What to Do About Bad Times

20 January 2025

The second Trump inauguration is a grim day in US history, signifying the political triumph of the reactionary elements of the ruling class, and the triumph of the alliance between reactionary capitalists and clergy. “Culture war” issues, such as the treatment of transgender people, have been given answers by this reactionary clique: transgender women are to be abused in women’s prisons, and the reality of their gender identity is to be denied. So weak is patriarchy, and so disconnected is it from reality, that its definition of gender must be codified into law and enforced at gunpoint. Economic issues which might threaten profitability and private property, such as Trump’s original plan to impose tariffs on the US’s major trading partners, have been sidelined, for now. It seems that this clique’s most immediate concern is to create a conformist political culture, and to wield the state against what it identifies as “the left”.

The situation is made more dire by the utter lack of a muscular opposition to this reactionary clique. The Democrats have not signaled any substantive opposition to reactionary policy-making. Indeed, Democrats over the last four years have made common cause with the far-right Republican party wherever they could, and allowed the reactionaries to define the policy agenda. Under Biden, there were no fights for popular policies such as Medicare for All, even though they may have been doomed by the makeup of Congress. There were muted attempts to pass pro-worker legislation, such as the PRO Act, which died when they reached the Senate. Instead, the Democrats’ signature policies include the mass murder of Ukrainian and Russian men in a war which the US federal government has sponsored, and an attempt to give the Republicans everything they wanted on immigration. The Democrats, a national coalition of disparate state parties, lack a coherent political vision and lack a coherent political platform. This is not surprising, given that the Democrats are, at the end of the day, the oldest bourgeois party in US politics.

We should not expect anything good from this government. As the reactionaries attempt to shape society in their image, we should expect innumerable attacks on our civil liberties and our ability to organize for socialism above-ground. We should be cautious and a little paranoid.

But we should also stand up for each other, we should admonish sectarianism and see our fellow socialists as comrades within a growing socialist movement. We need to continue organizing and developing coalitions of socialist political solidarity. We need to collectively oppose the imperialist interventions into Latin America that the new reactionary political consensus is promoting.

We need to continue autonomous socialist efforts to educate the masses and ourselves about the issues which have bearing on our everyday lives. We should ensure that bourgeois sycophants who ordain poverty and working class immiseration as the facts of life are answered by socialists with a positive alternative vision. We should hold ourselves to collective and individual account, and ensure that we ourselves are the best comrades that we can be.

We have to stand up for socialist values, the value of egalitarianism, but also of free expression, which socialism in its brightest moments, especially in North America, has upheld. We have to stand up for the values of collective and individual autonomy, the self-given right of society to question itself and its institutions, and the collectively-secured right of individuals to be themselves, to follow their own passions, and to participate in society’s critical self-questioning and self-institution.

To quote Cornelius Castoriadis, “[a]utonomy is not merely a project; it is an effective possibility for human beings. It is not for us to foresee or decree its advent or its disappearance; it is for us to work toward it. We’re living in bad times, that’s all.”