Opinion | Farrukh Abadi
Angela Davis endorsed Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris during a revisionist festival in France earlier this week, stating that there is “no question about who progressive people should vote for”. Her remarks came about two week after the Cheneys endorsed Harris.
When Biden initially selected Harris as his running mate in 2020, Davis had said that it made his campaign “more palatable” and that despite her shortcomings, “it’s a feminist approach to be able to work with those contradictions. And so, in that context, I can say that I’m very excited.” The millions of Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Yemeni women seem to not share Davis’s excitement, as they face the contradiction of destroying imperialism rather than integrating into it.
During her speech at the festival, she claimed: “When Obama was elected, that was a very important victory” because young people were able to elect a Black president, and that “Kamala’s candidacy means something spiritually to Black women.” Though she cautioned against electing “people into office only because of their race or gender”, it seems that the only other qualification is that they have to be a Democrat, as both Obama and Harris have the blood of millions on their hands just like their white and male counterparts.
While simultaneously arguing that Harris will “be the face of capitalism, militarism, and neo-colonialism”, she said that voting for Harris is “about opening space for those of us who are more radical than Kamala Harris to put the pressure for change, especially in the first place when it comes to the genocide in Palestine.”
In the twisted logic of this miserable opportunist, voting for the chief enabler of the US-Israel genocide—no previous administration has given Israel more weapons and money—provides “space” for pressuring an end to the genocide. We have seen this same type of talk coming out of the Democrat-aligned “non-committed” movement, whose leaders ride the mass movement in the hopes of getting into those coveted “spaces” and claim every identitarian imperialist PR campaign as a victory.
The purpose of revisionism—claiming Marxism while peddling bourgeois ideology—and opportunism are to bring the masses and their struggles under the leadership of the imperialists by using the guise of progress. They are trends that arise within the working class and mass movements from those who have something to gain from class collaboration and thus peddle those ideas to the masses as if their bribery benefits everyone. It stems from the delusional thinking that the imperialist class can be reasoned with and “pressured” from the inside, a Utopian notion that reduces imperialism down to the personality of individuals as opposed to the materialist notion of class interest—as Karl Marx put it: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Hence why electoralism is the refuge of opportunists and revisionists while revolution and revolutionary violence are universal in accomplishing political power for the working class, which is fundamental to Marxism.
Davis has a long history distorting Marxism, at the rally claiming that she is “still a communist—with a small ‘c’ rather than a large ‘C’”—a postmodern and individualist conception that one can be a communist simply by holding onto “communist” ideas rather than organized around a Communist Party or toward its reconstitution.
The “communist party” she formerly belonged to is the “Communist” Party USA, a revisionist party that has tailed after the Democratic Party since it was falsely reconstituted in 1945. During this time, she associated herself with the Black Panther Party to push them to the right and involve them in electoral politics and away from organizing and arming the masses to take matters into their own hands. She was the vice presidential candidate for the “C”PUSA and running mate of Gus Hall, a wretched liberal who had previously led the Party to endorse Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. Davis eventually left the Party in 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, diverting from the Party’s opposition to the US-backed coup. She went on to found the reformist democratic socialist group Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism on the basis of anti-communism, an organization that unsurprisingly denounces Palestinian resistance today.
Davis was also one of the main theorists of “abolitionism”, a petty-bourgeois reformist trend that seeks to have capitalism but without its misery.
“Abolitionism” proposes the abolition of prisons and replacing them with so-called community-control practices like restorative justice. This is based on the mistaken premise that prisons are primarily a profitable enterprise rather than a tool of repression to protect private property and the dictatorship of the imperialist class. There cannot be class society without imprisonment, because class antagonism necessitates repression to ensure the domination of one class over others. Hence to focus on the termination of one specific repressive feature of society—whether it be prisons or cops—without raising the question of power is a reformist dead end that inevitably leads to “harm reduction” rather than the end of the root of the harm itself. It derives its name from a false comparison between the abolition of the slavery mode of production, a revolutionary process that required a civil war, versus the abolition of one feature of society, which leads to reformism. Such reformism offers life support to the decomposing dictatorship of the imperialist ruling class.
In opposition to “abolitionism”, Maoism establishes that power is fundamental, and that the strategic aim is the conquest of power by means of revolutionary violence. Just as a civil war was necessary to overturn slavery, revolutionary class war is necessary to overturn wage slavery, and this takes the form of a people’s war.
While many “abolitionists” may argue that they also agree with the need for revolution and that the abolition of prisons is only a step in that process, “abolitionists” will nonetheless typically deny revolution, its path, methods, and its means of defending working class rule. What is important is not only the goal but also the means of accomplishing that goal; otherwise, it leaves the goal as something permanently aspirational, providing only rhetorical cover for the abject reformism engaged in by “abolitionist” leaders like Davis. If the reforms are unable to be connected to revolution, they remain just that.
Some argue that the path and means of revolution are yet to be discovered and will spontaneously arise through the course of struggle. Such a perspective is based on historical ignorance—both as to why the last century of reformist struggles under imperialism have not produced such a path, and on an ignorance or distortion of revolutionary experiences, including of former socialist countries and how it was accomplished.
The task of revolutionaries today is to reconstitute the Communist Party USA as an advanced detachment of the working class to organize and lead its struggles toward the violent overthrow of imperialism and the construction of socialism. The struggle for reforms alone maintains imperialism by quelling rebellion to preserve the system. Only by consciously combining the struggle for reforms with the struggle for power can reforms be in service of the conquest of power, organizing the masses on both tactical and strategic axes.
Comrade Stalin summed up this differentiation between reformism and revolutionism well:
“To a reformist, reforms are everything, while revolutionary work is something incidental, something just to talk about, mere eyewash. That is why, with reformist tactics under the conditions of bourgeois rule, reforms are inevitability transformed into an instrument for strengthening that rule, an instrument for disintegrating the revolution.
“To a revolutionary, on the contrary, the main thing is revolutionary work and not reforms; to him reforms are a by-product of the revolution. That is why, with revolutionary tactics under the conditions of bourgeois rule, reforms are naturally transformed into an instrument for strengthening the revolution, into a strongpoint for the further development of the revolutionary movement.”
