What is to Be Done? From Scattered Resistance to Mass Mobilization
By: Clay Hurand
Tags: Coronavirus, Organizing Strategies, Activism, Revolution

While the coronavirus pandemic strips naked the failures of neoliberalism, it also reveals how completely insufficient popular resistance and left-activism are in the US. The government’s response to the pandemic, characterized by total corporate domination, is a potent reminder that our movements are nowhere near having the capacity to make any substantive change: If we cannot even hamper outright corporate looting during a crisis, regardless of which of the two corporate parties is in power, then we are nowhere near winning our vision(s) of a better world.

Bernie Sanders’ loss is further evidence that electoral politics is not the opening we need to make the swift and urgent system-change that ending poverty and averting ecological catastrophe requires. Our elections are fundamentally broken even from a basic procedural standpoint, and the corporate media, which has an outsized influence over the political judgements of the electorate, ignores or is outright hostile to politicians running on transformative platforms. While “democratic socialists” (who are in practice, moderate social democrats) have won some important victories, sprinkling a few insurgents into the margins of political power ultimately poses no real threat to the corporate oligarchy.

Under corporate authoritarianism, winning the “ideological struggle,” as Bernie Sanders said in his concession speech, is nothing to be very hopeful about. Concentrated wealth has such an immense stranglehold on our society that popular opinion, especially if it conflicts with dominant corporate interests, does not translate into material change. As Albert Einstein wrote in his essay Why Socialism?, “members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature [emphasis mine].” A true challenge to corporate power, the source of legislative corruption, will not come from within the legislature, but from a national extra-electoral mobilization. The coronavirus pandemic is a better time than any to start building at least one institution that can help catalyze such a movement.

The coronavirus pandemic is a wellspring of organizing potential, yet there are no institutions with the capacity to translate that potential into substantive change, let alone a government response that puts human life over corporate profits. Resistance efforts and labor actions that have exploded as a result of the pandemic lack strong institutional channels that unite them; they are extremely fragmented nationwide, even within locality. Seattle City council member Kshama Sawant recently described the inadequacy of scattered pandemic activism as the following:

“In addition to mutual aid we need to get politically organized for collective action….because those of us who are doing mutual aid have so little and most of the wealth lies in the hands of a small minority at the top. Mutual aid, while it is fueled with great feeling and genuine compassion, can only go so far. Just to give a concrete example, statistics show that 90% of go fund me campaigns [for healthcare] fail for the simple reason that most of us who care about.. our community members have very little to give. The healthcare crisis does require us to wage a political battle to win Medicare for All, and I would go even farther to win socialized medicine. If we just focus on rent relief and mutual aid it is really [just] a bailout for the people at the top who are responsible for the way this crisis is unfolding.”

Getting a fair pandemic and recession response from our government, just like moving towards socialized medicine, requires a mass mobilization that challenges the source of the problem, corporate power and capitalism itself. Scattered mutual aid, rent strikes, car protests, etc., are necessary, but without a unified, nationally-coordinated political mobilization, corporate power is going to emerge from this crisis far more entrenched than before. As Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson recently put it, “if we don’t use this moment to press forth the structural demands that we need we are just going to give the right all the power to reorganize society to make it more brutal and repressive than it already is.” We need a concentration of our forces to challenge the corporate state, but there are no existing institutions with the capacity to catalyze such a unification.

Big Labor? DSA?

Big labor is by and large not a force for leftward structural change. Even if union membership doubled in the US, if the majority of that new membership went to mainstream labor institutions with “centrist” leadership that oppose policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, we would not find ourselves much closer to system change. Although increased union membership helps workers secure better pay and benefits, major labor institutions in the US are simply not democratic enough, militant, or radical enough. We need new institutions fighting for system change that can build membership at the scale of a union like the AFL-CIO, which has nearly 13 million members.

The Democratic Socialists of America, the only nationwide radical-left organization in the US with a shred of influence, is also not a reliable vehicle to build the movement our moment calls for, and likely never will be. Despite having an oversized presence in social and left-media, as of March 2020, DSA had a total membership of 65,000, and only a portion of that membership is “active.” It is difficult to imagine the organization building active membership at the rate it would need to have any true revolutionary potential; DSA’s fringe-branding and internal culture simply does not lend itself to a mass-politics in the US. DSA is a social club that organizes cultural-leftists behind a lifestyle-brand more than it is a labor institution that organizes the working class behind a structural agenda. While DSA is a positive development on the left and some chapters are doing good work in their communities, we need radical institutions that are better-resourced and can more successfully organize the working class.

What would such an institution look like? The following is a loose step by step on how to build an organization that could use this pandemic to catalyze a nation-wide, multi-racial, multi-generational political mobilization:

Towards a Mass Mobilization

The first step is gathering a relatively small, diverse team of like-minded organizers to establish an organizational framework (decision making procedures, delegational structure, etc) that strikes a balance between too much centralization and too little. While an excess of democracy or decentralization tends towards discord, inefficiency, and dissolution, too much centralization and bureaucracy tends towards mismanagement, corruption, and a leadership that becomes alienated from the organization’s rank-and-file. There is plenty of history of dissolved or corrupted movements and institutions that have not struck a healthy balance to consider. The structure of the organization should be something completely new, something that adopts the successes of current and past left institutions and learns from their inadequacies or outright failures.

The organization would essentially be Bernie without Bernie. Its policy goals and scope should be nearly identical to the Sanders campaign, which had a tried-and-true movement plank. If a candidate running for political office can build such a broad base of support behind a national agenda, then an insurgent extra-electoral institution with the same or similar vision could also ostensibly garner similar membership and support. If a new hybrid labor/community organizing institution were able to build even half the fundraising machine the Sanders campaign did, its organizing scope could be massive: A dollar goes a lot further building community and labor power than it does being sunk into the unbelievably wasteful elections-industrial complex. This would be especially true of an organization that has a more balanced pay-scale than non-profit organizing programs, presidential campaigns, or labor unions: There is no good reason why any organization fighting for a more just system should pay leadership and management roles an annual salary that is several times larger than on-the-ground roles.

After establishing a basic institutional framework the organization would have to pool together significant funds to begin hiring base-building organizers to grow its capacity. The speed and scale of the organizing needed to build a national mobilization out of this crisis would require a lot of money that would have to be pooled together in short-order. It cannot be launched solely from crowdfunding, it would require some start up funds in the form of grants or big donations. Taking big donations is impure, yes, but no new organization, regardless of who is starting it, could pool together enough small donations to mobilize at the scale this moment calls for. One of the effects of this pandemic could be that wealthy donors become more willing to give money to courageous and transformational organizations; the failures of both the neoliberal status quo and the institutional liberal activist circuit are so stark that such fundraising might be easier than one would expect. The organization would publicize a set of terms attached to the funds to demonstrate complete transparency and show that the money is being given solely out of support for the purpose of the organization, not in service of an ulterior aim. The long term goal would be to sustain the organization through sliding-scale membership fees, small donations, or other alternative means that do not create a potential conflict of interest or the appearance of corruption.

The first phase of the organization would be based around getting a just pandemic and recession response for the most vulnerable populations and resisting corporate consolidation, but the longer term vision would be to endure as a political bloc. The organization would start by unifying activist efforts at the local level and building membership within state programs which would be done in part by hiring and providing stipends to organizers already doing work in their communities and or workplaces. These organizers would aim to build membership by consolidating pandemic-related activism (rent strikes, mutual aid campaigns, decarceral activism, etc.) and orienting communities towards a unified, national struggle.

Each state program would be organized around a set of demands specific to their own state legislature, but national demands would be consistent across state programs. State umbrellas would be split into three base building programs with their own particular strategies, but unified in their demands:

1. National Unemployed People’s Council of [*insert state here*]

2. National Essential Workers’ Movement of [*insert state here*]

3. The Movement for People Over Profit of [*insert state here*]

Unemployed People’s Councils

38 million Americans have filed for unemployment as of March 2020, many of whom are having trouble securing benefits. Unemployed councils across the US could put significant pressure on state legislatures in places like Florida, where only 7.6% of unemployed people were receiving benefits in April of this year. According to a Columbia University study, 21 million people are likely to fall below the poverty line as a result of pandemic-caused unemployment. Given the extent of government neglect, whether or not we build a political mobilization on the basis of unemployment could be a matter of life and death for many Americans. A well-staffed and structured national organizing program could build a significant base of our nation’s unemployed which would be filled with dynamic people from a range of backgrounds who could lend a variety of skills to the organization. For example, given that mass layoffs are currently occurring in the journalism industry, unemployed journalists could be hired full time or given stipends to act as the press arm of the organization.

National Essential Worker’s Movement

Workers whose labor is essential to the functioning of society are systematically undervalued and exploited in our capitalist system. The US could use at least one organization aimed at mobilizing “essential workers” into a national movement aimed at challenging that system. Labor organizers would be recruited out of the many scattered wildcat strikes that are occurring across the country and provided with stipends or full time positions. These staff would build consciousness and demonstrate that a national struggle against neoliberalism is, like bargaining with one’s employer for higher pay, in workers’ immediate self interest. The ultimate aim of the essential worker organizing program would be to build enough membership to be capable of coordinating a cross-sector strike that could paralyze the basic functions of our society. An organization that has enough membership and the institutional courage to even appear capable of staging a general strike could have significant leverage over the federal government; even a relatively small base of organized essential workers at the national level, if working in tandem with a national unemployed persons movement, would be a stronger system-wide bargaining unit than anything that currently exists in the US.

The Broader Movement For People Over Profit

The third branch of each state program would be base-building among community members who are not essential workers or unemployed, but are sympathetic to the policy goals of the organization. This base could include people who are retired, people who work from home, and members of the middle and professional classes who agree with the organization’s policy agenda. System change, and even fighting for a just pandemic and recession response cannot be the burden of those who are already living the most precarious lives; it is the moral responsibility of more wealthy and privileged classes to stand alongside the working class and bear the burden. If millions of people signed on to a letter directed to the White House and Congress threatening a general strike, members of the middle and professional classes would be mobilized to sign on to the threat. If there were a general strike, then those in the broader movement umbrella (including the unemployed) would be called to share in the risk and join the picket.

In summary, the coronavirus pandemic is a major opportunity to build power behind a transformative agenda, but we lack institutions with the capacity to turn this crisis into a political opportunity. While running insurgents for office is not a fool’s errand, when it comes to making the structural changes our moment calls for, electoralism is a dead end. Although the organizing process I laid out here is very general and unrealistic in the short term, it is meant to demonstrate the scale, type of organization, and level of coordination that we would need to stage a political revolution no matter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

The three branches of the organization, unemployed councils, essential workers, and a broader movement for people over profit, are bases that, if operating at a large enough scale and working in tandem behind a specific set of goals, could be capable of breaking through the corporate power structure. If we do not attempt to build new movement infrastructure that can consolidate our forces at an historic scale, then we will remain divided and conquered by our ever-concentrating corporate foes.