Capitalism, Crisis, and the 2024 Election

This is the second-ever presidential election as conscious adults for many young folks. I remember during my first, in 2020, I was freshly 18 and brimming with an almost egoistic confidence in my decision to abstain from voting. I did not have faith in either the Democratic Party or their nominee, Joe Biden, to represent me.

Four years later, my view of the Democratic Party has only worsened, especially as Palestinian blood continues to spill by their hands. And yet, at the same time, the threat of fascism from the Republican Party is becoming ever more real. The far-right has intensified its attacks on the bodily autonomy of women, the LGTBQ community, and on the rotting carcass that is American Democracy. Now that I am 22, and in stark contrast to my past self, this election leaves me writhing in a pool of self-doubt. The same question repeats over and over in my head: Can I really sit this one out?

It is within this tension that I found myself sitting down with three next-system thinkers about the upcoming election. These activists and scholars have dedicated their lives to challenging systemic poverty and economic injustice through decades of combined experience in grassroots organizing in the United States. Our discussion touched not only on the significance of the 2024 election but the increasingly acute political crisis in the United States and the current prospects for system change.

We're living globally in a period of a profound economic crisis and environmental catastrophe.

What I learned, in some ways, reflected my own ambivalence. They too were divided on the question that Bill Fletcher described in our interview as "the politics of moral outrage versus the politics of power." As Cheri Honkala shared with me, it is important that Americans vote their conscience in the face of a genocide carried out in Palestine by the Democratic Party. However, Stephanie Luce offered an opposing perspective, urging the left to "get realistic about our power" in the context of an increasingly emboldened, fascistic right wing. Ultimately, what these contrasting tendencies represent is an ongoing historical debate between two different philosophies for the American left.

These interviews have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: There seems to be a general sense that, regardless of who wins the 2024 presidential election, the system as a whole—the social, ecological, economic, and political system of which we are all a part—has some very serious issues. What systemic problems do you see today and how serious are they?

Cheri Honkola: Our capitalist system has created a situation where people just can't live… People have absolutely no rights to land, no rights to free speech, and no rights to live anywhere. And there's a serious increasing criminalization just of being poor and just of being homeless in this country. People just can't live right now, so people are being forced to set up co-ops and a cooperative economy and all of those kinds of things. And the approach, I think, for folks that are on the absolute bottom, it's a little different. There's a growing equality of misery; we're very clear that there's going to be no utopia under capitalism.

Bill Fletcher Jr.: We're living globally in a period of a profound economic crisis and environmental catastrophe, and this convergence runs us into the equivalent of two tectonic plates that are crashing against one another. And in that situation, you have mountains that are built, and you have earthquakes, and we're seeing both, and so this is creating great instability and anxiety.

In the United States, in part as a reflection of that, we're living through a cold Civil War. And this cold Civil War really became very evident with Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America, there were clear signs of counterattack against the victories that had been won in the 20th century. Now since then, key elements in the Republican establishment have made use of mass movements on the right that have been developing since the late 60s and have thought that they could manipulate them, but instead, what they've done is follow the course of Dr. Frankenstein in creating a monster that they can't control, and that's why the MAGA movement smacked out of the way the opponents to former U.S. President Donald Trump both in 2016 and this year. So, it's a very dangerous situation, and the danger's compounded by an armed wing of the right-wing authoritarian movement, plus the recklessness of very wealthy men, so it creates a very unstable situation.

If we go down a path of authoritarian rule, I don't see any hope for addressing a more functioning economy or a more sustainable climate situation that's going to protect the most impacted.

Stephanie Luce: Well, I think it's multidimensional. The crises are from a number of angles. Some of the most pressing issues are certainly related to climate. There is really no way of turning back, so our choices are to slow down the worst of it and mitigate the worst impacts. But in any case, it seems, we're already in it, and a lot of people are already experiencing a climate crisis, and then certainly, there are growing threats to democracy around the world, of people even electing authoritarian leaders and losing faith in democracy. And I would say the U.S. certainly has never had a real democracy even to begin with. So, it's not like I'm romanticizing what came before, but it is possible that even that can go backwards, instead of forwards, in terms of creating a real multiracial democracy. And then how we think about the economy, there are a lot of measures that would suggest things are relatively stable right now, but underneath it is certainly not a sustainable system, it's an economy that's producing for profit instead of human need and producing for growth instead of sustainability. So, I would say those are the underlying crises that will be there no matter what the outcome of the election is.

Q: Given what you just shared, what kinds of changes to the system do you see as absolutely necessary? And what changes do you think are opening up that you are really excited about?

Cheri: One of the things I see is that this growing equality of misery is a different form of unity that is developing. The ruling class has really figured out how to keep us divided in regard to gender, race, and all of these other kinds of things. And I think that the positive side of the negative is that it's forcing us to figure out how to work together to create something very different in order to stay alive.

One of the closest people I work with is an African American male who was formerly homeless and incarcerated, served some time in the military, has seven kids, and is married. There's no way we would have been working together for 30 years just because he's a nice guy. We have nothing in common. But we've had to figure out ways to work together. People need each other desperately in order to stay alive.

For us, it's really about organizing. To literally take back land, organize to take back food, working together to demand the other half of the operation for a kid's mouth, and that's why we've just recently written this book Takeover. It's a little bit of our history, but it's also a manual on teaching homeless people across this country how to house themselves in abandoned government homes that are vacant because there are more abandoned properties than there are homeless people. And I think that the other positive thing is that there's so much surplus right now that it really is a question of redistribution and getting organized to take back our human rights.

We have to create a block that's capable of winning and introducing substantive, structural changes.

Bill: Well, the system itself is a rock, so I start there. Capitalism is antithetical to the future of humanity. Now, on top of that, the U.S. sociopolitical system that's based on or built upon, capitalism is itself rigged against people of color, women, against working-class people. And one of the things about the way it's rigged, particularly when it comes to people of color, is that when we try to play by the rules, the rules get changed. We see this in elections by different things that the Republicans have been doing in terms of voter suppression. You see this in the economy and business. The demand needs to be for consistent democracy, an expansion of democracy into all spheres, not a retraction or a retrenchment, and so we need to make it easier for people to vote, not more difficult. We need to make it easier for workers to form unions, not more difficult. We need to make it easier for women to control their own bodies, not more difficult. We need to make it easier for LGBTQ folks to live their lives in harmony and not more difficult. We need to be addressing the fact that the planet is burning rather than ignoring it. Those are the kinds of things that we need to be doing, and those are the changes that need to be introduced and that we need to demand of our political leaders.

Stephanie: Well for me, in a sense, the building of a multiracial democracy is an outcome and a way to address the other two. I don't see how if we go down a path of authoritarian rule, I don't see any hope for addressing a more functioning economy or a more sustainable climate situation that's going to protect the most impacted. So I guess for me, some of my effort has been focusing on deepening and expanding and making democracy real, because I feel like that's one of our only hopes for addressing those other serious crises.

I think it's a strange moment of kind of real highs and lows. So, I have been involved myself in a number of efforts to engage more people in this fight around democracy, acknowledging, again, like I said, the ways in which it has failed many of us up until now. It's not about just saying, let's revive the status quo or what's done been before, but can we deepen it and make it more real, whether it's in the workplace, through having a voice at work and even thinking about worker control, whether it's in our communities, and thinking about what it would look like if we had people who are most impacted making real decisions about things like housing and transportation.

Some of the training and discussion about what democracy could look like, the ways in which it's failed us, and the historic role that working people have played in fighting off authoritarian governments, I think that's interesting. There are people definitely worried about that and engaged in that. My other arena is particularly around worker organizing, just tons of interest. I've never seen this level of interest in the entire time I've worked on this, particularly among young people, about how it's not just about fighting for things, like a union that's important, but like, really questioning, why do we even work at all? What is it for? What's the purpose of work, and who makes the decisions about how the economy runs?

Q: Staying on the theme of new possibilities: What kinds of new combinations do you see as possible—unusual allies, new ways of coming together, new sets of approaches—in the 2020s that may have been more difficult to achieve in the past?

Cheri: Well, there really is this thing that we call a growing, developing new class. And so that's like a nurse friend of mine that just figured she was going to be a nurse the rest of her life and everything would be great. And now she's an older woman, and she couldn't figure out the technology, and so she was replaced by a bunch of younger people that are going into nursing that were born and raised with computers. Or it's the person that has worked someplace, and they've totally eliminated that industry that used to pay enough so you could have a two-car garage or thought that they were going to be great for the rest of their life because they worked at a union and paid union dues their whole life, and then they close down that shop. These are the new people that are coming to the bottom and that we're working together with, and that's a huge fall. And these are people who really believe that they have an entitlement.

You know capitalism has really done a job on poor people period, to have them believe that they don't really deserve any of these things, and they don't have rights, and they've been individual failures, and it's not a part of a larger system. And I think that that's harder to buy when you're part of this growing new class of people that are becoming expendable.

Bill: We have been witnessing the rise of new and renovated social movements. We have not yet built a conscious majoritarian block that can win power. That's what we need to do. We need to first block or stop MAGA, but stopping MAGA is not enough. We have to create a block that's capable of winning and introducing substantive, structural changes.

I think that the two corporate political parties in this country are going to fight like hell to remain relevant.

So, I'm not sure that there are any new combinations as such. It's more about making the combinations more conscious and standing up against ethno-nationalism and identity-exclusive politics.

Stephanie: On the one hand, there are a lot of young people, and not just only young people, but a lot of energy from young people looking to rebuild an internationalist movement particularly focused on Gaza, but that brings people to renew their interest in learning about other parts of the world, and we do have more tools to communicate across borders and talk to and learn from activists across the globe. So that's a positive place for me. I also think there are a number of issues that are really contentious, but actually kind of divide our political parties or divide our coalitions. I think immigration is one, for example, it tends to be portrayed as if there's a Republican position and a Democratic position. I don't actually think that's true.

I think there's actually a lot of division within the Democratic Party and also division within the Republican Party, because a lot of people who are truly Christian or religious have a belief in rights. Employers, for example, have historically been wanting to embrace immigrants and bring more immigrants to the country. So, there's these issues that divide the coalitions as they stand and could make space for reconfiguration of new alliances, certainly also around things like healthcare, that crosses party lines. And it's more about 1% versus 99%—and climate as well, I think climate is another area of possibly renewed alliances, and some of that's generational, but it's also about some people's values that that they hold and it's like, Okay, actually, the parties aren't speaking for these values.

Q: It looks like system change is coming whether we like it or not. There are endless possibilities for what the next system might look like, good and bad. What do you see as the organizing and movement building challenges that absolutely must be overcome in order to build a better world?

Cheri: I think we're in an in-between stage right now, and those who are already facing fascism are terrified and having to confront that. That's immigrants in this country, and people that are already living behind bars. And neighborhoods like Kensington are already dealing with a system where the government and the police there and the politicians are all working together, and where they have mobile jails, and there is no due process, and there is no media covering our day-to-day reality. Like in Kensington and other areas of the country, they want absolute control, there already has been a genocide of different sections of the population with the fentanyl crisis, and more people have died now from fentanyl than died during the Vietnam War. And that is crippling people and killing people, and nothing is being done about it.

I think that the two corporate political parties in this country are going to fight like hell to remain relevant. They will buy or offer cabinet positions or large amounts of resources for their organizations to divert the population from system change and keep them in some kind of reform. Have the people's leaders take them in the direction of reform. So, what you see happening now in this country is the immense threat of anybody that's talking about the creation of a different kind of system, versus getting on the bandwagon for Kamala Harris. I have so many Democrat bots on my social media. It's like a full-time job for them. I'm old enough to remember back in the day when there was a real anti-war movement in this country, and you would never think of any civil rights organizations not being involved. There are so many people who are in the financial pockets right now of the Democratic Party for their places of faith. While, literally, children are being slaughtered and the genocide is going on in Gaza; it's just devastating.

Internally, I think we need to really up our internal training about long-term strategy and be realistic about our power.

Bill: One of the big dangers is purism. We see it in the electoral realm all the time, and it's the idea that if a politician does not have exactly my platform, they are a sellout and not worthy of support. It's also reflective of the politics of moral outrage versus the politics of power. So, the politics of moral outrage are represented by "we are furious about this, that, or whatever, and therefore we're not going to vote for this candidate, or we're not going to vote at all." And that view is objectively apocalyptic. Basically, it means that no change can come about until there's a total collapse. And some people believe that you have this kind of pure streak that is waiting. I often analogize it to a surfer who paddles out into the ocean waiting for the ideal wave, believing that once they get it, they can ride it straight into shore. And that's not politics. That's something else. Sectarianism is related. It's sort of the notion that it's my way or the highway.

Mountain Stronghold Mentality is something that Bill Gallegos and I have written about, and it's a notion that comes from an era in the Chinese Revolution when there were guerrilla bands that were literally on mountaintops that would be their base area. They'd come down and attack the enemy and then go back to the base areas. The revolution shifted, and they needed mobile units to engage the enemy in a different way. Many of the guerrilla commanders didn't want to come down from mountaintops, because they were comfortable. They were secure. They didn't believe that they could be captured or destroyed by the enemy, and so they basically, despite the change in conditions, sought comfort. We see this with organizations that are afraid to take risks and to unite with others because they're comfortable where they are.

Another problem is the lack of strategy and strategic thinking. We progressives are very used to fighting defensive battles when we have difficulty thinking offensively. So, I'll give you an example. I often use this example. A number of years ago, maybe 10 years ago, I was in Texas on a speaking engagement, and it was before [Greg] Abbott was elected governor. And so, I was giving a talk about something, and during the Q and A, people were telling me how bad the situation was in Texas. So, I listened. They wanted to know what I thought needed to be done. And I said, How do we take over Texas? They took a deep breath, sat back, couldn't figure out what I was thinking, whether I had lost my mind, and I said to them, look, you've told me how bad the situation is. I get it. We have two alternatives. One, we can give up, go off, and get high, right? The other is that we develop a strategy to win. And the strategy to win needs to look at everything, from which are the key cities in Texas, which are the key counties, which are the counties that we can afford to ignore? What are the social movements that are in operation? Who are the key opinion makers? Where can resources be obtained? All of these things. And then read a little bit of Sun Tzu, you know The Art of War, and think strategically about how we win.

Stephanie: Oh, there's so many. Yeah. I mean, this is a long list, but for me, I sometimes think about it as, what do we need to do internally, within our organizations and movements? I think we need to think about that. And then there's the set of external challenges. And so internally, I think we need to really up our internal training about long-term strategy and be realistic about our power. A lot of us don't have power, and instead, we tend to look for a moral stance like, what's the right thing to do? That's important, but if it doesn't come with building power, then it's not a strategy. I worked on this book called Practical Radicals because people have tended to be either radicals with big dreams and visions but with no plan to win, or very pragmatic and with a small, winnable goal, but it's too small to really change much. So, I think as organizations and movements, we have to really get better trained on how to do long-term strategy, and that includes also getting better about how to work in alliance with one another across our organizations and sectors where we don't agree on everything. People in the climate movement might not share the same goals and visions as some people in labor unions, for example, but we have to find those common-ground ways in which we're all better off. We're stronger together than we are apart.

And then I think the external challenges are massive. Because the U.S. state is well armed and powerful. The police state is massive. People will be deported, shot at, arrested. So, we have to be realistic about the powers that we are up against, not just in the United States, but globally. And really also get strategic about how to divide that ruling coalition. They don't all benefit from it, or they benefit unequally, and that means that we need to think about peeling off certain segments of that. That means working with people we really don't like and whom we disagree with on a lot of things, but we might share common end goals, such as climate sustainability or defending democracy as a system. So those external threats are real, and we just don't have the power on our own to really make those kinds of changes.