The Old Is Dying, and the New Cannot Be Born
If there is anything that I’ve learned about American history, it is that surprisingly little has changed. I held a meeting recently about activism beyond elections, attended by several radicals and a local business owner, about the building of community support networks. The business owner argued against the organization of base areas, unapologetically capitalist, and declared we were “doing nothing.” Unsurprisingly, the “business owner” left unsatisfied and frustrated with myself and numerous members of the organization I am a part of. I said that elections are a means of controlling the public, and while he didn’t dispute this, he argued that building smaller businesses that sold items from one business to another would lead to “socialist corporations.”
Putting aside the nonsense of those two words, his attendance and perspective was a perfect example of that hegemony. Antonio Gramsci wrote the words of this article’s title while imprisoned by the fascist regime in Italy in 1931. He recognized the impending changes that were wrought in his country, and now it is time to recognize the impending changes, or more specifically, the lack of changes, that confront us today.
When Gramsci wrote those words, he seemed to leave out one thing. The old system, rather than “dying” must “be killed.” The old authorities that are dying will not die of their own accord, they must be brought to heel; here we come to the reality of organizing. The events in Myanmar and other countries is instructive. With the collapse of liberal democracy in Myanmar, there was a strategic error in Aung San Suu Kyi’s doctrine; she was wholly beholden to the military. Her party failed to grasp the simple truth that Mao realized — “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Rather than bringing about the death of the old authority, in this case quite literally, the old authority will bring death to them. They did not kill the old authority; they merely temporarily displaced it. Much the same is happening in the United States.
Mao stated that “the enemy will not perish of himself.” It is much the same here. Where Gramsci’s quote becomes instructive, is when we think about the hegemony; neoliberalism has proven incredibly unpopular, and capitalist society is tearing itself to pieces, “we are killing the old” or perhaps “the old is killing itself.” But at the same time, the capitalist-imperialist hegemony reasserts itself through the transfer of power to Biden, and all petit-bourgeois activism has wasted its efforts on that front: “and the new cannot be born.”
Of course, the new is socialism, and the old is capitalism. So long as we act in the hegemony, as long as we even pay attention to elections and distract ourselves from community organizing, there is no hope of change. To address and debate elections is meaningless; they are events that further assert the imperialist cause because the imperialists control them. The imperialists will not perish of themselves. The whole practice and ideology of community organizing is to make it possible for the new to be born, to break the hegemony. It is impossible to destroy the French language by speaking French. It is impossible to abolish capitalism by being a capitalist. It is impossible to destroy bourgeois society by acting within the bourgeois society. So yes, the old is dying, and the new cannot be born, but the only reason the new cannot be born is because we believe it cannot. With the support of the masses, anything is possible.
