Bernie Sanders has spent much of the last eight months touring the deepest red parts of the country. Earlier this month, for example, he held a rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he told a packed room that West Virginia is a “working-class state” that should stop electing politicians who serve “the billionaires.”
That simple message, delivered in a place where left-wing politics don’t normally leave much of a footprint, is exactly what we need to communicate with the as-yet unconvinced. All too often, the Left forgets that this is the point of our politics. At protests and conventions, in reading groups and organizing meetings, one sometimes gets the uncomfortable sense that instead we’re competing to show off the depths of our radicalism.
From maximalist slogans about abolishing police and the family to debates about identity politics or Palestine or the role of the Democratic Party, the same dynamics keep playing out. Leftists have become excessively concerned with proving our political bona fides to each other, or even with gaining the approval of the tiny fraction of the American public with positions to the left of standard-issue democratic socialism.
Amid the grandstanding and one-upsmanship, it’s easy to lose sight of our real task: to win over the hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans who currently stand somewhere to our right.
Socialists have always had what our comrades in previous generations called “maximum” programs, or ambitious long-term horizons, and “minimum” programs, or proposals for short-term steps in the right direction. Workers’ parties around the world have stood for collective ownership and bottom-up democratic control of the means of production, but they’ve also advocated for immediate reforms under capitalism like universal health care, better labor laws, and higher wages. Even in the Communist Manifesto, along the way to their stirring conclusion about the workers of the world rising up because they have a “world to win,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took the time to advocate a platform of immediate demands that included items like “a progressive or graduated income tax” and “free education for all children in public schools,” which have long since become a reality in societies like the United States.
This simultaneous pursuit of short-term reforms and a long-term transformation could be criticized from two perspectives. On the one hand, someone who sees the value of ideas such as Medicare for All, tuition-free college, or Zohran Mamdani’s plan of building cheap municipal grocery stores in New York City might question the point of combining the pursuit of these aims, which can meaningfully improve people’s lives in the real world, with anti-capitalist horizons. Why mix the rational politics of reform with what can seem like silly utopian wishcasting?
On the other hand, convinced anti-capitalist radicals might question the value of combining a critique of the fundamental flaws of our society with proposals for tinkering with the status quo. Why keep one foot in the politics of the present, accepting all the limitations that come with that, instead of marching with both feet toward the society we actually want?
One thing the first critique misses is that, even aside from purely ideological objections to big-picture injustices like worker exploitation, there are pragmatic reasons not to stop at incremental improvements. As Danish parliamentarian Pelle Dragsted argues in his book Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy, when social reforms leave the “oligarchic power” of capitalists in place, they will always find ways to translate that economic power into political influence and use it to roll back our progress. Radically restraining (and eventually eliminating) their power is necessary to safeguard what’s already been won.
Until we can institute those fundamental changes to the economic power structure, we need to design reforms with the goal of increasing social ownership in the economy and putting the working class in a more secure position for the next round of struggle. For example, it’s a lot easier to convince people to take risks in labor organizing when they don’t have to worry that being fired would cause them and their family to lose their health care. Therefore, universal tax-funded health insurance is an excellent short-term goal, because winning it will shift the balance of power in workers’ favor. This type of strategic thinking requires keeping the long-term view in mind.
What the second critique misses is that, in addition to short-term reforms making people’s lives better and nudging society closer to our egalitarian ideals, there’s a fundamental strategic reason for socialists to struggle for reforms. Right now, the vast majority of the population isn’t on board with our maximum program. Capitalism is the only system they’ve ever known, and it can almost feel like it’s baked into the structure of reality.
Many ordinary working-class people will roll their eyes at long-term radical socialist visions, and even many who agree that getting past capitalism sounds like a nice idea (and might even tell pollsters that, if someone asks) don’t take it seriously enough as a real-world possibility to even change their voting behavior on that basis, let alone become active participants in a radical movement that might entail taking real risks.
What is possible in the short term, though, is assembling majoritarian coalitions to fight to renegotiate the social contract in ways that benefit the working class within the existing system. Effective socialist organizers have always looked for the sweet spot where items on our socialist wish list overlap with what currently sounds reasonable to the majority of the general public. Those are the places where real possibilities for mass politics emerge.
If we could snap our fingers and make it so, for example, we’d eliminate every trace of private capitalist power from the health care system. Ideally, we would nationalize every hospital and make all the doctors and nurses who work in them employees of an American National Health Service. Hell, we’d even make the hospitals democratically self-managed by committees of those employees.
But that vision is a long way off. Right now, we are tasked with assembling a functional movement to make progress on decommodifying health care. For that task, we need to identify a demand that will first appeal to the majority of people and second put us on better footing if we win it. The sweet spot here is eliminating the private insurance industry. We call this reform Medicare for All as a way of connecting it to the familiar social programs that the majority of people already support and enjoy.
Another example: In foreign policy, if we could simply snap our fingers and make it so, we would transform Israel/Palestine into a single secular democratic state — no, a single secular democratic socialist republic — with equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea. I’ve argued many times and in many places that a “one-state solution” would be the most just possible outcome. But American socialists have no direct means of compelling this outcome on the other side of the world. Rather than simply drop the mic after articulating the maximalist program, we need to orient ourselves politically and figure out how to distinguish between our friends and enemies in present-day battles.
That doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands and accept that Israel will remain an exclusionary ethnostate until the end of time. But whether someone shares our in-principle anti-Zionism is less pressing right now than whether they’re opposed to the genocide in Gaza and willing to join with us in calling for an immediate cutoff of all US weapons and support.
Those few brave Israelis who face jail for refusing to serve in the Israel Defense Forces are certainly our allies, even if many of them aren’t yet ready to totally reimagine the basis of their society. And it would be very foolish to denounce every American politician who isn’t on board with our maximum program for Israel/Palestine as a “genocidal Zionist,” including the ones who are actively spearheading efforts to cut off American weapons.
As a final illustration of the principle, every serious American socialist wishes that we had a mass workers’ party, a historical necessity when it comes to effective class struggle. However, we can’t simply create one out of thin air. We need to build the constituency for such a party over time, and to do that, we need to get working people’s attention and win their support within the existing two-party system. If we announce tomorrow that all of the Left’s candidates will run on the ballot line of a new Democratic Socialist Party, we will end up like the Green Party: correct on most of the issues but lucky if we even crack 1 percent of the vote.
Instead of pulling a Jerry Maguire (“Who’s coming with me?”), we’re better off running candidates like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani in Democratic Party nomination contests. They can use those campaigns and elected positions to force confrontations with establishment Democrats, which increasingly align socialists with the majority of voters against the centrist politicians and their wealthy donors. It’s a long, frustrating road with no guarantee of success, but it’s the only road that doesn’t immediately end in a wall.
There are several crucial techniques in the art of mass politics. The first is to strategically center issues that can get large portions of the population moving in the right direction. The second is to prioritize those popular demands that, if they become reality, can help set the stage for fights for more and more ambitious demands at later stages of struggle. And the third is to do this without disguising any of our fondest long-term ambitions or giving up on persuading whoever might be open to them right now.
Meeting all of these criteria is challenging in practice. But one thing is certain: nothing good can come from angrily articulating our maximum program, demonizing all who have reservations, and alienating everyone who isn’t already on board.
It would be a serious strategic mistake to turn maximalist positions on fully nationalized health care, a one-state solution in Israel/Palestine, or a mass independent workers’ party into litmus tests for political allyship. But at least those are all intelligible and desirable end goals. What’s worse is that some radicals insist on maximalist demands that don’t really make sense.
One example of this is the demand for police abolition. Policing, especially in poor neighborhoods afflicted by high crime rates, is often aggressive and militarized. There’s a real and troubling power imbalance between law enforcement and ordinary citizens, and this imbalance is frequently abused. There are numerous necessary reforms to policing that any socialist worth their salt would support. And beyond the sphere of law enforcement itself, we desperately need to implement social programs that stabilize people’s lives, decrease crime, and reduce mass incarceration — like better jobs, higher wages, improved education and housing, expanded mental health care, enhanced substance abuse prevention and recovery, and so on.
These reforms are part of any socialist’s minimal program on criminal justice. And on the ground, many people who call themselves police abolitionists seem to focus on activism around these demands. The problem has to do with the slogan itself, which suggests that our maximum program should be to completely eliminate policing from society. But even in an advanced socialist society in the distant future, where poverty is something people read about in history books, some people will still break laws and hurt each other. We need to have some way of dealing with those people besides decentralized vigilante justice, if only because we care about the rights of criminal defendants.
When pressed to explain the meaning of “police abolition,” some proponents argue that they really do envision a society in which all crime will wither away. This isn’t very realistic. Others insist we shouldn’t take it so literally anyway: there will be crime and we’ll therefore need something like policing, but it will be totally different from the police we see today. If so, though, why use a slogan that conveys the impression to any casual listener that there will be no dedicated law enforcement at all? That’s both misleading and deeply alienating.
When people hear abolition, they think of the fight against slavery, when abolitionists not only wanted to completely eliminate slavery but, furthermore, to end it immediately. Thus the phrase “police abolition” also makes many people think proponents are advocating getting rid of all policing now — which, in an unequal, unstable, and heavily armed society with a crime rate already far above the global average, would likely mean a dystopian nightmare of private security for the rich and Mad Max–style chaos for everyone else. You could hardly devise a worse way to connect politically to average people.
To be fair, most self-identified prison abolitionists seem to recognize that getting rid of all police and prisons in the short term isn’t realistic. And many of them even realize that it’s not a desirable end-term goal. So why use the term “prison abolitionism” at all? Its main effect is to convey that all efforts to achieve a desirable minimum program — like demilitarized police departments and better mental health supports — are connected to a long-term goal that no one really believes is a good idea.
The slogan on some fringes of the socialist left about abolishing the family makes even less sense. Police and prisons may be a grim necessity, but it’s easy to wish we didn’t need them. The same can’t be said about the family, which hundreds of millions of people experience as a vital source of solace and connection. The overwhelming majority of ordinary people, of all backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, and ethnicities, see family life as a good thing. We should reject the nonsense of conservatives who scold people who don’t want to start families or who have a restrictive idea of what counts as a family. But we’re not going to get anywhere attacking an institution that is, for many people, a last refuge from capitalist alienation.
Our politics should be about making it easier to form families for people who want to (and, of course, possible to abstain for people who don’t want to). Even long-term socialist politics is all about giving people the material support they need to live their lives however they please, as long as they aren’t violating the rights of others, not telling them how to live one way or the other. It’s well and good to say that those who want to experiment with more communal living arrangements should have the space to do so, but if (as seems likely) many people will always prefer to live in private households with one co-parent and their children, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Many self-identified family abolitionists emphasize the value of giving people various forms of social support so they don’t need to rely on their family members to meet important needs. That is a desirable minimum program that any socialist would cosign. But making it easier for people who want to exit an institution (while also making it easier for those who want to enter it) is simply not the same thing as abolishing it. So, once again, the maximalist slogan is not only deeply alienating to ordinary people of all backgrounds but far from an accurate description of a defensible ambition.
As with prison abolitionists, in my experience, family abolitionists will often evade these inconvenient questions by retreating to a high level of vagueness or insisting that no one gets to have an opinion until they’ve mastered dense reading lists of abolitionist literature.
It’s hard to avoid the sneaking suspicion that, for some activists, the appeal of maximalist slogans is precisely that they sound so extreme. Rather than soberly concluding that some radical proposition is correct and then strategizing about how to present it reasonably and gradually persuade as many people of it as possible, the slogans sometimes seem to be preferred on account of their apparent radicalness, even if they have to be interpreted in vague and nonliteral ways.
The whole spectacle is a worrying sign of a basic misunderstanding in some parts of the Left about the guiding mission of socialist politics. Foregrounding maximalist demands, whether they be intelligible or unintelligible, only makes sense if you think we should be primarily concerned with appealing to the most radical among us — that is, with gaining the approval of people to the left of standard socialist opinion. In reality, by orders of magnitude that are hard to overstate, most people are to our right. Connecting with them is our responsibility. Writing them off as hopeless reactionaries because they don’t cosign our best (and worst) maximum program planks is a way to guarantee political irrelevance.
Politics that only lives in the discourse of one small part of the population isn’t really politics at all. Politics is about what we do together, not what we say to each other and how righteous it makes us feel. Sometimes, when a fundamental point of principle is at stake, it may be worth taking deeply unpopular positions, come what may. If we consistently default toward a posture of needlessly alienating maximalism, though, we’re not changing the world. We’re just wasting precious time.
Great Job Ben Burgis & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
