A second major problem with any socialism-from-above approach is that it usually relies on an abstract vision of working class unity constructed from on high, while ignoring how in their everyday lives workers are pushed together and pulled apart by capitalism. Any alternative politics must proceed from people’s lived conditions of existence—from the actually existing working class in all its differences and diversity. Socialists should not be in the business of persuading Black workers facing racist police violence that they need to focus on “unifying” demands, as if the demand to be free of capricious state violence is somehow not already universal and working class in character. Nor should we be lecturing queer workers or undocumented immigrants that their concerns are “narrow” or merely “identity-based.” Such an approach is a socialist variant of trickle-down economics: it assumes that unity proclaimed at the top finds its reflection below. Any Marxist politics that does not begin from the real differences among working people will never be able to develop into a truly universal politics.
We reject the politics of prioritizing so-called “universalist” campaigns over struggles against racial domination, patriarchal subjugation, cis-heterosexist erasure, Islamophobia and antiSemitism, xenophobia, and imperialism and nationalism in all their beastly guises. Insofar as there is a unified position at Spectre it is this: these anti-oppression struggles are not alternatives or even supplements to class struggle but constitute key elements of the class struggle in the present era.
If the emergent socialist left is serious about helping to reconstitute working class unity, we cannot remain willfully indifferent to the actually existing fragmentation of workers or to the demands for solidarity that arise from their struggles. Feminist calls for reproductive autonomy, campaigns against racist police terror, movements for the abolition of all border patrols or for free gender affirmation on demand: these aren’t simply limited skirmishes. Insofar as each of these struggles serves to integrate sections of the proletariat, moving to unify them in fits and starts, these “particular” struggles are integral elements of the universal struggles we seek to build.
This is where Spectre comes in. Rather than building an echo chamber or advancing a single political or organizational line, we seek to create a venue for discussion and debate on the revived left—a left we see as emerging from 2008 rather than 2016. To this end, we seek to elaborate a comradely range of revolutionary socialisms and to invite debate, disagreement, investigation, rethinking, research, and polemic.
To be clear, we remain wary of putting our eggs in the social democratic basket. But we are equally suspicious of critics who take pleasure in denouncing the reformist turn from a place of insular detachment. Marxism is engaged, or else it fails on its own terms; it is a practice rather than a gesture.
And while rejecting one-size-fits-all universalism, we also question any individualized brand of point-scoring framed as identity politics. We see these as two sides of the same undialectical coin, two routes to a dead end.
Here at Spectre we are especially keen to publish articles on questions related to working class feminism, racialization under capitalism, migration and borders, anti-imperialisms, anticapitalist queer and trans* critiques, ecosocialisms, indigeneity and land reform, the state and Marxist strategy, union and shop floor radicalism, and all other modes of anticapitalist and pro-working class analysis. It goes without saying that we are resolutely internationalist in our outlook, and we especially welcome engagement with contexts beyond the US and Europe. We will try to prioritize global and transnational work, as well as writing that seeks to build solidarity across borders and all other existing divisions within the global working class.
We are equally resolute in our opposition to imperialism. While the period of formal colonial rule may be over, the impact of imperial domination remains ever present in much of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, not to mention in postcolonial diasporas across Europe and the Americas. Across the globe, new working class movements, strikes, and mass struggles are arising. Our solidarity is with workers in motion against imperialism in any form and against the ruling class of every country.