2020 and Liberalism, Ultraleftism, and Mass Action

Forewarning- I have made it most of my life not reading things, and I intend to keep that up until I die. If you read this piece and think “wow, this guy has not read X’, then you are right.

Kids like these memes still

Post-Bernie Malaise

The mood of the left has gone from swagger to despondent in the past year. Following leftists on social media you will find people trying to helpfully remind everyone else about how pathetically powerless we are, and how nobody can face reality. The question repeated is “where do we go from here?” where ‘we’ is sometimes ambiguous about whether it includes the person asking it, or if they are just trying to spectate the left, and are not the least bit impressed with your performance so far.

The question also usually has 2 different concerns bundled up in it. One part of the question is actually “what is the next big thing?” What can I tune in to and maybe even participate in, assuming it’s a good fit for my personal brand? Is there an emoji I can add in to my username, or a hashtag in to my bio? The thing that will finally be the moment of history I’ve been looking for?

But there is also another part of the question that does seem even more odd to me: simply what are we supposed to be doing now?

Before the Bernie campaign ended, even those most enchanted with his possible win claimed to understand that a victory would likely be a bit of a fluke- and that he would be a President fighting an establishment the left was otherwise not ready to take on. We needed to rapidly expand union membership and militancy. We needed more and more left politicians across the levels of government, ready to take over the Democratic party or split to our own party. We would need to mobilize his millions of supporters out in to the streets to agitate for his agenda. This was accepted work ahead of the left as of roughly March 2nd, 2020. It was also the accepted work in 2019, 2018, and…well if there were times before that it was probably accepted then. But since Bernie’s Super Tuesday loss, or at least since his concession at the end of March, that accepted wisdom seems gone. That wisdom was replaced with exhortations for a need to reflect and post-mortem his loss, almost all of which has obsessed with campaign rhetoric or the loyalty of his staff to the greater socialist project.

It’s difficult to mark when we are at a point of closure to reflect. Much thinking prior to the General Election would have spoken ominously about the collapse of the Republican party and the formation of a new Democratic super-party populated by a mass migration of reasonable Republicans (the Haliburton Democrats, as they were called). I am glad personally I didn’t write that! But perhaps with the new year we can attempt some reflection.

Liberalism, Ultraleftism, and Mass Action

As a modern day thinker, I studiously avoid actually reading the source material for an article I’ve opened. After all, it’ll either be relevant enough to the article I’m reading that the author will highlight the important passages for me, or it’s tangential enough that I can just read the critique and be on my way. I will still respect you, reader, if you take this approach.

That said, I encourage everyone to actually go read Peter Camejo’s Liberalism, Ultraleftism, and Mass Action before going further. My sales pitch is that it is short (maybe a 10 minute read, possibly shorter than this piece), mostly devoid of left jargon, and very fun. If nothing else, you will walk away thinking about how great of a poster Camejo would have been if he were with us today on Twitter. A small taste:

This is the key thing to understand about the ultraleftists. The actions they propose are not aimed at the American people; they’re aimed at those who have already radicalized. They know beforehand that masses of people won’t respond to the tactics they propose.

They have not only given up on the masses but really have contempt for them. Because on top of all this do you know what else the ultralefts propose? They call for a general strike! They get up and say, “General Strike.” Only they don’t have the slightest hope whatsoever that it will come off.

Every last one of them who raises his hand to vote for a general strike knows it’s not going to happen. So what the hell do they raise their hands for? Because it’s part of the game. They play games, they play revolution, because they have no hope.

The speech is a reflection on current events in 1970- and I think most people will have the basic familiarity to follow that context: the war in Vietnam coming to an end, and the anti-war and civil rights protests of the prior several years being the big concerns. A decent chunk of the speech is concerned with a large student strike in May 1970- which I think you can just accept as “a big protest” for the purposes of reading, but a little more detail at Wikipedia if you need it. A small section dives in to the 1968 Dem convention, and a spat Camejo has with other individuals like Tom Hayden. If you have issues navigating those few sentences- just assume Camejo is a leftist you like on Twitter, and Hayden is someone who says they’re a leftist but you and I know they’re actually a sellout.

Now, if you’re reading Liberalism… for the first time, or even re-reading it now, I think you’ll be struck with how present the entire piece feels. How did those boomers know what our problems were like?! It’s wild. He’s talking about a mass protest, and we had one too! He’s talking about how the establishment tried to limit and divide that protest using gimmicky class and race rhetoric to isolate it. Remember MSNBC doing that in May?!

What did they say in the newspapers? “It’s terrible. America is divided. We have to come back together.” And then they started saying, “It’s too bad that our children are this way.” You see, it’s just the kiddies. It’s the generation gap. On television they say to the workers, “You’re older, and this strike isn’t for you. It’s just our kids, and we’ve got to try to understand them.”

Or, “It’s a white strike. It has nothing to do with Black people. And it certainly has nothing to do with unions or workers!” That’s the general campaign they put on.

Or his comments on Nixon’s decision on Cambodia and Vietnam. A system that seems to be responding to something, but not really yielding power or even admitting to what the pressure point was. The same obtuse machine we bang our heads against (maybe).

I think the reader will also instantly recognize his targets in discussing Liberalism and Ultraleftism. Camejo’s liberalism are more or less the Libs we know and love today. A convenient overlap! Ultraleftists may be a bit more controversial to spot. I think at times in online discourse, Marxist-Leninists and Maoists can get tagged as ULs, and certainly nobody on the left is going to self identify with Camejo’s definition- a liberal who’s having a panic attack. But I think you can see a recent trend of Ultraleftism in the past year for sure, growing even more after Bernie’s defeat in the primary. Calls for more radical, immediate, and often performative actions that end up being dead-on-arrival campaigns. The effort in February to organize a yellow-vest movement to ensure party delegates didn’t steal the nomination from Bernie on the convention floor. The March and April efforts to organize a left exit from the Democratic party and rally to Howie Hawkins. A summer tweeting about general strikes, and talking with certainty about how millions of unemployed and evicted people would be in the streets soon to join with BLM protestors.

But you can also recognize the trends of Mass Action that Camejo outlines in our recent history. Our efforts to organize to the local or community issues, and weave that together to a larger mass movement. Attempts to support and connect Anti-ICE protests and BLM to larger anti-capitalist struggles. Work to try and reinvigorate union efforts where we can find them. Getting people in motion.

That is the big difference between the perspective of the ultralefts and our perspective, because we do want a general strike. We do want a real strike. We do believe you can win the workers, so therefore we don’t just raise our hands in games, we raise our hands for what really can be done, for what can begin to move masses of people.

The independent mass action concept does not just mean demonstrations against the war. It’s a general strategy with many aspects to it.

One aspect is to build a mass independent Black political party. It also means, for instance, organizing to mobilize masses of women against the institutions, social norms and practices that are used to oppress them. It’s a strategy that calls for doing things like building the Chicano Raza Unida Party, which is growing in the Southwest.

This is the concept of getting people into motion, into action. Not talking down to them, but organizing actions which are able to give expression to the mass opposition to the policies of the ruling class, at the level of understanding that people have reached about what’s happening in this society. It’s the concept of bringing masses into motion, but at all times keeping the movement independent of the ruling class.

Now, what is the best way we can implement this orientation at this point? We follow a general organizational type strategy which is simply this. You get the issues around which people are moving against the government and create a unified movement around them, in order to maximize the numbers that will come into motion.

I would say this was at least the high level strategy of DSA and much of the Berniecrat left since 2016. But 2020 has clearly shaken some faith. And perhaps rightfully so.

2020- the year of Mass Action

2020 saw the culmination of two campaigns in both the Bernie 2020 Presidential run as well as the Summer BLM protests- both of which I would identify as milestones on a Mass Action approach. Maybe readers will question that either of those campaigns are clear and good examples of Mass Action as Camejo describes it. I already have to hedge my language- in a sense I’d like to call each a Mass Action given their size…but Camejo’s term is a larger orientation to work and not a description for one campaign. Milestones isn’t part of Camejo’s terms, but I think it helps fit them in to the big picture. Also, I’ve seen pushback to calling the BLM protests a campaign- which is fair. It was in part a reactive event and goals were not clearly defined in advance. That said, I’d argue that just like the Bernie campaign, organizers had been working for several years in communities to prepare for such a moment, and as the uprising happened they quickly stepped in to help shape it.

That said, we should appreciate the scope of the effort and participation each had.

DSA and others spent a large amount of their time after Bernie’s 2016 loss indirectly laying the groundwork for his next Presidential campaign- dedicated M4A issues campaigns across the country, electing Berniecrat politicians at the state and even national level, finding what avenues it could to support teachers unions looking to strike or individual workers looking to organize a union, or working in solidarity with Women, Black, and Latino activists on programs. The campaign itself and Bernie’s unique credibility among the left drew these strings together almost immediately, and (rightly) boasted itself the grassroots campaign of 2020. One million people signed up to volunteer for Bernie by April 2019, and while certainly only a fraction of that number did volunteer to a great extent, the output of their effort was massive. Thousands bussed in and out of Iowa and New Hampshire alone to knock hundreds of thousands of doors. Millions of phones banked. $200,000,000 raised off small donors before the end. If you could build a time machine and send these numbers back to Camejo he’d probably think you were pulling his leg.

But in the end, the centrist candidates belatedly and quite clownishly coalesced around a fatigued old man who had the most inroads with older Black voters and White moderates, and in the course of effectively a long weekend put an end to Bernie 2020. Biden was gracious in victory, letting some Bernie aligned reps meet with centrists on a number of issues focus groups, producing platform recommendations that Biden presumably flushed down a toilet after use.

In the following months, the left stumbled itself into a second moment. The murder of George Floyd sparked protests in Minnesota that grew to engulf not only the US but even spread internationally. In July, the estimates ranged from 15 Million to 25 Million participants in the protests, and protests sustained throughout the entire summer. As I noted above this event was reactive to the moment, but an army of BLM organizers who had cut their teeth in 2014/2015 and spent the last several years organizing further proved up to the task of marshalling and steering much of these efforts. Again sending these numbers back to Camejo and he would definitely know you were just joking. 20 Million?!

But after 4 months, what did we have to show for it? Several dozen more videos of cops brutalizing people. A few more dead. Police and their unions relatively untouched, a few politicians who made obvious shell games of their 2021 budgets to pretend to cater to the movement. A Democratic presidential candidate who derided the movement and promised $300M to cops once elected. Here in Chicago, our new Mayor who ran on being serious about police oversight reform offered a very straightforward “fuck you” to the protestors and left alder-people demanding a reduction in CPD’s budget.

In a way, the end of the BLM protests also included an extra blow. Electoral campaigns are subject to the whims and power of a hostile party, that’s simply an accepted risk for all the left’s efforts there. But street action is supposed to be as level a playing field as you can get, the fallback for when your more intricate plans fail, and the absolute expression of “the people won’t take it anymore.” The ultraleft did not get their unemployed marches or eviction actions, but even if they do finally come in January or February, shouldn’t we assume they will run aground as well?

Some obvious similarities that is driving our discontent:

1. Neither campaign was without prelude, both had groundwork laid directly or indirectly over 4–5 years
2. Both campaigns, in terms of performance, were about as well executed as you can hope for. Neither flawless, but both better managed than a most video game releases these days
3. Despite the prep work, size, and execution, neither seemed to build clear and significant power for the left, nor did they deliver meaningful concessions from the establishment.

Some participants will react and note that each built new organizers, and radicalized people, and moved opinion polls on issues such as M4A and Defund. All I’ll accept as true. But I doubt you truly feel satisfied with those outcomes, and with no obvious future ‘milestone’ in sight, commitment to the strategy is a bit of an act of faith.

Reflections

I think we need to be frank that the past year does not generate new faith in the Mass Action approach. I suspect the turns towards both despair and ultraleftism are being driven by an unspoken fear that Mass Action is not the answer, and there isn’t some obvious next strategy to move to. However, I think generally DSA and most of the organized Berniecrat left are still on the path of Mass Action- and we need to be clear and direct on selling people that this course of action is still not only the best of bad options, but that there are meaningful victories to be had.

An immediate response that comes up in the wake of the 2020 campaigns is simply “we need more”. We need to be more organized, we need to be larger. What if DSA had 200,000 members? What if 1,000,000 more people listened to Chapo Trap House? The assessment is not absurd, but I think people need to be careful when deploying that analysis; I don’t think there’s a political movement or ideology people encounter today that doesn’t claim its failures arise from it not being done at a big enough scale, for long enough. Skeptics are right to worry they’re being sold a line if they start hearing that. Also, these lines rarely seem to get specific about the where or how of getting bigger. And if you think about my numbers above, in some areas it’s hard to imagine getting bigger for those milestone campaigns. I could imagine another Bernie campaign that increases the number of volunteers, maybe, but I could only imagine Bernie pulling that off…and it’s clear this is the end of the road for his Presidential hopes. BUT also I cannot imagine the multiples of $200M that would need to be raised to both manage the kind of field organization we dreamed of, and also to combat the negative media people like Mike Bloomberg were able to buy in just a few months. Does $500M for a campaign sound possible? $1B?

The BLM numbers seem equally daunting in terms of “more”. It’s hard to account for what drove people to protests, and almost impossible to imagine we can promise to bring out 20M people again, let alone 30M or 40M or more. At best we can just hope things get really bad, and that the real badness of things gets people out. After all, that’s how this is supposed to work?

We weren’t organized enough. Does the audience know for sure what that means at this point? We weren’t militant enough. Outside of a lot of complaining on police radio some nights, it sure seemed like cops had more and more reserves of violence left in them. We didn’t read enough theory. Which theory did we need?

There’s a need for a positive and specific defense of Mass Action, and what we missed or what we learned. I can try to lay out a few possible thoughts but I warn people- just as much as I am ill read, I am also a limited and inexperienced organizer. If you listed the all the DSA members from best organizer to worst, I would likely come in around #84,998. At most, take below as points for better people to explain why they’re wrong.

One: we should be honest that our work from 2016 thru 2019 was itself still very limited and based on inexperience, and perhaps overread our accomplishments up to that point. One area here is our attempts to reconnect to Unions. There is a lot of great work being done by Union organizers and labor activists- but I think the larger Berniecrat movement may have convinced itself that so many unions endorsing Bernie spoke to a larger awakening and commitment than was (or is) really there. I think people began to think the Teachers Strikes of 2018 reflected a larger appetite for labor action across other trades that wasn’t there…or even that the Teachers Strikes themselves implied a consistent level of radicalism among teachers that’s maybe only present in a few locals like Chicago Teachers Union right now.

Two: our limited and disorganized approach to media means an uphill battle in defining ourselves versus being defined by the establishment. The insurgent left media that took off in podcasts and on YouTube in 2016 has to be appreciated in at least partly helping to keep younger Dems overwhelmingly pro-Bernie through 2019 and 2020, but it failed to have any voice in the legacy mass media channels of Cable News, Radio, or Newspapers that dominate with +50 audiences. And with the recent ‘Force the Vote’ campaign, we see the risks of a more or less unaccountable insurgent media that begins to believe it itself is a mass organization.

Three: We still struggle to articulate our successes- in particular our ability to get and then use power to deliver results for people. We are very good at showing people that things are bad. That we have some ideas on why it’s bad. That we have some policies you the voter will very much like. BUT why trust us? Did we ever get results? How are we not just the naïve doofuses the establishment has painted us as for decades? How do you convince people to participate in processes and institutions that have largely screwed them over (or they believe screwed them over) for most of their lives, just on a promise? You need either an incredible bond with them, or some tangible results.

Four: we need to better articulate what is meant by organized, and why we are not there yet. I think there’s general acknowledgement that there is a larger disorganized left that floats around, and perhaps confuse media consumption or social media participation as organization. Usually that’s contrasted with the organized DSA member, but we all know it’s perfectly possible to be a DSA member and not organized. And often left victories that clearly have to do with good leadership, good strategy, or leverage of power are attributed as ‘organizing victories’, which muddies the water. Centralizers have a vision of increased organization, do we need to go that route?

Five: this is not so much an observation on the past- but we will need to explicitly define the left coalition in a post-Bernie world, and put effort in to a visible strategic process. I think the desire in late spring for Bernie to effectively keep his campaign organization running reflects the anxiety in doing this- so long as we all operated under the Bernie masthead we could avoid certain conflicts that will eventually come up between unions, NGOs, and mass organizations.

Even a sympathetic reader may find the above points less than compelling, and I’m certainly in no position to direct the fixes. But I think we can at least articulate the frustration people are feeling without trying to dive in to the minutia of recent work, and miss the forest for the trees.