The historic Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which reached a crescendo in 2020 with the George Floyd Uprisings, has been a generation-defining political moment for many working people in the United States. Indeed, the mass demonstrations of 2020 mobilized millions, making them the largest protest movement in our country’s history.

Those who once considered themselves “apolitical” then saw the value of political life. Many who considered themselves “centrists” or even “conservative” no longer identified with those labels. Progressive and socialist organizations swelled with new membership and activity, including our Party. It seemed that the U.S. zeitgeist of that period was imbued with progressive, even definitively anti-racist, attitudes.

After Donald Trump was decisively defeated by Joe Biden in the election of that year, much to their surprise, the far-right seemingly recognized the need to strike back. Thus, they began laying the foundations for, or perhaps kicking into overdrive, a movement of their own — one that could rival the influence and scope of BLM.

This movement was exemplified with the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 in an attempt to overthrow the election results and the democratic will of the U.S. electorate. One might consider this moment — that being the time of intensified class and democratic struggles surrounding the 2020 election cycle, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the 2020 uprisings — to be the moment Make America Great Again became not just a political slogan, but a far-right fascist movement to counter BLM.

Rising to the task of growing the right wing’s mass base, billionaires such as Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Peter Thiel began to infect mass media with queerphobia, racism, and xenophobia under the guise of speaking for “the common man.” Fringe figures like the self-identified white supremacist Nick Fuentes have slowly become more accepted into the mainstream of right wing politics. Sitting Republican United States House Rep., Marjorie Taylor Green, has openly called herself a “Christian nationalist” with little to no push back from her party. Current Florida Governor and former GOP candidate for the 2024 presidential election, Ron DeSantis, had to fire an aide for publicizing a video that utilized literal Nazi imagery.

Contrary to the narrative that MAGA is a movement of the “average working person,” it is very clearly beholden to the interests of the capitalist class. Moreover, it is the most reactionary section of the monopoly capitalist class which has ushered in the fascist threat, steering the MAGA ship.

The Black Lives Matter movement was an embodiment of the anti-fascist people’s front. At its height, it saw popular support from two-thirds of the population.

Comparatively, the Black Lives Matter movement was essentially an embodiment of Georgi Dimitrov’s concept of the anti-fascist people’s front. The anti-fascist people’s front, he says, is “a fighting alliance [emphasis added] between the proletariat, on the one hand, and the laboring peasantry and basic mass of the urban petty bourgeoisie who together form the majority of the population [emphasis added].” During the height of the 2020 uprisings, the BLM movement saw popular support from two-thirds of the population, cutting across racial and ethnic lines and spreading across the entirety of the country. Such was the case for the Civil Rights Movement, which also saw broad support during its apex in the 1950s and ’60s.

These days, to be “anti-woke” and decry “wokeness” has become a mainstay of the current GOP. What started as a dog whistle to malign a commonly used phrase in the Black community, especially during the BLM movement, quickly became an unabashed rallying cry for the far right. It’s worth noting here that the term “woke” has its historical roots in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, popularized by working-class folk-singer Lead Belly, as well as the anti-slavery forces, the Wide Awakes, who supported Abraham Lincoln’s candidacy for president.

In many ways, “anti-wokeness” was their sales pitch to America during the 2024 election cycle. “Can’t find a job in your town? It’s the immigrants taking them — and by the way, they’re eating pets.” Or, “The school system is failing your children? It’s because educators are letting drag queens come into the classroom.” Plus, “You’re noticing infrastructure is crumbling all around you? It’s because of unqualified workers hired to meet DEI quotas.”

The capitalist class dividing workers on racial, ethnic, and gender lines is certainly not new. However, the level of vitriolic bigotry and terroristic reaction employed by the GOP in the MAGA era may be surprising and novel to many, especially those politicized by the events of 2020.

Economics and racism

Necessarily, the growth of the fascist MAGA movement and rise of the far right in nearly all spheres of life in the U.S. cannot be divorced from the economic reality of U.S. people. It is true that “Bidenomics” did improve the economy “post” Covid-19 pandemic from the perspective of corporate America. However, the economic position of the working class hardly saw the same improvements. 2023 brought the largest median increase in rent costs in over a decade, an increase in the average cost of healthcare per person, and an increase in the cost of higher education.

The national minimum wage still sits at $7.25 an hour while the ultra-rich, including the aforementioned billionaires, benefit from record profits. This coincides with some of Biden’s disastrous political decisions, such as his approach to the genocide in Gaza and his decision to seek re-election, which created fissures in the bloc that elected him in the first place. Indeed, many who elected Biden in the midst of a generational political moment expected generational political changes. Biden failed to meet this moment while the MAGA movement eagerly embraced it, which led to Trump’s most recent presidential victory.

The anti-racist sentiments built in 2020 have seemingly been eroded by the far-right. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, many have taken this as an opportunity not to defend the ideological gains the working class made in fighting against bigotry, but rather to join in with those among them who are now disavowing “woke.”

The MAGA movement made far-right “identity politics” their sales pitch to America in the absence of any coherent economic program.

Setting the tone for non-Leninist socialists, Senator Bernie Sanders spent the weeks following Trump’s victory denigrating the Democrats for “focusing too much” on “identity politics.” He, and others like him, seemingly ignore the fact that it was the Trump campaign and MAGA mouthpieces that openly and frequently threatened the LGBTQ community, made up shockingly vile false narratives about Haitian immigrants, denigrated women without children, and attacked Harris’ Black womanhood. MAGA did not win by focusing on economics as opposed to identity politics. Rather, the MAGA movement made reactionary, far-right “identity politics” their sales pitch to America in the absence of any coherent economic program.

With this in mind, it must be said that those aforementioned views from Sanders and his like-minded followers are completely incompatible with Marxism-Leninism. It is precisely this kind of economism that has historically separated the socialists from the Communists.

In Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, he repudiates economism stating,

“Revolutionary Social Democracy … utilizes ‘economic’ agitation for the purpose of presenting to the government … the demand that it cease to be an autocratic government. Moreover, it considers it its duty to present this demand to the government on the basis, not of the economic struggle alone, but of all manifestations in general public and political life.”

“For this very reason, we Social-Democrats must not under any circumstances or in any way whatever, create grounds for the belief (or the misunderstanding) that we attach greater value to economic reforms, or that we regard them as particularly important.”

Subsequently, democratic struggles, such as the struggle against racism, against queerphobia, against misogyny, against xenophobia, etc., cannot be treated as separate from — or less than — the struggle to address the economic needs of the working class. The two must be seen in a dialectical relationship with one another — building the necessary unity of the working class to overcome their mutual competition for jobs in the marketplace in order to overthrow the rule of the capitalist class.

What Bernie Sanders does get right, however, is that to defeat the MAGA movement, it will be necessary to put forth a new vision for our country to rival that of the Trump posse. This vision necessarily must be grounded in a mass movement for political change that clearly is so desperately yearned for. Perhaps it will be necessary to revitalize and link Black Lives Matter with Bernie’s Our Revolution (to the extent that they were ever that separate in the first place).

Time for a “Third Reconstruction”?

Can we address not just the cost of higher education, but the entire failing education system as a whole, which disproportionately affects racial minorities and the poor? Can we address not just the rising cost of healthcare and medical debt, but also medical racism and rural “healthcare deserts” that keep people from care regardless of the cost? Can we address the harmful effects of money in politics that disadvantage pro-worker politicians, and at the same time recognize that many people of color and poor people in the U.S. feel alienated from politics altogether?

Is it time to fight for a Third Reconstruction, a movement that can bring the masses, the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-gendered working class, to the unified position that all of us deserve to live with dignity in a country whose wealth is built on both slave labor and wage labor?

We are seeing the basis for the Communist departure from non-Leninist socialism play out today, over 100 years later. The founders of the CPUSA rejected the racist notion that the struggle to end Jim Crow racism was an issue for the future, after socialism was achieved. In a similar vein, the CPUSA of today must reject Bernie Sanders’ and other non-Leninist socialists’ concessions to the far right by abandoning democratic struggles. Our understanding of the intertwined relationship between economic and democratic struggles is key to keeping us in lock step with the working class.

As we respond to a second Trump term where he aims to be more repressive than the first, we should remember that it was the coalition built within the framework of the Black Lives Matter movement that, in part, handed him his defeat in 2020. Is now the time to acquiesce? To do away with the progressive, democratic consciousness forged in mass struggle just four years ago? To abandon Lenin for Sanders? Or should Communists stand unbowed in solidarity with the most oppressed? We are obligated to say “Black lives still matter,” “Protect trans women,” “No human is illegal,” “Our body, our choice,” when others give in to division. The path forward is unity of the working class and all oppressed people, and Communists must lead.

The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect the positions of the CPUSA.

Image: Black Lives Matter protest march by Fibonacci Blue (CC BY 2.0); Minimum Wage Rally at Atwater’s by Maryland GovPics (CC BY 2.0)

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