On this holiday celebrating Martin Luther King, the great revolutionary democrat of the 20th century, I’m reminded that working class empowerment depends on people’s empowerment and people’s empowerment depends on working class empowerment. That strategic, dialectical relationship and lever of progressive and radical change goes unappreciated in too many instances.

Back in the day when I was much younger, I remember reading Lenin for the first time and being struck by the emphasis that he, like King, placed on alliance relationships and coalitions at the national and international level. In his view, such alliances were the gateway to freedom and social liberation for the Russian working class. Many decades later, that dialectical relationship and alliance advocated by King (and Lenin) has lost none of its resonance, as I see it.

According to the AFL-CIO, 42 per cent of its members – overwhelmingly white – voted for Trump. That is fewer than in 2016, but after 4 years of Trumpian anti-working class policies and extremist rhetoric, the obvious question is why such a modest slip in support? And what about other sections of the working class – again overwhelmingly white workers – that supported him in his first campaign? Polls suggest that their support hasn’t declined in any significant way either. Any reliable profile of Trump’s mass/ fascist base has to be arrived at empirically, not derived from what abstract Marxist theory tells us it looks like – the despised petit bourgeoise and middle strata. Marxist theory gives us a point of entry and way of looking at a phenomenon, but not too much more than that.

An addendum: Abstract theorizing gives us a way of looking at the phenomenon, a point of entry. but only that. It has to be followed by concrete and empirical analysis of fascism’s base. To assume that its base includes only the “middle strata’ or people in contradictory class locations or sections of capital is a mistake – a big one in fact.

““If one is not concerned with the steps between the present and the future, one does not deal with politics, radical or otherwise.” Eric Fromm

On the road to freedom, there will always be unexpected allies. A wise movement will welcome them, even if their change of heart is only temporary and tactical. We saw that yesterday when Liz Cheney and 9 other Republicans voted for impeachment.

In their opposition to the impeachment of Trump, more than one House Republican cited this excerpt form Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural address:

“”With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

What they forgot is that Lincoln understood that the prerequisite for that moral invocation was the decisive military defeat of the insurrectionists in the South. And General Sherman with Lincoln’s full support at that same moment was doing exactly that as he and his army marched through the Deep South laying waste to the Confederate Army and Confederacy.