), and a two collections of essays, Dialectics of Revolution (Daraja Press, 2020) and A Political Sociology of Twenty-First Century Revolutions and Resistances: From the Arab World and Iran to Ukraine, Africa, and France (Routledge 2024). He writes regularly for New Politics, The International Marxist-Humanist, LA Progressive, and Jacobin on Marxism and on international politics and radical movements in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

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