What will it take for Sanderistas to energize a real social-democratic movement?

I thought this opinion piece in Washington Post from last October did a pretty good job of answering that question.  The article points out that previous very progressive presidential candidates (i.e. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the ’80s, which featured significant participation by former hardcore Marxist-Leninist groups) failed to translate their campaign into a longer-term movement, and the volunteer energy fizzled away after election season was over.  The only way that such campaigns can translate into real movements, the article argues, is for volunteers to create their own, independent organizations.

But forging a movement from a campaign, and building it in tandem with the many progressive constituencies that for any number of reasons have not flocked to Sanders’s standard and are not likely to — that’s the hard part. Devilishly hard.

This formidable task requires, first, that Sanders’s legions understand the unique historic opportunity that their coming together presents: That their victory in all probability won’t be putting Bernie in the White House, but creating a surging and enduring left. That, in turn, requires them to give as much thought to forming or joining autonomous post-campaign organizations, and envisioning post-campaign mobilizations, as they now do to advancing Sanders’s candidacy. Indeed, they need to start forming such organizations today, while they are together campaigning for Sanders, and in the process even reach out to other progressives who may not be for Sanders. These endeavors can’t and shouldn’t be undertaken by the Sanders campaign itself. They fall exclusively to the volunteers.

Unfortunately, its not clear whether Sanderistas will be able to put thought and energy into forming “autonomous post-campaign organizations” while the campaign is running hot; nor is it clear how many Sanderistas do actually see the campaign as a potential to build a larger movement, rather than a one-off chance to elect a progressive Messiah.

More difficult is the question of what more radical leftists (Marxists, socialists, anarchists, etc.) ought to be doing.  What would have been ideal is if we had strong, vibrant organizations that could reach out and relate to Sanderistas for recruitment or coalition-building; but as it stands, the radical left is in even worse shape than America’s social democrats, and existing radical organizations that try to absorb an influx of Sanderistas will likely turn into social democratic organizations themselves, rather than act as a radicalizing pole.

What is it with the absence of worker solidarity when it comes to migrants?

A common sentiment, even among some factions on the left, is that immigration undercuts wages and is generally a way for capitalists to attack the working class.  For example, check out this interview between Ezra Klein of Vox and Bernie Sanders.  When asked about increasing opportunities for people to immigrate into the US, up to the level of open borders, Sanders said:

It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

But we need to ask, why exactly it is that immigrants are doomed for low wages.  It makes sense if you think about the issue using the simple Econ101 supply-and-demand model: immigration = increased supply of labor = decreased price of labor = lower wages for everybody.

Except this isn’t how labor markets work at all, and leftists–especially old-school union leftists like Bernie Sanders–should understand this better than anybody.  Workers aren’t a commodity whose only value is that which is determined by the market–we’re alive and kicking, and are able to manipulate and deform and influence market structures in accordance with what our needs are, and what we think our wages–and that of our comrades–should be.  This is a basic, fundamental observation of any serious leftist ideology, whether you’re looking at what Karl Marx was talking about in the mid-1800s, or what Karl Polanyi was talking about in the mid-1900s.

The “solution” to immigration, and the downward pressure on wages that it exerts in a simple supply-and-demand model, should be to escalate labor organizing, workers’ solidarity networks, connections between native and migrant unions, and so forth–y’know, anything to increase the ability of the working class to defend and increase their wages, benefits, and rights.  Indeed, the major reason why immigrants (especially undocumented immigrants) have to work for such low wages today is arguably because their precarious status undermines any organizing or militancy they might want to engage in–and this precarious status is itself linked to the hostility of modern unions toward immigrants!  Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy (and self-defeating strategies).

If old-school unionists are serious about defending wages and benefits from the capitalists who want to exploit precarious migrant labor, they should be lending migrants a hand–not bolstering the very laws and institutions that force them to devalue their labor in the first place.  And thankfully, plenty are indeed doing just that.

Tuesday Interesting Links

• Excellent, in-depth piece on Rojava, the PKK and PYD, and on-the-ground observations about local civil society being built in accordance with the ideology of libertarian municipalism

• Reddit AMA with a PKK soldier who has been fighting in Syria

• Summary of a study published last year on the motivation of people fighting for Islamist groups in Syria; its less about religion than one might think

• Malcolm Harris writes, via a book review, on the history and future potential of cooperation between anarchists and Marxists

• Larry Summers on Bernie Sanders and the Federal Reserve

Create two, three, many Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders is pretty okay as far as politicians and presidential candidates go–but if his campaign is going to leave a lasting mark, his supporters are going to need to break from current strategies and think long and hard about how to create the conditions so that many more Bernie Sanders can emerge and win political power.

Even if Sanders wins the Presidency, he will find little support for his program among the more conservative, establishment-linked politicians that currently control Congress and both the mainstream political parties.  If social democratic politicians aren’t elected to the House, and social democratic technocrats aren’t part of the White House staff, then President Sanders is going to be hard pressed to implement social democratic policies.  Thus, Sanderistas are shooting themselves in the foot if they put all their energy and focus into the presidential race and talking about how awesome Sanders is, rather than trying to develop the political and social conditions to empower two, three, and many more Bernie Sanders to contest political power at all levels of government.

In many ways, this situation is very similar to the situation of Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist who was recently elected to lead the United Kingdom’s Labour Party.  Corbyn was elected to lead the Labour Party by popular vote, but finds himself paradoxically in charge of a party dominated by much, much more conservative politicians.  Thus, the task for those who rallied around Corbyn is to continue to organize and consolidate a broader movement that can fight conservative elements in the Labour Party just as vigorously as they fought for Corbyn’s election.

The task is the same for the Sanderistas this side of the pond.  Without a broader social democratic or democratic socialist or whatever movement that functions, grows, and consolidates itself above and beyond a single presidential campaign, then the large amount of energy and activity that has emerged around Sanders will dissipate.  And indeed, a broader mass movement is something that Bernie Sanders himself wants to see  (and indeed, needs to see).

Whether Sanderistas expand their political involvement to engage in longer-term organizations and preserve the networks that have emerged around the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign will ultimately determine whether this campaign ends up as something more than yet another one-off, transient upsurge of leftist-liberal optimism, like Obama’s first campaign and Occupy Wall Street were.