The Sanders Moment and After

THE SANDERS MOMENT AND AFTER SOCIALIST STRATEGY AND STATE CRISIS 1 The Sanders Moment and After: Socialist Strategy and State Crisis Edited by Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian. Layout by Niko Block. Published October 2020 by the Socialist Project Toronto, Ontario, Canada. socialistproject.ca THE SANDERS MOMENT AND AFTER Socialist Strategy and State Crisis From the Streets to the State and Back Again: Learning From the Sanders Moment 6 Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian I. The Political Crisis Working Classes and the Rise of the New Right: Socialist Politics in the Era of Trump 18 Socialist Project Accountable Capitalism or Democratic Socialism? 24 Stephen Maher Why is There Now Socialism in the United States? 34 Ingar Solty II. Organizational Questions By Party or By Formation 43 Seth Adler The American Left Resurgent: Prospects and Tensions 62 Rafael Khachaturian and Sean Guillory Search for a Mass Politics: The DSA Beyond Bernie 79 Sarah Mason and Robert Cavooris Three Measures Against Racist Policing 92 April M. Short III. New Labour Formations The Political Revolution Goes to Work 105 Jane Slaughter Teachers’ Strikes: A New Class Politics Emerging 116 Eric Blanc Green New Deals: Climate Movements and Labour Unions 126 Alleen Brown with Jane McAlevey IV. Social Crises Global Capitalism, Global Pandemic, and the Struggle for Socialism 132 Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian Racism, COVID-19, and the Fight for Economic Justice 142 Marty Hart-Lansberg The California Disaster: What is the Link Between Wildfires and the Coronavirus? 150 Christoph Hermann Political Openings: Class Struggle During and After the Pandemic 156 Sam Gindin About the Socialist Project 175 4 Note on the Text Citations for these articles can be found in their online versions. We also wish to thank the photographers whose images are featured here for licensing their work under creative commons. 5 FROM THE STREETS TO THE STATE AND BACK AGAIN Learning From the Sanders Moment Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian he essays gathered in this collection were written in the midst of an escalating and multifaceted crisis situation in the United States.T They address the search for a socialist politics in a highly uncertain period during which the legitimacy – if not the structural persistence – of neoliberalism came under increasing strain. During that time, Bernie Sanders’ campaigns were seen as an apparent breakthrough for the left, allowing the widespread delegit- imation of neoliberal ideology to be expressed within the parame- ters of the party system. Their failure compels socialists to return to difficult organizational and strategic questions – and the answers are as uncertain as ever. As contemporary analyses of this period, these essays both shed light on the forces that led to the present conjunc- ture, and illustrate the political and organizational challenges that are relevant in the post-Sanders moment. The promise of Sanders spoke to a generation that came of age after the “anti-globalization movement” of the 1990s had come and gone, appearing to transcend hollow slogans about “changing the world without taking power.” Although Occupy Wall Street created important political and ideological space in the context of the economic fallout of the Recession, its suppression by the authorities as suddenly as it emerged onto the political scene a mere two months later left little if any organized infrastructure behind. The limits of what had been accomplished through mass demonstrations alone was apparent to those who came out of the recession facing a precarious future, with lowered standards of living, eroding social protections, growing state surveillance and repression, and a rapidly intensifying ecological crisis. For this new generation of activists and organizers, Sanders’ upstart 2016 campaign appeared to be a viable route to claiming 6 Sanders in Des Moines, Iowa. Gage Skidmore, 2019. a part of state power. Following Sanders in unabashedly proclaim- ing themselves ‘democratic socialists’, these activists flocked to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), transforming it practi- cally overnight from what was effectively a grassroots progressive caucus within the Democratic Party into a vehicle for a left politics still to be defined. Some of Sanders’ more ambitious supporters saw his campaign as the first step in an eventual “dirty break” from the Democratic Party. According to this strategy, socialists would run as Democrats for national, state, and municipal offices. These campaigns would serve as vehicles for strengthening the bonds between democratic socialists in office, on the one hand, and community organizers and rank-and-file trade union activists, on the other. Ultimately, it was argued, this would create the base for an autonomous socialist party and a split from the Democratic Party. Given the stranglehold of the two corporate parties on electoral politics, this seemed to offer the best path to a viable mass socialist party. 7 From the Polls to the Streets Sanders’ failure to secure the nomination in 2016, and again in 2020, cast doubt on this strategy in the eyes of many. To be sure, the magnitude of the defeat this represented was often overstated, as important electoral victories for democratic socialists across the country at the state and local level has clearly attested. Neverthe- less, there was a marked lack of clarity around when and how a ‘dirty break’ would be executed, and weak structures of democratic accountability between DSA-endorsed candidates elected to office and their organizational basis. In addition, despite the invocation of Andre Gorz’s concept of “non-reformist reforms” – whereby an accumulation of reforms would pave the way toward more radical social change – the con- crete steps from expanding programs for social provision to a deeper, revolutionary transformation was never clearly elaborated. In the spring of 2020, shortly after Sanders suspended his campaign, a mass wave of urban uprisings on a scale not seen since the 1960s swept the country in response to police brutality and the state coercion of black and brown working class people – which had become part and parcel of neoliberal urban governance. Despite put- ting forward his own plan for police reform, Sanders’ inability to play a leading role in these mass mobilizations seemed to further underscore the revival of street protest as the best path toward social change, and the limits of working “within and against” the Demo- cratic Party. The size of the demonstrations, the breadth of support they claimed, and their militant and radical nature has cast further doubt on the new socialists’ electoral strategy. Some have taken these mobilizations as an indication of a deep crisis of the ruling class, or even signaling the beginning of a pro- longed insurrectionary moment. Yet beyond the footage of burn- ing police precincts and “autonomous zones” remains a deeply-en- trenched two-party system which is supported by a capitalist class that has shown no sign of the kinds of splits or crises that would indicate anything like a revolutionary opening. None of the political forces currently on the scene seem capable of offering a serious al- ternative to the basic trajectory of neoliberal globalization, however ideologically discredited this has become. While the neoliberal center has consolidated its control over the Democratic Party, growing tendencies toward open fascism are 8 apparent in the rhetoric of Donald Trump as well as in the structures and practices within the coercive apparatus of the state. These were clearly visible, for instance, in the rapid deployments by fed- eral and state governments in response to the urban rebellions, as well as in the mobilization of various paramilitary groups that were apparently connected with them. But the consolidation of ruling class power around a hardening of the state and “law and order” has been advanced by both parties – albeit in different ways. This again presents the basic dilemma of how to move beyond street protests to break the deadlock of the two-party system. Beyond the Two-Party Deadlock? The pieces presented here trace how the convergence of these novel forces has its roots in the 2008 financial crisis. That moment sparked new challenges to the hegemonic alliance between the neoconserva- tive Republican and neoliberal Democratic forces – both in the form of the nativist Tea Party and the progressive Occupy movement. At the time, those twin pressures from left and right indicated growing ideological divergences both within and between the respective parties. The critical question now is where these conflicts within the two parties stand today – both in the form of ongoing tension within the Republican Party between Trump and what remains of the old establishment, on the one hand, and the Democrats’ successful squelching of Sanders’ “political revolution,” on the other. Positioning itself directly against the Obama-Clinton Demo- cratic Party and new social movements like #BlackLivesMatter, the first Trump campaign took advantage of the growing legitimacy crisis to secure an unexpected win. Bolstered by the explicitly coun- termajoritarian institutions of the American constitutional order – winning via the Electoral College despite a significant defeat in the popular vote, and governing in conjunction with Republican control of the Senate and the courts – Trump has succeeded to a large extent in bringing previously marginal far-right tendencies front and center within the GOP and creating space for fascist mobilization at the grassroots. Trump’s victory has also created intense contradic- tions within the state apparatuses, his feud against the “deep state” being just one example. The perpetuation of neoliberal hegemony depends, in part, on the stabilization of the two-party system through polarization and 9 negative partisanship between Republicans and Democrats. To that extent, Trump has exacerbated the dynamic of negative partisanship, with the “first past the post” electoral system reinforcing the party duopoly and driving partisan voters further apart into their respective camps.

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