Electoralism is a dead-end for the left. History mandates that we put our energy into building real, lasting power structures that communities can directly control without having to depend on the supposed goodwill of state-sanctioned representatives and bureaucracies.
The agenda-setters and advocates for the Bernie Sanders campaign are already engaging in bad-faith attacks on the libertarian left in order to preserve their special place as the goalkeepers of progress. The fact that they do this at the expense of much-needed mutual aid projects and solidarity organizing in the midst of an international pandemic demonstrates that they are more concerned about protecting their grift than they are about building power.
As a recent example, Jacobin published an article by Paul Heideman in April that laments the possibility of a return to “movementism”—the “embrace of social movements as an alternative to electoral politics” which “expressed itself most strongly in the anarchist moment of the late 1990s and early 2000s.” He simultaneously claims that Sanders’ defeat in the Democratic Primary was in fact an enormous victory for left politics in the United States. Heideman, an academic in American Studies by trade, is a member of the Bread & Roses caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Bread & Roses is run and operated as Jacobin’s political arm, and has a disproportionate amount of power in the national infrastructure of the DSA. They have a history of denying the necessity of mutual aid in times of crisis. As fires raged in California last June, Bread & Roses took the position that providing masks to those harmed was counter to the DSA’s mission. At the DSA National Convention, they solidified their position that the DSA should be seen as the nucleus of a new workers’ party, pushing through a resolution that would set the DSA on the path to running its own candidates in national elections.
Bread & Roses is not the only faction within DSA, or the left for that matter, to endorse party building. An insurgent group of former Socialist Alternative members have recently published a petition arguing that the DSA should immediately set upon building an independent “Democratic Socialist Party.” Outside of the DSA, the Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt) continue to push for a democratic centralist model of party-building, while the Green Party attempts to absorb the momentum of the Bernie campaign and channel it into their own electoralist project.
This is not a path the left should take. It is a path that has been walked again and again with predictable results. Historically, left-wing party building plays out in one of three ways:
- The party falls apart or is marginalized under the slightest institutional pressure, as was the case for the Socialist Party of America, the US Labor Party, and the Green Party of the United States.
- The party gains some power through concessions, degenerating into a neoliberal institution, as happened to the German Greens, the UK Labour Party, and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Sweden.
- The party captures the state, ossifying into a totalitarian regime that suppresses labor under state capitalism, like the Marxist-Leninist/Maoist projects of the twentieth century.
The problem inherent to party-building is that political parties as institutions are not composed of the people they attempt to liberate. Instead, they consist of professional consultants, politicians, and bureaucrats. As soon as the left sets upon party-building, it begins the process of alienating oppressed peoples from political power. It sets upon a mission to exchange one set of bosses for another.
These issues with party politics are most powerfully illustrated in works such as “The Party and the Working Class” by Anton Pannekoek, “Listen, Marxist!” by Murray Bookchin, and “The Political Decomposition of the German Greens” by Peter Staudenmaier.
The Last 30 Years or So
Libertarian socialists see in history a more fruitful path to direct our energies. We envision a world without bosses, in which oppressed peoples organize and govern themselves.
In the past 30 years, anarchists, communalists, and other libertarian socialists have taken massive strides towards bringing this vision to life. The global justice movement—often incorrectly labeled as the anti-globalization movement by the press—is at the root of this slow build up of community-based power. The global justice movement’s aims were quite simple: the cancellation of debt owed by the Global South to Europe and North America. It was an amalgamation of the anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist movements with strong undercurrents of anti-authoritarianism and internationalism. As it picked up steam in the late 1980’s, global justice activists centered their praxis around direct action and prefigurative politics. They simultaneously disrupted the currently-existing power structures in large displays of popular resistance as they tried to build new social and economic relations within the shell of the old system.
The global justice movement reached its high-point in the mid-to-late 90’s. On the morning of New Year’s Day in 1994, as the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rebelled against the federal government of Mexico in and around the jungles of Chiapas. The insurgency seized over a million acres of private property and formed the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ). By the end of the decade, open hostilities between the EZLN and the Mexican government had all but ceased. The EZLN never took power for itself, and instead facilitated the self-government of local municipalities by means of a popular assemblies consisting of roughly 300 families. Emphasis was placed on anti-colonialism and indigenous sovereignty.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the movement gained steam, culminating in the Battle of Seattle (N30) during the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999. Local anarchists, particularly those coming out of Eugene, Oregon, formed up in black bloc, intent on destroying as much corporate-owned property as they could. More than 40,000 protesters participated in near-insurrection against global capital and the United States government, causing about $20 million in damages and lost revenue, adding $3 million to the city’s budget for the WTO conference in a span of four days.
The global justice movement had a real and lasting impact on global capitalism. At the turn of the Millennium, the International Monetary Fund, the organization responsible for enforcing World Bank loans, was decimated. To this day, the IMF cannot operate in many parts of the world, thanks in large part to the very real threat that mass direct action poses to capital and the nation-states that act as its protectors.
Movements across the left slowed after 9/11. The anti-war movement, despite having numbers larger than anything before it, was co-opted by the Democratic Party. The militancy of the global justice movement faded away. Instead of targeting businesses and infrastructure that kept the war machine running, family-friendly weekend marches became the preferred method of “resistance.” In spite of this, organizers from the global justice movement began to find ways to leverage what they learned to mobilize during the Bush era.
Like most natural disasters, Hurricane Katrina (2004) laid bare the inequities of both capitalism and government, growing out of the structural violence of systemic racism and poverty. Radicals from New Orleans and elsewhere quickly organized a response, creating systems of mutual aid and community defense. They organized distribution networks for food and supplies, took over garbage collection and toxic waste cleanup efforts, and even took up arms to defend communities against murderous police and racist militias who flocked into the city to prevent “looting.” This effort has since been expanded into a trans-national effort by organizations like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, which can respond quickly and flexibly to natural disasters, taking on relief efforts that are often overlooked or mishandled by government agencies and NGO’s.
The libertarian left was also able to effectively spearhead a movement against the Mexican-American border during Bush’s second term. On May Day 2006, undocumented immigrants took to the streets in A Day Without Immigrants, the start of a two month long campaign against the militarization of the border. More than 5 million people, mostly Latinx and immigrants, participated in what was effectively a general strike against border militarization legislation. Support for border militarization faltered after the efforts.
But it wasn’t until the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, and a new Democratic administration, that the left libertarian movement in America was truly in the national spotlight once more. The Occupy Movement was a watershed moment for a new generation of politically activated Millennials. Just two years before Occupy, anarchist theorist Peter Gelderloos published Consensus: A New Handbook for Grassroots Social, Political, and Environmental Groups, which became one of foundational texts for the movement. Occupy was anything but parliamentary. Deliberately confrontational and prefigurative in methodology, it was a clean break from the performative liberal demonstrations that exemplified Bush-era “resistance.” The movement was, in a sense, the global justice movement brought home. It aimed to address the growing inequality within our own borders, seeking redress for the government bail-out of financial firms and the austerity imposed on the working masses.
Once again, the black bloc took to the streets, this time evolving into a defense unit that aimed to directly confront police violence against protesters. Multiple cities, from New York to Oakland, erupted into popular revolt. Occupy awakened an entire generation, even if it did not succeed in achieving its primary goals.
Liberals and progressives can whine about the hours-long meetings regarding drum circles if they so choose. By doing so, they are downplaying what actually happened on the ground in Occupy camps. They deny the history that took place, while simultaneously appropriating its language and energy for electoral projects.
The real lesson from Occupy—the real mistake—is that it moved too fast and bit off more than it could chew. The method was correct. The broad geopolitical aims were just too much for something so new to handle. Occupy failed insofar as they ignored the Zapatistas’ advice to walk slowly.
The way in which race issues were dealt with within Occupy was a clear indicator of the need to slow down. Thousands and thousands of newly radicalized white people were in constant tension with the small contingent of people of color that participated in the Occupy movement. It would not be surprising if a more thorough historical analysis connected this tension with the formation of autonomous, identity-based movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM).
In 2012, George Zimmerman stalked, confronted, and shot to death Trayvon Martin—an unarmed, 17 year-old, black teenager. In 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of all wrong-doing. Shortly after, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter began trending on social media. After a slew of nationally publicized police killings of unarmed black men, including Michael Brown and Eric Gardner, the hashtag turned into a national movement against the over-policing of black communities and the general disregard for black lives in the US. Ferguson, Missouri, Brown’s home town, erupted into unrest in August of 2014, fueled by a brutal and authoritarian response to peaceful protests by militarized police equipped with armored personnel carriers, riot gear, and semi-automatic rifles.
Overall, there’s very little evidence that the birth of BLM could be explained by an uptick in police brutality. The proliferation of the smartphone making police brutality against people of color more visible is a more credible explanation. But, nothing makes sense about the BLM movement without understanding that the voices of black and brown people routinely went unheard within the wider activist community, leading to the spontaneous self-organization of black and brown people in service of their own immediate needs.
After BLM established itself as a force to be reckoned with, some progress was made to integrate the needs of marginalized communities into wider struggles. The Dakota Access Pipeline protests, led by indigenous water protectors of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, merged the immediate needs of indigenous communities with a much broader campaign against the fossil fuel industry. At the same time, anti-racist movements coalesced into a militant, autonomous anti-fascist movement in response to the build up of an neo-fascist insurgency and the rise of Trump-era nationalism.
The perceived strength of the Bernie Sanders campaign manifested itself in as much as it appropriated the successes and the language of these movements as they began to converge into a holistic liberatory project. The 2016 and 2020 campaigns for the Presidency by Sanders are often seen as the inception of a mass movement. But when put into its proper historical context, it appears to be little more than the last ditch efforts of social democrats interested in preserving the myth that capitalism and state-craft can somehow be humanized and reformed to suit the needs and desires of a vague “working class,” so long as the right bosses are in charge. That project failed.
In stark contrast, the libertarian left has pushed forward in bold new ways since 2014. Cooperation Jackson is now 6 years old, making real progress in lifting black and brown people out of poverty in one of the poorest areas of the country, providing them a means of determining their own destiny. They are practicing a type of autonomous municipal democracy that offers a direct parallel to the Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities. There are now dozens of such projects forming across the United States, joining together under the banner of Symbiosis Revolution and the Congress of Municipal Movements.
While we should tolerate diversity of tactics, as organizers we will inevitably have to choose which efforts are worthy of our time and effort. Returns from electoral politics and party-building have diminished significantly over time, but direct struggle and the building up of counter-institutions to challenge the power of capitalism and the state has proven to be a remarkably fruitful strategy over the past 30 years. We should not bank on another Bernie Sanders, or another party. We need to build towards a radically democratic transformation of society.
No Bosses for the Left by Oaks is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
Citations are not necessarily endorsements.
Further reading:
- Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements (2014) by Chris Dixon
- “Dual Power: A Strategy To Build Socialism in Our Time” (2018), statement by the DSA Libertarian Socialist Caucus
- “The Confederation as the Commune of Communes” (2020) by Debbie Bookchin & Sixtine van Outryve
