It’s time to take stock of the year have just lived through and get oriented for the year ahead. Here, we review the events of 2024 and our own contributions to the fight for a better world.
A year that began amid genocide in Palestine and war in Ukraine and Sudan is concluding as Donald Trump prepares to return to power. This has grim implications in the United States, where Trump has explicitly promised to carry out “the largest mass deportations in US history,” but also elsewhere, as Trump may attempt to seize new territory, permit Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to resume invading Syria in order to carry out ethnic cleansing, and make deals with other fellow autocrats at everyone else’s expense.
From this vantage point, we can see that we have been living through the rise of a new reactionary nationalism that is now positioned to supplant neoliberalism as the dominant political paradigm. It has been gaining power almost everywhere—from Russia to Italy and Germany, from Brazil to Indonesia. It is clear now that the Biden era did not interrupt the rise of autocracy, but simply represented a stage of its rise, during which liberals demonstrated that they, too, were eager to militarize the police, fund genocide, and normalize extrajudicial violence—even if that meant preparing the way for an authoritarian regime that will do away with democracy as they knew it.
For decades now, we have been fighting on two fronts against neoliberalism and fascism. These are challenging conditions: winning a battle is no guarantee that we will not have to fight that battle again and again, and every time we lose a battle, we are forced to fight it once more, but on worse terms. That makes it all the more important that the ways that we fight demonstrate our values and reflect the sort of life we consider worth living.
As 2025 begins with an explosion in Las Vegas and an attack in New Orleans, it looks like we are in for a bloody period. As we have already seen in Trump’s aggrandizement of various murderers and, on the other side of the battle lines, in the support for Luigi Mangione, this era is shaping up to be a clash between different kinds of violence. It is not the future we would have chosen, but the story is not over and there may be better days yet to come.
This year, the challenge will be to fight as hard as we have to in order to defend ourselves and our communities while nourishing the parts of ourselves that are imaginative, that are tender, that can not only desire a better world but believe it into being. We will have to do these things in the midst of turmoil, rather than waiting for more peaceful times. We can do this.
Happy new year, dear comrades.
Continue reading.
