Navigating the storm, rebuilding the fightback

As a reader of this site, it should not be necessary to overly rehearse the political challenges and dangers the Left faces heading into 2025. But a few words, as Tempest will need your help to play our part in confronting this reality.  

The electoral success of the Trump movement and its insurgent far right politics—with all its chaos, contradictions, and clownishness—is both an acute symptom of the crisis of our capitalist political order and a manifold threat: to communities of migrants and refugees, to trans and queer people, to trade unionists and public sector workers, to educators, to Palestine activists and the Left as a whole, to all of our democratic rights, to the working class in all our diversity, to the planet, and within all of that, to humanity. 

The first appearance of the word “reactionary”, in English at least, apparently dates to the French Revolution defining the monarchical and clerical forces whose response to the mass democratic impulses was to defend feudalism in all its god-given glory. The Trump movement contains its own varieties of reaction. 

What does it mean to make America Great Again? Those in the U.S. are being algorithmically sold a promise of overcoming the anxiety-inducing experience of late neoliberalism with a return to mythic pasts. Be it of a white, Christian (part Society for American Civic Renewal, part Opus Dei), heteronormative, and slave-owning variety and/or, simultaneously that of a “freedom loving” libertarian paradise. One where the working class is hopelessly prostrate, without legal protections or unions, and where the twenty-first-century holocausts (be they of the public health, mass shooter,  ecological, or genocidal settler-colonial variety) become routinized and normalized. A “great America”  then becomes a place where Great Leaders and their billionaire council of advisers can transact the world’s business and prepare their collective escape to Mars once they’ve ensured the destruction of this planet. 

With these frightening mythic lode stars, the Trump sequel is both a reaction to late neoliberal febrility and a reaction to the failed strategy of the Left and our social movements tying ourselves to the Democratic Party and social liberalism generally. The Kamala Harris of it all, to use a shorthand.

We believe that this “lesser evil” dialectic and the insidious, anti-democratic throttle of the U.S. republic’s electoral process means that, whatever damage it will wreak, Trump does not have a mandate–control of Congress and the bought and paid Supreme Court be damned. The majority of (currently) eligible voters, much less the majority of U.S. residents have not bought in or yet been cowed into submission. So what does this mean for us, the Left, the socialist movement, our revolutionary current?

At the risk of immodesty (and a teleological conceit), the Tempest Collective launched in 2020 in preparation for this moment, this trajectory. Much of a nascent and vibrant effort to reconstruct a Left fit for the post-2008 global crisis coalesced into a social democratic electoral experiment that by the spring of 2020 had been defeated with a whimper. To this day, there has been very little self-reflection on its limitations though we already see the efforts to rehabilitate this tired strategy. 

In our inaugural editorial, we wrote:

The multiple, conspiring, crises of this moment have brought their own damage and destruction. But like a storm they also force us to come together…in their wake, they open up possibilities, a new terrain for struggle.

If there is a single imperative which drives this project it is not letting this opportunity be lost. The Left must lay the foundations for independent and democratic organizations of self-activity and struggle and must ensure that these organizations are deep-rooted and organically reflect and represent the working class. To do this also requires us helping recohere a resurgent revolutionary current, to keep our eyes on the prize, and to provide the perspective and commitment to get us there.

In common with much of the world over the last two decades, the U.S. has witnessed mass movements of historical breadth and revolutionary horizons. But our collective inability to translate these opportunities into lasting class independent organizations, and the possibility of a party of the working class, in all its diversity, has now contributed to reactionary politics taking power. 

Tempest aims to help change this equation. We seek to build the revolutionary current, and in so doing, train a new generation of cadre. This is inseparable from actively organizing a much greater independent, organizational weight for our class, our communities, and our Left. And in so doing, we seek to create a space for the strategic and tactical questions that arise at every level of our collective work. 

This year we will continue to support the independent resistance, those movements, rank-and-file efforts, unions, organizations, and united fronts that already exist. This means supporting our members in their work; We simultaneously continue to build local collectives and a voice for the politics of revolutionary socialism from below at the national and international level. Concretely, we have costs–both immediate and longer-term–in preparing our organization for some of the promises and threats of the incoming administration. We also want to deepen our international collaboration, our support for important institutions of our movement, like the annual Socialism Conference, and expect to build regional conferences of our own. This is in addition to the ongoing work of this website. It is very clear that, in the midst of the coming, frightening storm, there are real opportunities to build.

Our membership has been the sole material base of support for our efforts these last years but there is much more to be done.  We need the financial help of everyone who sees the importance of these efforts. We know resources are tight, and we thank you in advance for donating to our work. Most significantly, we look forward to seeing you all in our collective efforts to navigate the fight for a better world.