Gadsdens over Rio
The left wing of winning back the republic
Something global is happening1. Make America Great Again flags fly over evangelical churches in Central America. Gadsden Flags (‘don’t tread on me’) wave over Rio de Janeiro. A sign outside Australian parliament reads, ‘over governed over taxed over run, we need a fix like 1776.’
Seems strange, no? At first glance, there is something post-modern and absurd about this play of signifiers across protests by various populations fighting for what seems like very different things. But surely hundreds of millions of people all over the globe mean something when they fly these flags. What would it look like to take these ostensibly ridiculous statements seriously, to interrogate what they mean at this historical juncture?
The fact is that the international system that we grew up with, and took to be something akin to a force of nature, are in deep crisis. The material underpinnings for United States hegemony are crumbling around the globe. There is a tendency to see this as a geopolitical problem, the rise of a multipolar world which might bring needed counterbalance to the overweening power of US finance capital within a perpetual order of sovereign mutually independent nation-states. But I would argue that the issues at work and the consequences of this crisis are far greater than a shift in foreign policy or the locus international power. What is crumbling at this historical juncture is an entire imperial system at home and abroad. One that overthrew the American Republic back at the beginning of the 20th century and advanced an apparatus of tyranny throughout the Cold War whose legacy we live with today.
The republic was overthrown because the threat of proletarian socialism in the US and abroad necessitated it. Wearing the badge of Progressivism and ‘organized labor’, it smothered the independent workers movement with the modern welfare state. Federal policies were put in place to serve as countertendencies to the concentration and combination of capital while the concentration and combination of legally sanctioned workers organizations led to their subordination under the Democratic Party. The reactionary middle classes, facing their ruin, erected an entire edifice—an undemocratic administrative state housed within the executive branch populated by handpicked experts—to turn back the clock and ensure that small property, whether petit capital or educational credentials, could reproduce itself. This Bonapartist state at home was then unleashed abroad in the ideological battle against the Soviet Union in the Cold War. After 1991 it morphed into an entire ersatz civil society of non-governmental organizations tied to one or both of the capitalist political parties and their branches in Europe.
In the context of a dying imperial project, ‘We need a fix like 1776’, in a Commonwealth country like Australia isn’t so absurd after all. It is no surprise that these mantles are being borne abroad as the U.S. War for Independence was the most substantive bourgeois revolution in history with a long and checkered afterlife. What we are seeing, and what we ignore at our peril, is that there is a growing international republican movement afoot. They set their movement against what they call ‘globalism’. They call for people power against the elite. They want to take back sovereignty of nations and control of borders. Which is to say that currently the global republican movement has only a right wing. This confuses middle class intellectuals who have been created by the imperial project that overthrew the republic but if anyone still believes in small-R republican ideas like non-domination by state/private actors, civil liberties and substantive independence its the working classes of the capitalist core. By contrast, the so-called left has long since acquiesced to the death of the republic despite Marxism’s undeniable radical republican roots.
We who form the core of the Independent Labor Club of North America were born and raised in the shadow of the imperial state that is now in crisis all around us. Let the middle classes mourn the Bonapartist state and let the capitalists try to patch the rules based international order back together, to make it great again. The second chaotic term of the Trump Administration is a last toss of the die by a political class hemmed in on all sides by crisis. It is not our job to save the American empire from itself but to articulate the way in which we, the working classes, are the historical heirs to the great revolutionary projects of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Building a left wing of winning back the republic is not about ‘appealing to MAGA workers’ by tailing the reactionary right, its about building an explicitly proletarian wing of the already existing global republican movement. Regardless, if Trump 2.0 is any indication, the political program of the right wing middle class is dead in the water–it’s just not possible at this late date to raise small property up to prominence again not least because the center of global value production no longer resides in the middle-class reactionary socialist Collective West but increasingly in East Asia.
Against the anti-globalists xenophobic, Christian fundamentalist, nationalist, petit bourgeois right wing republicanism we must counterpose a solidaristic, secular, internationalist, working class republicanism. The latter has deep roots in North America going back to the working class movements like the Knights of Labor of the 19th century. The Independent Labor Club is not the political expression of left wing republicanism itself, but the potential connective tissue of a broader working class movement for class independence on republican terms that must necessarily cohere itself in civil society before it can take on an independent political form.
We don’t choose politics, politics chooses us. In the era of Clinton and Obama we were trying to work within progressivism to make it social democratic again. In the era of Trump we must work within the battle against the Bonapartist state empire to make the republican movement socialist again, to posit the working classes as heirs to a revolutionary legacy around which all politics still rotates. Our allegiance isn’t to the flag or to the country for which is stands but to the historical process of political freedom inaugurated by the rise of bourgeois civil society and the abolition of feudal social relations, and recognized by Marx and Engels as the precondition for working class self-activity. The petit bourgeois can be easily organized for their reactionary vision of the republic because production already organizes them and the ideology of Americanism holds them up as the arbiters of social freedom. It is not so easy for us, but the common sense small-r republicanism of the working class is a premise already in existence but an ideal to which those who claim to be socialists will have to adjust themselves. Socialist workers building the civil social pre-conditions for a social republican proletarian party and/or revolutionary international unionism is the pre-political struggle the Independent Labor Club sets before itself.
Marxists are essential for building the preconditions for independent politics because its only they who take the working class seriously as the subject of history. However, the aggregation of all the Marxists in North America under one banner would not be a substitute for a mass movement, let alone a mass party. The first step is to build an organization that might express the fractures and fissures within the class of which it is composed so that the problems of class unity and self-activity can be worked out in practice. All the radical phraseology and learned lessons of the 20th century will prove useless if left in the hands of socialist intellectuals. What the ILC intends to do is build the institutional conditions necessary for a left, right and center of the working class movement to rise again. If Marxists have what it takes to lead a movement of millions then so be it, but that leadership must be earned, not given.
By organizing ourself in this prepolitical capacity to build the left wing of republicanism we are entering a fraught and terrifying battle. But we have no choice if we are to be at all relevant and to stop the march of right wing petit bourgeois reaction in its place. Radicals need to leave the cocoon of the late 20th century and move into the 21st. We can’t pretend we have a movement. We have to build one fit for the stakes of today. And it has to be built from the ground up, chapter by chapter. One advantage of fighting on the terrain of the social republic is that it automatically excludes popular front forces and progressives themselves. This is a good thing because we need to make explicit a split that has been implicit since the New Deal coalition started to fray in the mid-20th century.
Our path begins by recognizing that there is more potential in a Gadsden flag flying over Rio de Janeiro than with another vote to preserve an imperial edifice in terminal decline. We have to deal with society and politics as they actually exist, not as we wish them to be. The international battle to win back the republic needs a left wing and the Independent Labor Club intends to help build it.
— Sean KB, October 2025
After a sabbatical from writing due to some health issues, here is a blog post to follow up my Left is Dead article from last year. This will be the first of hopefully many smaller texts that expand upon the concept of prepolitics and hone what I think the Independent Labor Club of North America might become.
Yeah.... with all due respect my brother, NO
This argument about "the republic being overthrown" by the New Deal is... unique? Also not accurate
Also we really don't need to do the "MAGA communist" thing - there's internet grifters that do that, they're much better at Instagram scamming than we are so let's leave them to that task (& the inevitable criminal justice consequences of that kind of fraud over an interstate wire stuff)
The problem is, we don't have a workers party & our labor movement is weak
As well intentioned as the Independent Labor Clubs are, it's not the way forward - based on my practical observations of that project in New York, the ILC is a social club for young, childless, college educated White professional workers who subjectively identify with being leftist.
That's not a bad thing if you fit into that demographic (it's not the typical demographic of your typical NYC union member - a churchgoing married middle aged Black or Puerto Rican lady with kids and a clerical or allied health services job who's left on economic issues but conservative on crime and social issues - so that's kind of a problem)
Our tasks are simple but vast
We need to build a mass, interracial, explicitly anti capitalist mass workers party that's both electoral and activist focused - that party needs to focus on the bread and butter dollars and cents demands of the working class (and all the inequalities that make some of us, of certain races, in need of more bread and butter and dollars and cents) in the short term and in the long term for the end of capitalism and our class coming to power for the first time in the history of the world
We need to build new labor unions for the 95% non union private sector and recapture the public sector legacy unions - these new jack labor unions need to also be explicitly anti capitalist, radically democratic, anti corrupt and strike oriented, and they need to be built by grassroots organization, not the NLRB process that requires that you ask permission from the employer to organize your coworkers
We live in a country with the most expansive civil liberties and right of free association on the planet - there is nothing external stopping us from recruiting our fellow workers into a workers party and into militant labor unions and using our right to protest to carry out peaceful, non violent mass struggle for our ideas, at work and on the streets
That's what we need to be organizing right now
Let the billionaires, small business owners and professional classes fight each other over which party of the rich will rule over us - we need to organize for our class agenda from the streets and the jobsites
I agree that if we want a mass left wing movement in America, we're going to have to rewrite the American Myth in our favor in some way, but I think this misses the mark. The main problem of the 21st century will be finding an answer to mass migration because of Climate change. We need to tap into those parts of the America Myth. The small freeholder republic stuff is what the right is selling. That's a politics of liquidation. There's no left wing way to have a politics of liquidation, so that's a dead end.