Liberal protests vs. radical power

There is a certain kind of liberalism that has fused with socialism, and the way that socialists and other radicals talk about strategy. This is seen in how there is a common tendency nowadays to talk about militant mass movements as primarily being about pressuring politicians and capitalists in order to extract concessions and reforms – but ignoring the question of how to actually dislodge and overthrow the power of these politicians and capitalists.

This is quite common in how many leftists talk about the Green New Deal. Groups like the DSA and the Sunrise Movement have a theory of change that focuses on using public pressure via sit-ins, demonstrations, and strikes, to push politicians into supporting the GND. DSA leaders do tend to recognize the material power of the working class, as seen in this excerpt from this essay on strategy in Socialist Forum:

Most importantly, the working class has a “lever” at the core of the operation of the capitalist system. If workers stop working, or go on strike, business as usual grinds to a halt. As we’ve seen recently, this ability to shut down the system at its core is the greatest source of power for the working class as a whole. When workers strike, or organize other mass disruptive actions, those in power are forced to pay attention.

And yet, this limits working-class power to the ability to make politicians and capitalists “pay attention”, with the tacit assumption that these elites are indeed the ultimate decision-makers in society, and that this power cannot be challenged – only influenced. Working-class militancy thus becomes simply an inverted form of lobbying to that of the K-Street suits; instead of showing up to DC offices with bags of money, workers can threaten to stop the flow of money by striking, and thus achieve political influence. But at the end of the day, the levers of actual power and decision-making remains in the hands of the same people and institutions. The structure of liberal democracy, the functionaries who run day-to-day operations, and rule of capital over economy and society is all left intact.

You especially see this pattern in the way popular discourse talks about general strikes. The general strike is talked about like a secret weapon of the working class that can force all kinds of reforms out of the state, whether its about halting deportations or family separations, or police abolition, or getting Trump out of office. Again, this framing casts the power of the working class as being solely about lobbying the state. But the original radicalism of the general strike was not about influencing politicians and pressuring capitalists, but about kick-starting working-class autonomy and self-governance. The general strike is meant to demonstrate that society is in fact run by workers, even though decision-making power is monopolized by an elite class, and that this state of affairs only exists because we consent and go along with it; and thus, we the workers can and should organize and run society ourselves, rather than continue to carry out the dictates of capital. All this is lost in popular discourse today, and the general strike is seen as simply a kind of super-protest, which will make politicians do this or that, after which we go home and let the machinery of the status quo grind on as before, except with maybe a slightly different tempo.

None of this is to say that we should abandon attempts to influence politicians via mass militant protests. Its not the protesting that is liberal, but the general strategy that protests are used to support, and the fact that this strategy accepts the rule of capital and its institutions and functionaries. Protests that are primarily meant to influence/lobby politicians absolutely have a role to play for radical and revolutionary movements; but they should exist alongside an arsenal of different tactics, and should play a secondary role to those tactics which actually help develop autonomous working-class power, and which engage with issues of biopolitics and dual power and political economy.

After all, it is ultimately the threat of autonomous working-class power that actually forces big reforms in the first place. The ruling class only reacts to mass disorder and unrest when there emerges the real possibility that alternative forms of power are being developed. The New Deal was not passed because workers went on strike for reforms, but because key fractions of the capitalist class saw a real threat in the growth of the communist movement, and its links to the USSR and revolutionary movements elsewhere. It was to head off this revolutionary force that the New Deal was made. Likewise, despite big regular protests since 2014 around police violence, it wasn’t until this year when militants in Minneapolis took matters into their own hands and looted and torched a police precinct, that politicians started talking seriously about police reforms. The threat of an uncontrollable street movement, fighting back police and ransacking shopping malls, demonstrated a kind of independent power that frightens the ruling class enough to reform the system.

Thus, even radicals who are mainly focused on mobilizing for electoral-legislative victories via pressuring/lobbying politicians ought to support movements that are building out independent bases of working-class power. A Green New Deal won’t be made unless there is a growing popular working-class movement that is taking ecological regulation into its own hands, rather than simply asking politicians to do so. What is necessary isn’t (just) more sit-ins at DC offices, or even mass marches in urban centers, but more train blockades, mining site invasions, pipeline shutoffs, etc. — or, as Andreas Malm puts it, what is necessary is “to disrupt the normal routines of the fossil fuel industry”.

Tagged: anarchism, green new deal, marxism, organizing, socialism, strategy