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“More and more people are either excluded, marginalized, dismissed, or directly motivated to drop out, with either all or part of their energies. This gives rise by necessity to a strategy.” –Rudolf Bahro 

“We can’t organize the way we organized back in the ’60s, we can’t organize the way we organized even 30 years ago, 20 years ago. We’ve got to break new political ground and have new political theory and new political tactics.” –Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin

The piecemeal release of the Epstein files has dominated news headlines in the United States. Damning revelations to indict and expose the evils of the financier and human trafficker are supposed to have larger implications. The details of his case have become a political football, tossed back and forth to condemn politicians, parties, ideologies, and even the larger geopolitical order. It’s also become a hope for deliverance for desperate parties who hope this scandal will lead to revolt or some sort of consequences. 

Amid all this deserved exposure, tyranny continues to expand, and a significant observation is being neglected. Survivors pushing for accountability deserve better, but misogyny, violence against women, and preying on youth are standard all around the world. Complicity is nearly universal in a system in which a wealthy child abuser can influence not only domestic but international relations. 

It’s a fantasy to believe that the wrongdoing Jeffery Epstein and his network represent will simply be voted away, die off, or face a sweeping, harsh justice without an unrelenting force pushing it. The fact that this release is being dictated by his “closest friend” of 15 years, President Donald Trump, is much more than mere irony. It’s an illustration that to change our reality, we’ll have to move beyond oversimplified binaries about who is good and who is bad under an establishment in which everyone is guilty. 

There’s a common hope that this current episode of fascism will pass away when the president does or when his term is up. It’s almost as if people think that fascists believe in things like fair elections, terms, and norms. In his latest Netflix special, “The Unstoppable,” comedian Dave Chappelle seems to give voice to this widespread public delusion. Speaking to an especially frustrated segment of the U.S. public in Washington, D.C., he advises people to “keep your wits about you.” He went on to say, “I’m here to remind you that we are a community, and we will stay sane together. We will take care of each other, and we will wait this orange nigga out.” This raises the question of what the public is waiting for. It’s naive to imagine that the architects of Project 2025, white nationalists, and accelerationists driving this moment haven’t planned. The most optimistic among us might want this to be a moment that just fades, but reality and history are already telling us otherwise. 

The day before Chappelle’s special was released, during the opening of Turning Point USA’s annual “America Fest” conference, the widow of the far-right pundit Charlie Kirk endorsed JD Vance for president. “We are going to get my husband’s friend, JD Vance, elected for 48 in the most resounding way possible,” she said. It shouldn’t seem odd because this is what the reactionary political establishment has shown us they do: Plan ahead. Before they’ve finished implementing one plan, they’re already laying the foundation for the next several. This is why, unfortunately, waiting things out will make what’s already unbearably bad even worse. Waiting didn’t prevent us from entering this era; it brought us to it. It was waiting for the Democrats to become a better party, and waiting for saviors who froze much of the public in their passivity, hiding, and disempowerment. Nothing changes with this stalling, but instead we get more of the same entrenched in overconfident inaction. There are better ways to use our time. 

While many people have fought hard, with varying degrees of success and failure, Epstein and his ilk show us what the state really is. It’s a plaything for rulers, giving them easy access to everything they need to control a society and exploit its resources.

Some barriers need to be broken down. Those who rule over us and exploit know that one of the easiest ways to maintain power is through petty divisions. In the U.S., like many other places, party politics and sectarianism have long inflamed these tensions. So, while I’m certainly not of the mind of uniting with fascists or people who seek to kill the marginalized and oppress others, I’m not sure much can be overcome without a furious rejection of the current state of things. The Epstein horrors towering over it all are not just an opportunity to identify the worst among us; they’re also a chance to demand total transformation. 

When the illusion of choice is exposed by the affiliation of heavyweights from both parties, anything less is inconsequential. There’s a message here, too, even for the sectarian denominations of the left, when antithetical icons like Noam Chomsky and Fidel Castro, both, have had their association exposed too. Instead, we’re in the muck of a multitude of losing sides mocking each other on shared terms. It’s part of a pattern that has emerged since Trump’s reelection. Similarly, many liberals still believe that their vote against him is justification to detach as consequences structured by the policies of both parties roll in. The challenge here is to exceed and outmaneuver rather than play unwinnable games in political arenas designed by our oppressors. 

In his talk, “Who Can Stop the Apocalypse? Or the Task, Substance and Strategy of the Social Movements,” given at the World Future Studies Federation in 1982, Marxist theorist and communist dissident Rudolf Bahro said: 

We already fall back into the system if we act as if politics could be challenged by politics (of the same type). What can we achieve by immersing ourselves in the study of how the dominant politics functions, even with a view to bringing about improvements? The time always comes when the thinkers of a new era refuse to get drawn into the distinctions of scholasticism. We still run the danger of getting absorbed by the “compulsion of things” which is administered and reproduced on an expanded scale.

Not only can we not use the same kinds of politics that got us here, but we’re also in dire need of a strategy that understands our current situation. In the same talk, Bahro contemplates eerily similar conditions to the current U.S. He deliberated on a general strike, class reductionism, and cultural divisions, as many of us are considering our current conditions. Two aspects he emphasized were refusal and obstruction. Refusal, for him, was the “withdrawal of legitimation.” This meant not further legitimizing self-defeating processes. Obstruction, on the other hand, he defined as “restricting the operation of the system by active resistance, starting with the most dangerous of its normal directions of development. The motto for this is selective ungovernability.” I’ve written about what Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin means by “ungovernability” in terms of building autonomy. Despite their differences in approach, they can complement one another here. 

Bahro continues: 

What the movement offers that is positive and alternative is not something to be attained within the system, but in opposition to it. Even though the eventual outcome will certainly not be a purist one, the movement must strive to completely cast off the ruling structure. In its actual practice, therefore, its own ideal can be present only as the measure by which actions of obstruction are assessed.

What to do and not to do in the situation will be dictated by results and actions. However, if we’re to wait on something to get better on its own, we will be confined to a self-selected prison built by incompetence. We are not in a usual scenario here. We are up against reactionary social structure and the state.  While many people have fought hard, with varying degrees of success and failure, Epstein and his ilk show us what the state really is. It’s a plaything for rulers, giving them easy access to everything they need to control a society and exploit its resources. He treated government like a toy, not because he’s a genius, but because the apparatus of the state is designed for people like him to do so. How do we structure the world where someone like him can never have as much power as he does, or the president or the tech oligarchs, determined to destroy the planet for their benefit?

Whether I refer to the “selective ungovernability” Bahro mentioned decades ago, or the “fight back” ungovernability Lorenzo spoke of in 2020, too many problems remain the same. Bahro pointed out the same disillusionment with elections, unchecked corporate expansion, and political malfeasance that Ervin encourages us to use to organize the ideological defeat of capitalism, fascism, and empire. As he once told me, “We have to build an alternative, radical force, so that it can then work in a way that it never has before to overthrow the entire system. Not just the Democrats or the Republicans—you know the rulers. … We need a new society and a new world, not more capitalism.” 

If we plan to get to a better place, it will be through the struggle that so many around us are already engaged in. It will not simply come from the business, politics, and methods that haven’t created the reality we need.

Editorial Team:
Lara Witt, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor