Essay: Organize or Die (Link)
Organize or Die
A Profoundly Important Moment in the War Between “Us”
In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, it’s important to remember that “life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” It has certainly been a chaotic few days in the eternal “war between us” raging inside the Democratic Party and perhaps unfortunately, the larger left. Although this piece is largely going to be an informal opinion essay about organizational strategies, I have dug up a few citations you should probably check out because they help frame this discussion.
First up is the original call to action on the Medicare for All vote by Jimmy Dore; which I should have included in my last piece, but I assumed it would take watching a full episode to find it. Obviously, I touched on the inter-left dispute that burst out of Dore’s call to action in my last essay, including the largely inadequate response of popular democratic socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; so you should check out at least the first half of that one if you haven’t already. Things really started to get interesting however when, presumably in response to the raging debate about a Medicare for All floor vote, Ocasio-Cortez granted an interview with The Intercept in which she explicitly stated the ultimate goal of the Dem Party progressive caucus was to topple Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and presumably the rest of the neoliberal leadership hierarchy.
Now some on the left decried the larger Ocasio-Cortez interview as equivocating, stalling and excuse making, but as I said at the time on Twitter, announcing that you intend to topple the current leadership of the party would be understood as a declaration of war by the ruling neoliberal faction – and it’s safe to say that they certainly got the message. Facing down an internal vote for a key Energy and Commerce Committee seat almost immediately after the interview, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was thrashed by a blue dog backbencher 46-13. You can and should read the write-up of the behind the scenes political maneuvering involved in this vote over at the American Prospect; but the long and short of it is that some combination of progressives primarying a powerful conservative Texas Democrat named Henry Cuellar, and the declaration of war in The Intercept, caused the party mainstream to rally around punishing AOC and progressives – presumably to put them back in line.
This in turn has resulted in a nonsensical counter-narrative that Jimmy Dore just cost progressives a key committee position, being pushed among those who prefer the co-operative progressive coalition strategy for building power on the left. Look, I’m not here to belittle the nature of this dispute; the fact is that we’re talking about two undeclared factions within the larger democratic socialist political movement who want the same things, but have utterly incompatible ideas about how to get there. You can read more about these two opposing strategies in an article from the Summer 2020 edition of Jacobin Magazine entitled “The Two Paths of Democratic Socialism: Coalition & Confrontation.” If however you’re seriously telling me that the past five years haven’t convinced you that we are at war with the neoliberal establishment in the Democratic Party whether we want to be or not, and completely regardless of what some popular f*cking Youtube comedian says, I’m going to call bullsh*t immediately and laugh you out of the room. From my last informal essay on the subject:
“The problem of course is that these are not normal circumstances. First and foremost we are in the darkest hours of horrifyingly lethal pandemic and simultaneously facing down both an outgoing and an incoming administration that simply and collectively do not give a flying f*ck how many people die so long as Wall Street is making bank. It has become cliche to say that in terms of Covid deaths, America is experiencing a new 9/11 every single day, but while repetition may render the phrasing tiresome, it does not render the statement that the ruling class’s heartless response to this virus amounts to murdering thousands of innocent people every twenty-four hours, any less painfully accurate. People, particularly poor people, are quite literally being exterminated by American capitalism and its subservient governments, even as you read this. And so, from a political perspective and frankly just a humanitarian standpoint, now would be a really good time to demand universal healthcare and publicly f*cking dare the machine to say no.
Furthermore it cannot be forgotten that the American left has just come off an election cycle that featured endless and heinously dishonest smears from the liberal establishment, all kinds of shady f*ckery in the early primaries and an open ruling-class plot to stop Bernie Sanders from winning the Dem party nomination; and I’m frankly being very generous in that interpretation by not going further into just how crass and anti-democratic all this nonsense was here. This was followed by a presidential campaign in which the Democratic Party’s neoliberal leadership seemed quite happy to throw left-aligned activists resisting fascist street gangs, and racial justice advocates in the Black Lives Matter movement to the wolves, simply to appease angry white conservatives who predictably didn’t vote Democrat anyway. On top of all this, and again, I’m really only touching on the tip of the iceberg here, Biden’s victory has lead to a round of “how does my butt-hole taste” neoliberal triumphalism that has shut left-leaning candidates out of influential positions in the incoming administration.
In other words, and expressed as bluntly as I can possibly state the issue: rich neoliberals are straight up killing the labor class and every shred of evidence available says cooperating with them to keep the peace isn’t going to change that in the slightest. Joe Biden hasn’t actually been inaugurated yet and even a child can already see that the left, including the electoral left, is at war with Bidenism, will remain at war with Bidenism and will face down a Democratic Party mainstream in 2024 that is every bit as prepared to lie, cheat, and smear its way to a victory over young people, the marginalized, and the left, as they were last time.
Understood in context then the supposed “safe choice” becomes choosing to lose and maybe even perish, while the seemingly risky choice of forcing a floor vote on Medicare for All, becomes a declaration of war against the party’s (ruling) right wing; a war that is again, going to happen whether democratic socialists and progressives in government want it to, or not. Although there are certainly a number of reasons I wish anyone but Jimmy Dore had made this argument (more on this below,) it’s fair to say on the whole that he was, and is, correct. Right now the people need a champion, not a negotiator, and I sincerely believe that any politician prepared to genuinely and relentless fight for the survival of the labor class, can ultimately win their hearts and carry their votes in the coming election cycle – even if that person were to lose every single hopelessly rigged battle against neoliberalism along the way.”
Expressed quite simply, we certainly didn’t start this fire-fight and the labor class might not survive much more of this co-operative approach so long as the people we’re cooperating with believe in neoliberal austerity, forever wars and the absolute rule of capital. Trying to blame that sh*t on Jimmy Dore or even frankly AOC’s interview in The Intercept requires one to patently ignore the concerted, coordinated and quite frankly obscene lengths this very same neoliberal establishment has already gone to in its quest to strangle the Democratic Party’s nascent left wing; I’ve never been one for playing make-believe, myself.
Furthermore, there’s at least some evidence that there were in fact positive results achieved by adopting this confrontational posture already; for starters Chuck Schumer immediately came out low-key in favor of $1200 coronavirus relief checks, joining his mortal enemy Bernie Sanders in doing so. More importantly to our discussion however, congresswoman and fellow Sqaud-member Ilhan Omar posted a profoundly important tweet almost immediately after the establishment ambush during the Energy and Commerce Committee vote. In this tweet she coyly stated “Only in America, can elected representatives threaten to shutdown government regularly, but the public never calls for #GeneralStrike. It’s almost the opposite around the the world” and in doing so, I believe told us what we needed to know about how to proceed forward from this moment.
A (Very) General Theory of Left Wing Political Organization in Rigged Pig Empire Oligarchies
And that is where we’re going to leave our background discussion and move towards a brief review of general organizational theory, because having carefully read AOC’s interview and considered the staggering meaning of Omar’s unprecedented tweet – I believe the elected faces of the democratic socialist electoral wing on the left, are crying out for help from the larger public movement and their supporters, in a series of interconnected battles they are doomed to lose otherwise. Yeah, that’s certainly a lot to process, but in order to understand why I think the Squad (as it were) is throwing up the bat-signal and trying to call in the cavalry, I’m going to need to return to a Twitter thread I wrote earlier in December that I’ve cleaned-up and edited for clarity:
“After having spent several months going over why both the Sanders and the Corbyn insurgencies on the left were openly crushed this past cycle, I’ve come to some broader conclusions about how I think we have to build political power inside a rigged oligarchy like the ones we’re facing down in so-called “Five Eyes” liberal democracies. Unfortunately, these unquestionably unfair contests have exposed for perhaps the first time during this new left wing insurgency, the fundamental weakness of our political power and organizational structures. We tried to start revolutions inside power structures dominated by neofeudalist capital and got hammered by the rigged nature of those power structures. While democratic socialists were able to elect a small (and hopefully growing) cohort of representatives working inside these liberal democratic structures, we’re all keenly aware that the larger left is a long way from where we need to be, to end capitalist extractivism and save perhaps most life on this planet.
Furthermore, I believe it would also be a colossal mistake to ignore the transformative (in a bad way) political power of a fascist threat in response to a left wing, democratic socialist (or even just fundamentally humanist) program; our enemies in this regard do not reside only among the crypto-conservative “liberal” establishment and their mainstream political parties. As we’ve seen with Trump (and to a lesser degree Johnson,) but also with the rise of the alt-right, fascist street gangs, crypto-fascist conspiracy cults and even the reactionary anti-Covid lockdown protests – capitalist power is more than happy to unleash reactionary intimidation, violence and terrorism to beat back even the mere potential of a threat to elite capital from the left.
I believe that to move forward far enough to actually seize power, the Pig Empire left will have to adopt a hybrid strategy that will feature perhaps three distinct tiers of activism that are effectively fire-walled apart from each other while still being dedicated to a common program. These three tiers probably look something like an electoral party, or an absolutely united faction within the party, a popular civic protest movement, and some form of unaffiliated antifascist defense league, prepared to protect protesters on the barricades when the fascist gangs, militias and hyper-reactionary cops try to bring the hammer down through violent methods.
Frankly I think the less I say about the antifascist, direct action defense movement in this space the better, but the simple truth is that someone has to fight the fascists – you’re not gonna get by on grandmothers alone; the right in all its various forms will respond to left wing public organizing with violence, and that violence will increase with every gain we make and every bar of the capitalist cage we remove. Whether you agree that this pro-capitalist, ultra-reactionary and typically quite violent backlash (or perhaps more accurately, white-lash) is strictly a form of fascism or not, it is a historical absolute certainty that it will occur – and we need to be prepared for that eventuality.
Although it is absolutely vital that this antifascist action arm be kept entirely separate from both the political wing and the protest wing of a larger democratic socialist movement, it still remains important for the task of maintaining public support that this group only deploy itself defensively against capitalist, fascist or otherwise reactionary violence. Fortunately, if what we’ve observed about antifascist action during the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests against police violence this past summer holds constant, it seems that the overwhelming majority of folks who’re into that sort of thing by and large agree with that defensive posture.
With that out of the way then, I’d like to turn towards the other two branches of this hypothetical democratic socialist movement, and focus a little bit on how they would relate (or not relate) to each other in practice. The first thing that must be understood by both the electoral wing, which includes elected representatives, mainstream activists and left-friendly wonks, as well as the larger protest movement or even constellation of protest movements, is that we’re are engaging in a thoroughly un-Civil War with the neoliberal establishment (particularly inside the Democratic Party,) based around a common program. Furthermore, since that program will almost assuredly stand in direct opposition to the absolute rule of elite capital, we should neither expect our enemies to help us dismantle their power structures inside the political and economic spheres, nor offer any quarter to those who continue to defend and prop up the neofeudalist order – both inside, and outside the party.
Of course the purpose of this essay is neither to establish the precise nature of this program, nor to define tactics for the various arms of the movement built around that democratic socialist program, except in the broadest possible sense. While it’s certainly important to have an overarching vision and perhaps as many as eight key platform planks (things like Medicare for All, or Universal Basic Income, etc) there are honestly few limits in terms of how extensive this program might be; planners, activists and strategists are only limited by the constraints of mass popular support. Fortunately for folks in both Britain and America, issue-based polling demonstrates that a democratic socialist program has more than enough popular support on an issue by issue basis to win a popular struggle for acceptance over what I believe, would be a fairly short period of time.
The role then of this larger protest movement, or constellation of protest movements aligned behind this common democratic socialist program, is to incessantly and aggressively agitate for the adoption of this program (in government and broader society) by means both traditional and non-traditional. While obviously this includes pushing democratic socialist candidates in elections across all levels of government, the primary and unyielding focus of this protest movement must ultimately be the adoption and installation of this program (including the policies, governing rules and political mechanisms to enact its goals) in the broader political and societal sphere – full stop.
Although the precise methodology of how to use a broad, program-based protest movement is somewhat beyond the scope of this essay, this policy-based rather than personality-based approach would facilitate a much broader spectrum of activism, against a much wider range of targets, than our current candidate and election centered approach on the politically-engaged left. Naturally this would include more traditional tactics like pressure campaigns, as well as the production of literature and the staging of rallies or protests to help popularize the program. The advantage in adopting this multi-tiered organizational approach however is that the protest movement, which is not run by the electoral wing and not beholden to the careers of our aligned elected officials, can go much farther and be more aggressive than an affiliated movement, like say Momentum or Our Revolution.
The absolute key here, and the source of this organizational method’s power is in the separation and fire-walling of these various branches, united by a common program instead of common personalities and leaders. Because our elected officials do not control this protest movement, and are only connected to it by a common program, they can’t be held responsible for the activities of that mass protest movement; while the machine will certainly try, we’ve already seen that in action during the Defund the Police protests and it simply doesn’t work on people who aren’t already reactionaries and thus fundamentally opposed to any proposed Dem Soc political and economic program anyway. This then in turn, facilitates protest tactics that attack the capitalist power structure directly, things like mass shutdowns, laying siege to the places of power and disrupting the function of government like they did under Nixon, and yes, a general strike or a series of cascading strikes designed to hit the capitalists where it hurts – in the pocketbook.
Perhaps equally important here, is that this degree of separation between the protest movement and elected democratic socialist officials is that the movement at large doesn’t owe them anything and can turn against them if they betray their promises. The position of the electoral arm when negotiating or attacking the machine then becomes “look, I can’t hold this protest movement back, they don’t take orders from me – but I can tell you what they want and I’m going to fight for it in public.” The separation is the strength. I know that flies in the face of everything you were taught but you saw how they chopped Bernie Sanders (and Jeremy Corbyn) down to size by capitalizing on tying the candidate directly to the most extreme elements of the “us” in “not me, us” in the larger public eye. Quite frankly, the electoral arm should always be kind of on edge about what the civic movement is going to do. Thus, maintaining that wall is vital for the larger left – not just because it de-fangs the liberals but because it holds the electoral arm accountable when they speak for the whole of us.
Thus, in speaking of the larger, three-tierd movement as a whole we can see them as a series of specialized tools that can be employed, simultaneously, to wage a full scale war against the establishment on all fronts. Pushing our tool analogy to its limits, we could say the electoral arm is a microphone, the civic movement is a cudgel and the action arm a scalpel; and the only thing that truly unites the three, is the program. Otherwise, and especially if we continue along with our candidate-based electoral approach on the fledgling left in America, our enemies will just target our elected leaders, take them out one by one and we’re right back where we’ve started. We should at this point expect that to be the go-to strategy of the neoliberal order – after all, they’ve done this quite a few times now; Bernie and Jezza are merely the most high-profile examples.
The separation, and absolute focus on the program, is the source of such a movement’s power.
And of course, the other good thing about the three tier approach is that if they do just snap do away with elections, or they are so rigged we cannot win (and they might be, as a Michigander I am very discouraged and alarmed by Michigan primary results with EVERY county going to Biden) we’re not helpless, and we haven’t wasted all this organizing energy and momentum for nothing. Even under a rigged electoral system, the machine will have to go to extreme measures to actually stop such a broad, multi-tier movement, and by the time they’re installing a open V for Vendetta police state to stop it, we can reasonably expect mainline (non-wealthy) liberal voters will be flocking towards protest and resistance; where democratic socialist organizers will be waiting and recruiting.
That my friends is, in an extremely broad sense, how we can win even against the types of rigged Pig Empire oligarchies we find ourselves operating in today.”
Battle Stations
Look, at this point I frankly could not care less whether or not the so-called progressives in the Democratic Party force a floor vote for Medicare for All, or not; if you folks genuinely believe that’s what it’s going to take to establish this broad-based protest movement necessary to get where we want to go against the neoliberal austerity machine, I’m all for it. But at some point the American left has to face reality; we have somewhere in the range of thirteen to fifteen Congressional Representatives and a half-handful of allies in the Senate. Without a broad-based protest movement designed to force the center-left, and even mainstream liberal representatives to support our policies in government, we’re not getting anywhere until at least the next election cycle, and the fact that you’re riled up about a Youtube video doesn’t change that one f*cking lick. We lost the politics part of this election back in March; what we have now is people, very angry, desperate people, and if we’re not prepared to use them then we will lose politically – even a child can see that.
Personally, I believe that politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar are both signaling that they understand this reality, and that they’re prepared to fight alongside such a protest movement; but they cannot ultimately be seen to create that movement without compromising the entire project. Unfortunately, the harsh truth here is that without that mass democratic socialist movement they will lose, and so too will all of us who still believe in electoral politics. The upshot here is that the strategy I’m proposing is highly flexible, and if I’m wrong about whether or not our elected representatives have enough backbone for this fight, or if the worst case scenario is indeed true and we are well beyond the power of electoral politics to stop the capitalist pillage and genocide – we’ll already be well along the way towards recruiting the kind of army you need to win without politics, as well.
The un-Civil War in the Democratic Party and indeed against the common people suffering under both neofeudalism and a virus response that looks like mass murder and eugenics, has already started. We don’t get to choose whether or not that fight happens, only whether or not we choose to fight back. The left told the machine that we could hurt them if they didn’t give us a seat at the table, and they responded with a 46-13 committee vote to put our highest-profile representative in her place. Okay then, in for a penny, in for a pound – the progressives should sink Pelosi’s Speaker vote and get started on destroying whatever neoliberal muppet replaces her.
Regardless of whether this ends in a floor vote for Medicare for All, toppling Pelosi or some wonky combination of policy support and committee positions; it’s a war, and we’re not going to win without an army operating outside of the American political system. The mass murders and austerity beatdowns are not going to stop unless we put the fear of the total collapse of capitalism into the hearts of the so-called “liberal” mainstream; we might as well get started on that right now. Come spring, there will be barricades in America and if the democratic socialist left is not on them, you can bet the reactionary chud militias will be.
The choice is ours, collectively; organize or die.
– nina illingworth
