To my old fuzzy eyes and my old bent ears the two tasks at hand that I hope to aid a little in these troubling times are to Stop Trump and to Advance The Long March Toward A Truly Desirable Society. To my still I hope young mind, however, the two are not separate because to crown Trump would at best make the Long March much longer. So to Stop Trump and to Advance the Long March are really one task. But if they are one task then why the hell did I say “two tasks”?

I said they were two because in some people’s minds the Long March is one task and attempting to Stop Trump isn’t part of it and will even distract from it. Their most frequent and I think most effective argument runs like this. To vote for someone who you despise—in the current case, that would be Genocide Joe—because his or her opponent is even way further off the rails, is a trap that binds one into a never ending game of electorally whack this mole or electorally whack that mole, with eyes only on whacking bad moles, and with attachment only to electoral activity, and thus with eyes and attachment diverted from the prize, which is to win a better society. 

Listening to their argument, I agree that people can become so enmeshed in supporting Despicable Democrats that they bid goodbye to the Long March. They bid hello to endless electoral limitations. They slip into rabbit-holed Democratic Party Thinking. 

However such claims that election 2024 distracts from the Long March rest on a false binary: Stop Trump or March On. No one has to work on the Long March to the exclusion of working to stop the fascist threat that seeks Washington Power. And no one has to work to stop the Fascist Threat to the exclusion of working on the Long March. The two activities are not either/or. 

Are you a radical who wants more for society than any Democrat who might run against Trump will even contemplate? Are you a revolutionary who wants an entirely new system? Do you feel in your bones that revolution is the only solution to horrific injustice? Are you fed up to the gills with the vapidity of what passes for American political discourse? Me too. All of that. Nonetheless, to seek to Stop Trump and to seek worthy theory, vision, strategy, and practice for the Long March are not contrary tasks. They intersect. Each abets the other. You can partake of both.

We should try to aid the Long March all the time. We should also try to aid the Stop Trump campaign from now to November. But how? We can’t choose who runs against Trump. We don’t even have information that lets us calculate who would have the best chance to beat Trump. More, even if we somehow knew what we don’t know, then what?

Can something we can do now impact this world, now? Pending contrary evidence, I believe that voter turnout for whoever is running against Trump particularly in contested states is likely to be incredibly important. I also believe that voter turnout will be seriously impacted by the work of volunteers who tend to be mostly young and often, I suspect, to the left, and even to the far left of their candidate. So here is what I think every radical and revolutionary could contribute to help Stop Trump. We can help clarify, over and over, that to work to Stop Trump is not to become a Democratic Party simp. It is not to set aside one’s more radical beliefs. It is not to be distracted from what matters for people who suffer now or later. It is, instead, to avoid calamity and to remove a huge obstacle to our needed Long March.  

Trump must lose. Beyond his losing, for the Long March, a very great number of Trump’s voters must be heard, understood, and communicated with until communicating with those who disagree with us becomes a central part of our organizing, and until a very great number of those who now disagree become part of our community of Marchers. 

What I find most embarrassing, and perhaps even most scary about the Republican 2024 effort is that they are not only in it to win it. They have thought about it to enact it. They have prepared for it to do it their way. 

That is, if I have understood correctly, they have groomed thousands of right-wing MAGA types to be immediately appointed to government posts. They mean to literally lay waste to and then replace our existing government structures having learned that those structures place impediments on what they can get done in office. The Supreme Court was only step one. But what is embarrassing about that? 

It is that the morally and mentally moribund Republicans are playing chess, as the saying goes, and the Democrats are playing with or even shooting themselves, while the left is only playing, I fear, checkers—or so it seems to me.

Okay, be all that as it may, suppose the left not only helps stop Trump in 2024 and not only communicates effectively with Trump’s voters, but also (working with emerging activist and organizing efforts of the Long March) gets in gear for 2028. In that case, if invited, what might you or the 2028 candidate say in a short speech to the Convention and to a gargantuan TV audience?

Perhaps something like this:

Fellow delegates, given that the United States is the world’s most powerful purveyor of contemporary international violence and its most wealthy and chief obstructor of enlarging international law and reducing international global warming and vile disparities in international health and wealth….

And given that the United States has the most economic resources to put to the well being of its own citizens and to use to redress historically imposed international injustices….

I propose that in pursuit of a truly just and equitable United States, as the first acts of a new administration, and to lay a foundation for much more to follow, we should:

(1) Abolish the Defense Department as we know it—which is a War Department—and establish in its place a Department of Peace and Justice overwhelmingly concerned with eliminating violent strife worldwide and pledged to provide no military aid to nations engaged for any reason at all other than immediate self defense in international military operations, pledging as well to engage in no foreign military adventures ourselves unless under direct attack. 

This would obviously save a huge percentage of current yearly military expenditures. Closed military bases would be immediately transformed into worker co-ops for the creation of affordable housing and other socially worthwhile products—with the prior military members of those bases given jobs, should they want them, and for those who then work at the transformed bases, also given half price access to initially produced housing.

(2) Create a Department of Internationalism devoted to reversing the terms of international global exchange so that instead of most benefits of exchange accruing to the strong and rich nations, most would accrue to weak and poor nations—thereby reducing unjust, debilitating, and destabilizing income and power differentials. 

This would of course entail replacing the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade organization with new institutions, rooted in international participation and seeking a virtually opposite equity-based rather than equity-smashing agenda.

(3) Create a Department of Ecological Sanity devoted to social survival and diversity. 

This would of course include: (a) waging a Manhattan Project level campaign against global warming including developing alternative solar, wind, water, geo-thermal, and clean fusion sources of energy on a national and international scale, (b) instituting and enforcing strict laws to limit pollution and waste and to facilitate collective rather than individual consumption wherever appropriate, and  (c) clarifying a willingness to collaborate with other nations for purposes of surviving ecological disasters.

(4) Create a Department of Domestic Equity devoted to narrowing the gaps between rich and poor within the U.S. 

This would include implementing massive increases in redistributive profit and property taxes as well as parallel reductions of taxes on low income members of society, plus massively providing low cost, very desirable housing and very strict rent controls and mortgage limits.

(5) Create a Department of Just Work seeking more leisure time off work and better conditions at work. 

This would initially include: (a) to reduce the work week to thirty hours with no reduction in total weekly pay and with double time pay for all hours worked beyond 30 for everyone who now earns below $80,000 a year, and to reduce hours to 30 with time and a half pay for overtime and with a proportionate reduction in total base pay per week for everyone who now earns more than $80,000 a year; (b) to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour, at least wherever the above does not immediately accomplish it, and (c) to establish a workers bill of rights including rights to assemble, engage in free speech, access financial records, unionize, and participate in decision making—the violation of which rights would be enforceable by strict financial and organizational penalties.

(6) Create a Department of Health and Well Being to promote preventive health care policies regarding food, pollution, etc.

This would immediately: a) nationalize and establish sound health-based polices for pharmaceutical companies, enact free health care for all, and expand and update medical infrastructure, and (b) invest bountifully in quality of life improvements like parks, playgrounds ball fields, pools and auditoriums for cities and particularly for rural areas throughout  the U.S.

(7) Create a Department of Education for youth and elders alike.

This would a) guarantee equitable apportionment of education resources to communities and schools so as to redress regional, race, and class disparities, b) guarantee free higher education for all those who qualify via teacher recommendation or examination success, c) open schools in communities for use by community residents in the evenings after the school day including providing provisions and resources for social engagement with neighbors and for after hours learning. 

(8) Create a Department of Race and Gender Liberation.

This would a) immediately establish taxation penalties for violations of proportionate representation of women and minorities in positions of influence throughout the entire U.S. economy, polity, and culture, or violations of well being of those employed with zero tolerance for structural violations of rights or dignity, b) work with the Department of Political Renovation (see below) to redress and ensure that race and gender do not affect legal outcomes other than in cases that seek to redress racist and sexist outcomes, and c) institute abortion on demand policies. 

(9) Create a Department of Political Renovation with the purpose of reconstructing U.S. political institutions to enhance popular participation and collective self management at the expense of corporate and elite administration. 

This would not only renovate voting procedures and the norms, rights, responsibilities and powers of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of national government, but do likewise for states and cities including initiating grassroots participatory peoples’ assemblies.

(10) Create, in particular, a Renovated Department of Justice to move our country from being one of corrupt implementation of profit-protecting laws, to being one of accountable implementation of people-protecting justice where laws themselves are superseded whenever their implementation would thwart justice and where rehabilitation replaces vengeance as the aim of incarceration. 

With four years of explicit collective preparation before 2028, and four hundred years of implicit collective prior preparation, and finally more than a few minutes of last minute thought, the above ten-point list could obviously be substantively deeper and wiser as well as rhetorically more eloquent. It still wouldn’t fully implement the Long March—the revolution—but it would certainly be a very sweeping, energetic step in that direction and induce a whole lot of warranted positive support. 

My point? You can develop and partake of revolutionary vision, strategy, and program, electorally and extra electorally, even while you also fight off fascism. 

Stop Trump, Pursue Revolution. It is one task, one struggle. 

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