Recently I’ve had two personal experiences – one with my step daughter and the other with my daughter – that challenged me to reconsider my own ways of understanding and speaking that don’t measure up to the new requirements for anti-racist behavior and building an anti-racist world. These experiences remind me that younger generations bring to the plate new eyes, new sensibilities, and new understandings of racism that is on me (and older people) to soberly and self critically consider. I find it easier to do that if I think of myself as a work in progress and not too old a dog to learn anew.

Somber and simple, but beautiful and moving ceremony on the capital grounds today with the President and Vice President elect honoring the 400,000 dead due to Covid. To think that it took this long for the country to collectively mourn our dead speaks to the utter depravity and immorality of Trump and the Republican Party.

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