[Since Bernie Sanders’s defeat in 2020 and the start of the
COVID-19 pandemic, the US left has been largely disorganized. The time
is ripe for Bernie and the Squad to create a new mass organization to
confront today’s crises. ]
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TO WIN A REVOLUTION, WE NEED A NEW MASS ORGANIZATION  
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Jeremy Gong Nick French
August 6, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Since Bernie Sanders’s defeat in 2020 and the start of the
COVID-19 pandemic, the US left has been largely disorganized. The time
is ripe for Bernie and the Squad to create a new mass organization to
confront today’s crises. _

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez participate in an Amazon
Labor Union rally, April 24, 2022. , David Dee Delgado / Getty Images

 

It’s hard for leftists in the United States to find much to
celebrate these days. After the excitement of Bernie Sanders’s
victories in the early 2020 Democratic primaries, our hopes were
dashed when the center consolidated around Joe Biden and handed him
the nomination. The wave of inspiring uprisings against police
brutality later that summer was followed by disappointment too, as
demands for serious reforms to attack racial and economic injustice
were co-opted or sidelined. The Left, as some have put it, finds
itself in purgatory
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Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s administration has turned out to be what his
most astute critics predicted
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a presidency that, despite some early bright spots, has failed to
meaningfully tackle economic inequality, the climate crisis, or much
of anything else. Biden’s approval ratings are now at record lows
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as inflation
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batters the economy. (It’s unclear whether a last-minute
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compromise
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deal
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with West Virginia senator Joe Manchin on climate, health care, and
taxes will salvage the administration’s popularity.) On top of that,
the Supreme Court is rolling back
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abortion rights and threatening
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our democracy, and Biden and Democratic Party leaders are dragging
their feet
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on any sort of response. The increasingly reactionary GOP now seems
set for victory in the midterms.

There are some positive signs: Left-wing ideas are more mainstream
than they have been in decades, in part thanks to Sanders’s
presidential campaigns. Along with other insurgent politicians like
“Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib,
Sanders has put policies like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal,
and free public college on the agenda. Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA) has nearly one hundred thousand dues-paying members,
four members in Congress, and dozens of elected officials at the state
and local levels. The labor movement is stirring again, with this
year’s successful Amazon warehouse unionization
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effort in Staten Island, the ongoing wave of Starbucks organizing
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and the election of a strike-ready leadership to the
1.3-million-strong International Brotherhood of Teamsters
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Still, the Left hasn’t been able to coordinate effective political
interventions at the federal level, let alone exercise power. With
leftists still a tiny minority in Congress, progressive priorities
like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal are off the agenda, and
even less ambitious reforms are consistently stymied by conservative
Democrats like Joe Manchin
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And despite growing their legislative presence, socialists and their
allies have failed to expand beyond deep-blue districts
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Sanders’s presidential campaigns brought in tens of thousands
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of volunteers, millions of voters
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and a huge number of small-dollar campaign contributions
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(many from working-class donors
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But it wasn’t enough to win, and the underlying theory of the
campaigns — that class-struggle rhetoric and a popular platform of
wealth redistribution could turn out masses of working-class nonvoters
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to carry Sanders to the nomination — didn’t pan out. Despite the
popularity of Sanders-style politics and mass discontent with the
status quo, socialism remains largely the preserve of young,
college-educated professionals
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solidly Democratic districts — isolated from
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working-class constituency it purports to represent.

In a phrase, Sanders’s “political revolution” simply never came.

There are many theories as to why Sanders didn’t win. Part of the
explanation, though, must involve the lack of working-class
organization
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(including unions
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and left institutions. The defeat and disorganization of the Left and
labor since the 1970s has deprived the working class of the struggles
and organizations that undergird them — what Friedrich Engels called
“schools of class war.” Having never felt the power of collective
struggle
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many voters were understandably skeptical that Sanders’s campaign
would deliver. And with most Democratic voters taking their cues
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from the corporate media and party elites, Sanders simply didn’t
have a strong enough media counterweight.

Today, the absence of mass working-class organization continues to
haunt the US left. With the Right putting fundamental liberties like
reproductive freedom on the chopping block and the Democrats asleep at
the wheel, the time is ripe to build a mass organization that can make
desperately needed political interventions. And we think that Sanders
and the Squad need to take the lead in building such an organization.

Movements Need Organizations

The Left’s recent defeats — compounded by COVID-19, which has made
in-person organizing much more difficult — have fostered
demoralization and demobilization. But much of the post-2020 malaise
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attributed to the inability of activists — let alone millions of
ordinary people — to keep participating in a movement that has the
power to change the world, especially at the national level, where the
stakes are highest. While activists have supported impressive
campaigns and righteous protests, millions of former Bernie supporters
understandably feel helpless amid political and ecological crises.

Still, there are inspiring examples for the Left to build on. In
Richmond, California, the Richmond Progressive Alliance
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(RPA) has beaten landlords and Chevron
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majorities on and off for over a decade. The Vermont Progressive Party
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continues to be a significant force in state politics, even holding
the office of lieutenant governor from 2017 to 2021. In New York City
and Chicago, DSA-backed elected officials have formed socialist
caucuses.

These efforts are exciting because they elevate the political process
above individual candidates and fleeting election campaigns, fuse
legislative fights with permanent membership organizations, and create
clear and oppositional political identities distinct from the
Democratic Party. As labor activist and RPA leader Mike Parker wrote
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earlier this year, building broader political organization is the
“main task when it comes to political action,” not a “side
issue.” Organization is how we make Bernie’s “Not me, us” more
than a slogan.

Without organization, it’s hard to build, let alone sustain, the
type of mobilization needed for Bernie’s political revolution.
Massive protests wane without clear demands, let alone a compelling
strategy of how to win them. Thousands of progressives either don’t
know how to start building campaigns or lack the resources to do so.
Movements around important issues get co-opted by corporate
Democrats’ reelection campaigns
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grant-seeking nonprofits, and prominent social media personalities who
aren’t democratically accountable to any base. Ongoing organization
is also essential to train onetime protesters into skilled,
politically sophisticated, and lifelong movement cadre.

In electoral politics, progressive candidates face enormous pressure
to avoid criticizing establishment Democrats. Once elected, lone
progressives have few resources to push against the business-friendly
common sense at every level of government: corporate candidates can
rely on well-funded lobbyists to help write legislation, educate the
public, and even mobilize supporters; anti-corporate candidates must
do this all on their own. Without a broader organization at their
back, it’s no wonder that the progressive
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able to be constantly fighting on all fronts at once
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Only mass organization can bring together the resources and the people
of the Sanders movement on a permanent basis. The idea of such a
party-like organization has been popular on the Left since the end of
Sanders’s 2016 campaign, popularized in a 2016 _Jacobin_ article by
Seth Ackerman
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and expanded
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on
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recently [[link removed]] by
many [[link removed]]
others
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If the Left had a mass party–like organization in 2020, the end of
Sanders’s second presidential race wouldn’t have meant losing the
feeling that, together, we could change the world. While supporters of
Sanders and the Squad can donate to individual election campaigns when
asked, there is no way to permanently join and help build the movement
these elected officials appear to lead. Many of us called for
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Sanders to convert his 2020 campaign infrastructure
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into a permanent organization
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after the campaign, to no avail.

Such a party-like organization could have helped progressives in
Congress and their many supporters win more of the progressive items
in negotiations over Build Back Better since 2021. As Ben Beckett
argued
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in _Jacobin_ last fall, Sanders and the Squad could have built a
powerful movement to pressure Manchin and Arizona senator Kyrsten
Sinema by mobilizing with activists, including DSA members,
battle-hardened teacher unionists — who led historic mass strikes in
West Virginia and Arizona in 2018 — and other progressives. Such a
movement might also have pushed the Biden administration to use its
bully pulpit
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or the power of executive action
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enact sweeping change (like canceling student debt). The movement to
defend abortion rights desperately needs this kind of mobilization
today.

In a similar vein, Neal Meyer writes
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that “mass mobilizations require mass organization. We have to put
the days of lone-wolf politicians acting on their own . . . behind
us.” A Sanders-led party-like organization with permanent local
chapters across the country could have coordinated this movement with
progressive electoral challenges in West Virginia and Arizona and
pressure campaigns against Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi in
California and Chuck Schumer in New York. A mass organization could in
turn bolster Sanders and the Squad to fight for a better deal in
Congress, as well as support local and state-level candidates
nationwide — including in purple or red districts where the Left
does not yet have a foothold.

Ultimately, we need something like the organization described here to
help convince millions of working people who are disconnected from
politics that a better world is possible through collective action,
and to sustain mass activity once it’s in motion. That’s how we
can build the base that will elect Sanders-style progressives and
democratic socialists by the hundreds across the country and grow a
movement that can exert bottom-up pressure through mass disruption.

Build Back Bernie

It is premature to write a precise blueprint for what this party-like
organization should look like. But there are a few principles that
should guide us.

First, socialists and progressives should call on Bernie and the Squad
to participate in building and leading this new organization. For
better or worse, only these national political figures have the
resources and legitimacy to bring together millions of supporters and
many disparate threads of progressive activism into a single
organization. Their leadership would make the project much more likely
to succeed, and sooner.

Second, such an organization should be democratic and
membership-based. Local and national leaders should be elected by the
members, and members should be able to influence the policy platforms
of elected officials like Sanders through conventions and internal
debates. As Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle write in a different
context, democracy is power
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organizations can give their members a sense of ownership over
strategies and campaigns, grow the sophistication and size of their
activist base, refine their approach based on real-world experience,
and deal with competing ideas without alienating the minority of
activists who don’t get their way.

Third, the group should support progressive election campaigns, but
also year-round organizing outside the halls of official politics. The
history of progressive movements shows that mass disruption
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outside of the normal political process, is critical to securing
legislative wins. No anti-corporate political project will be
successful if the Left isn’t also helping build fighting unions and
social movements.

Fourth, a progressive party-like organization should be
working-class-funded, primarily through membership dues. That means
rejecting all corporate and billionaire donations, large unreported
donations from anonymous sources, and donations from PACs,
foundations, or other groups that launder capitalist cash.
Campaign-finance statutes complicate efforts to coordinate election
spending, but David Duhalde
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Ackerman
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have both explained how such a nonparty political organization could
navigate the law.

Finally, this organization should be effectively nonpartisan, meaning
it will support candidates running as Democrats _and_ as independents,
depending on what makes sense in a given local context. Sanders
himself has run as an independent for Congress, but caucuses with the
Democrats, and made his biggest impact by running in the Democratic
presidential primaries. This flexibility will be needed both to build
an independent political brand that resonates with voters sick of both
corporate parties and to keep together leftists and progressives who
might currently disagree about the long-term future of the Democratic
Party. In the near term, though, the organization can appeal to voters
who are still loyal to the Democrats or who are worried about the
“spoiler effect” in districts where that is a concern.

Along with mobilizing
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to defend abortion and other rights, activists and groups that believe
in this organizational vision should plan local and national
convenings to discuss how to make it a reality. We’re members of DSA
and believe DSA has an important role to play in backing this effort.
But we also believe that a Sanders-led party-like organization must
have a broader ideological base than DSA, since today’s fights are
for near-term reforms, not for overthrowing capitalism. As with our
election campaigns, unions, and protests, our mass political
organizations should be open to the millions of people who want to
defend democracy and support Sanders’s agenda but aren’t ready to
join an explicitly anti-capitalist organization.

 

Other membership organizations and nonprofits like the Sunrise
Movement and Justice Democrats, local or state-level political
formations like the RPA and the Vermont Progressive Party, grassroots
groups fighting for economic and social justice, and progressive
unions like National Nurses United, which hosted the People’s Summit
after Sanders’s first run in 2016, should also sign on to this
project.

A New Political Moment

Sanders has attempted to start a mass membership organization before:
Our Revolution, which sprung up in the wake of his 2016 presidential
run. For all its accomplishments, though, Our Revolution isn’t
suited to play the role of a mass party–like organization right now.

First, though at least some chapters
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had democratic mechanisms, members were not empowered to
democratically determine the national organization’s strategy.
Second, Sanders himself was not involved
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organization, which likely hindered the group’s appeal and political
effectiveness. Third, as Duhalde noted in 2020, most of Our
Revolution’s staff left the organization to work for Sanders’s
2020 campaign, and some of its key early leaders are no longer
involved.

That points to another problem with Our Revolution: it was formed at a
particular moment (post-2016), with many activists no doubt expecting
another Sanders presidential run, and with a particular strategy of
attempting to reform the Democratic Party from within. But that
political moment is over: Sanders lost the 2020 primary, progressives
have largely found themselves marginalized by the Democratic
establishment, and we need everyone who was activated by the Bernie
campaign and more — including Sanders himself and the Squad — to
come together to devise a new strategy. We should reconsider Our
Revolution’s strategy of running for internal Democratic Party
positions
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for instance, and think about establishing a political identity more
independent
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the Democrats.

The new left has much to be proud of since 2016, but the organizations
and tactics that got us this far aren’t enough going forward. If we
want to fight for democracy and justice, and build the power to make
more ambitious changes in the future, we need to get serious about our
strategy. Isolated protests, strikes, and election campaigns have
brought many of us into politics. But we need these to add up to more
than the sum of their parts so we can wage the struggle that
establishment Democrats can’t or won’t.

We know the creation of the kind of group we’re calling for is a
long shot. But we’ve seen the ability of Sanders and the Squad to
inspire millions, and we believe they have the power to start building
the effective, broad left organization that this moment demands.

Jeremy Gong is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in
California’s East Bay.

Nick French is an assistant editor at Jacobin.

The new issue of Jacobin is out now. Subscribe today
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yearlong print and digital subscription.

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