Where Will the Post-2008 Left Go Next?
The world capitalist economy based on globalized neoliberalism collapsed with the 2007-8 economic crisis. Despite over a decade of Quantitative Easing, it has not recovered.
In 2011, a new political generation of mostly Millennials responded to the crisis, and the undermining of the neoliberal myths about capitalism, with the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Those movements were both ignored and repressed (severely in the Middle East) by governments. The left responded with an Electoral Turn in 2014-15 to try to win direct influence in those governments – for example Syriza in Greece, Sanders in the USA, Corbyn in the UK, and Podemos in Spain. Then came Trump and Brexit in 2016, and struggles against the rise of the xenophobic neofascist Right. Emerging from COVID lockdowns, where do we go from here?
Keir Milburn has written a concise and theoretically well-informed history and analysis of the new political generation of activists that emerged after 2008, Generation Left (Polity Press, 2018). The book appears to aim to serve two purposes: first to explain that the movement is not just a movement of youth concerned with youth issues; and second to present the theory, strategy-tactics and individual-level practices of the movement and briefly critique them. This post will mostly take off from the second set of points made by Milburn. Important struggles continue, but the repertoire of 2011 needs some rethinking if we are to move to the next level.
A New Political Generation, led by Millennials, emerged with the Arab Spring and Occupy movements in 2011
This post is divided into four sections. Part one present Milburn’s insights about what underlies the rise of a new generation of activists after 2008. Milburn notes that the 2011 Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements highlighted two messages: first, that there was rising economic inequality and that it was caused by the success of neoliberal globalized capitalism; second, that democracy was being restricted and corrupted and that the main agent of this was the ever more direct submission of governments to domestic and foreign private capital.
What is distinctive about Milburn’s analysis is that he insists that to understand the new politics we need to look at the direct experience of workers with exploitation by capital at work due to new technology and reorganized work processes. Capital and the political non-left have waged a counter-revolution from the mid-1970s, that was both ideological (changing the common sense about the economy) and material (changing the relationship between capital and labour to disempower labour, and to put working people into insecure employment statuses). The last 40-plus years have remoulded all of us ideologically as both postmodern (anti-Enlightenment) and neoliberal (Market fundamentalist) subjects. The structures of the economy, including workplaces, have been greatly changed materially to what is variously called a Post-Fordist or digital or IT or fourth industrial revolution economy.
We need detailed analyses of this economy leading to a theory about how it is different, and how the left can mobilize to overthrow it, and work towards a different kind of economy. Neither Milburn nor I have such analyses or theory to present, but his book pushes us to recognize the centrality of developing a new theory of the economy.
We are in a New Post-Fordist Digital Economy, but Our Analysis of What Makes it Distinctive is Weakly Developed
Milburn traces two stages in the post-2008 protest wave, in 2011 and 2015. As we come out of COVID into a possible third stage, Milburn asks what we can learn from what the left did in those two stages that we can improve on going forward. Part two presents Milburn’s critique of the Occupation of public squares tactic that was dominant in 2011, more precisely the organizing of general assemblies open to all that privileged individual testimonials and consensus-building discussion, and ‘inviting people into the tent with the activists’ rather than making decisions leading to campaigns to organize others. This leads to a brief discussion of how the left can both practice democracy itself and promote democracy in the State that impacts the mass of people who are not activists.
Part three presents Milburn’s warnings about the limitations of what he calls the Electoral Turn of 2015, the attempt by left activists to create Movement parties like Syriza or Podemos, or alternatively to join mainstream corporate liberal (e.g. US Democratic party) or Third Way social democratic (e.g. British Labour party) parties in large numbers in order to build a strong left or progressive wing that could ultimately become the majority wing. The political system is organized in order to push electoral parties and governments to the Right. This includes strong pressures to have the electoral party seek to have the left damp down any protests or strikes or even radical speech so as not to hurt the electoral chances of the left-leaning party.
Milburn Argues that We Must Look at the Direct Experience of Workers with Exploitation in the Wide Range of Employment Statuses of the Neoliberal Economy
I agree with Milburn’s points but argue (as he likely would too) that the left must stay involved in electoral politics as a second arm after extraparliamentary protest. This begs the question: what can the left do to ensure that involvement in electoral politics does not weaken non-electoral organizing? Here again, neither Milburn or I have a worked out answer. What I propose is that we combine three ideas: first, Milburn’s idea that we make the neoliberal economy and experience of exploitation in the full range of employment settings central; second, Hardt and Negri’s idea of the Commons; third, Srnicek and Williams’s idea of a Post-Work Economy.
Out of this combination comes a very ‘early days’ suggestion that the left should consciously build up a third zone of organizing, that could be called Organizing the Commons or Organizing the Post-Work Economy. This sphere of organizing would aim at building something like the ecology of specialized function organizations that Srnicek and Williams suggest. There would be two kinds: first, mass organizations that are vehicles for specific groups to win power and leftward changes in their workplaces, neighbourhoods etc.; and second, organizations of organizers that would organize activities that ‘serve the people’ and/or provide functions that sustain organizers to go out into settings of all kinds to educate and train people to organize themselves in longer term sustainable ways.
Part four is a very brief exposition of the third zone, organize the organizers idea.
PART ONE: WHAT LED TO THE RISE OF THE POST-2008 ‘LEFT GENERATION’?
Milburn explains that ‘events’ like 2007-8 are a kind of shock that can lead to the formation of a ‘political generation’ that is aroused to wage new struggles to challenge the injustices of the system laid bare by the crisis. But there are plenty of shock events. None lead directly to the activist response that births a political generation. Milburn starts with the classic explanation of political generations made by Karl Mannheim. “For Mannheim generational divisions aren’t something that happens sequentially or cyclically; they only emerge when, ‘as a result of an acceleration in the tempo of social and cultural transformation basic attitudes must change so quickly that the latent, continuous adaptation and modification of traditional patterns of experience, thought and expression is no longer possible’” (p18).
The 2008 Debt Crisis was a Shock Event. The Old Neoliberal Ways of Thinking Could Not Make Sense of It. We Had to Rethink.
The shock event opens up a space for rethinking our sense of the way the world works and our position within it. It is a newly created thinking and feeling vacuum to be filled. But it does not lead necessarily to fresh thinking, let alone critical and progressive rethinking. Traditional thinking may no longer be possible, but many people respond with an impassioned denialism and embrace movements like the Tea Party movement and Trump’s Make America Great Again and any number of (typically racist and sexist) scapegoating conspiracy theories that explain away the shock event.
The 2007-8 economic crisis did not automatically generate an anti-capitalist left response. Some people, especially Millennials (often defined as those born between 1982 and 2001, hence those currently between 20 and 40) did respond that way. And even they only did so because a small group of activists initiated campaigns and struggles in 2011 that challenged neoliberal myths about capitalism and began to offer an alternative. Above all, the 2011 collective actions gave some people an immersive experience of the alternative in the public square occupations and consensus-seeking general assemblies. These consciousness-raising and personally liberating experiences expanded the core of activists who would carry on organizing after 2011.
The New Political Generation Was Not the Automatic Result of 2008. It was Created by Those Millennials and Others Who Started a Fightback.
Others, including some youth, went to the ethnonationalist Right after 2008, or at least remained under the spell of the Blair-Clinton Third Way version of neoliberal myths. In elections, it was often noted that there seemed to be a generation gap. A 2017 British election poll found that the likelihood of voting Conservative went up by 9 per cent for every 10 years older that you were. Millburn argues that this is a generation lag, where the younger cohorts found it easier to change their thinking about capitalism and neoliberalism sooner. This was partly because the older generations had crystallized their thinking years earlier, when they were entering adulthood. But it was even more because, while they had experienced the same mounting precarity of work and decline in wages and benefits, perhaps two-thirds of them had benefitted materially from the easy credit fueled years of consumerism, and especially from the opportunity to own a house that constantly went up in resale value.
Milburn’s second set of observations are about three things: first, what left theory and empirical analyses indicate are the sharpest contradictions in the social system that impinge on the 2008 political generation; second, what the current left’s vision of an alternative society has been (strategic goals), who it has been organizing, or at least mobilizing, with what repertoire (tactics); third, what have been the practices of left activists on the micro level (methods/practices). Actually, these latter two points are mostly reduced to an evaluation of two prominent tactics, Occupation-style assemblies and engaging in electoral politics.
Milburn Sketches a Portrait of the Economic Prospects and New Class Situation of the 2008 Generation.
First then, what are the defining contradictions of the neoliberal economic regime that describe the conflicting forces operating upon today’s workers? What negative features of the current system appear to most strongly impact the 2008 generation (especially in rich countries, but also in the metropoles of poorer countries)? Here are some major ones mentioned by Milburn:
** An absence of enough jobs with middle class salaries, stable employment and clear career ladders for those with all the degrees and qualifications required. The same absence is the case for people in what used to be (many decades ago now) working class unionized jobs.
** Precarious jobs and the perceived threat that AI will permanently eliminate many jobs and even whole (sub)occupations, including professional ones. Relatively high unemployment exists side by side with precarious under-employment. No unions so it easy to be fired or laid off, and easy to put a large percentage of people into part-time and just in time jobs. An increasing number of jobs are in the so-called sharing economy and gig economy, where you are supposed to be happy because you have all this autonomy as a self-employed entrepreneur. The employer commits nothing to you (little protection against layoff, fewer guaranteed hours at guaranteed times, fewer fringe benefits, worsened or no private pension) but expects you to buy into their corporate culture as if they did.
** Debt – due to low wages, unpaid student loans, greatly weakened unemployment/welfare so that loss of a job forces you to take the next job available at an even lower wage.
** Because of the first three points, all the things that went with the ideal of adulthood in rich countries in the golden thirty years after the war – getting into a career job with a good company; having enough stable future income to ‘settle down’ and get married and have children; and getting a mortgage to buy a house (getting on the middle class property ladder of buying and selling houses at ever rising resale prices) – are delayed, and for many look like they may never be achieved.
Generation Debt is Also Generation Rent and Generation Cannot Save.
Generation Debt is also Generation Rent and Generation Cannot Save. From the (opposite) vantage point of what is happening to business owners and managers, the defining trend is the ever-increasing power of financial capital over the capital owners who get workers to produce actual goods or services. The part of the economy that makes money from money is getting bigger in relation to production of products for consumers.
Those who were young adults in the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s also lived on credit, but many of them were able to invest in buying a house and car and consumer durables with the borrowed money. They borrowed in order to invest in some kind of property. Some of them were granted a private pension. Today’s youth have a much harder time doing this – with the obvious exception of a sizable group (call them the 20%) whose parents are in the mid to upper reaches of the business, professional or managerial classes, parents who heavily invest in their children to pass on their class positions.
This list of circumstances is all about class situation, about socio-economic circumstances and mobility prospects. Milburn recognizes that the left is also concerned with the worsening of other types of injustice and inequality based on race and gender and sexuality, is opposed to neo-colonial wars like the war in Iraq, and is way ahead of everyone else on the seriousness of all ecology issues. But the straight differences in economic situation provide a more focused indication of why fewer people in the older age cohorts have yet to turn left, and why the younger cohorts were the earliest to do so.
Syriza, Tunisia, Egypt, Spain’s Indignados, Sanders, Corbyn – the Lived Experience of Economic Exploitation and Rising Inequality Was Central.
And in struggle after struggle since 2008, it is notable how often the central precipitating grievances (alongside concerns about governments serving moneyed interests instead of the public) are about precisely the economic issues highlighted by Milburn in describing the class situation of the 2008 political generation (e.g. Syriza about debt, Tunisian 2011 revolt triggered by self-immolation of a youth unable to earn enough from grey economy small business to provide for his family, Indignados about access to housing, Sanders campaign and many student movements in many countries about student debt, Corbyn 2017 ‘For the Many Not the Few’ campaign about Tory economic austerity policies).
Milburn’s analysis also provides a useful, indeed essential, corrective to all the assertions about today’s youthful left activists being motivated to turn left by their immersion in digital technologies, or the simple fact that they are part of a demographic that has more experience with immigrants from different racialized groups, or are more likely to have a college education, or other smug technocratic liberal theories about a hip educated elite knowing better than the ignorant ‘white working class’. The post-2008 generation is motivated in part by their material situation and prospects for the future. So are the older cohorts.
Any left politics that fails to speak to the complexities of the ‘class situation’ of various social groups, that lacks what Lenin called a thoroughly empirical but theory-guided and theory-testing ‘concrete analysis of concrete conditions’, cannot develop strategies and tactics that understand the different as well as common interests and aspirations and self-justifying ideologies of all the social groups that need to be united in multiple fronts and alliances (not to mention those are most likely to oppose the left, and why, and how).
We Need Analyses of the New Class Situations Created by Neoliberalism. But it Must Be an Intersectional Analysis.
Having said that, any concrete analysis needs to be a Rainbow analysis, an intersectional analysis, that gives equal treatment to the differentiated social locations of the people to be brought together in any left coalition based on gender, ‘race’, occupation-within-class, country location in world imperial order etc. As will be argued below, those locations do not correspond neatly to the separate social movements that fight against systemic disadvantaging and repression of people insofar as they are treated as being (only) an X or a Y or a Z (e.g. a Mexican or woman or gay), because no one is an X or a Y or a Z alone. They are persons whose lives are impinged upon by forces that relate to all of their characteristics and to all the social relations in which they are enmeshed, albeit to quite different degrees for any individual/group in any particular time and place. Intersectional analysis lets us grasp how people with different salient identities can be united, but it is also necessary to grasp how any individual or group is pushed and pulled in opposing directions by various aspects of their characteristics and social situation.
Milburn stresses that the rise of a protest movement does not simply happen because exploitation increases, or takes on new forms, or impacts different sets of people. Having said that, all of those factors are relevant to the first stage, what he calls the technical composing or composition of a new class (in the sense of broad category) of people who share new conditions. The two main causes of this first stage change are new technology and a new “dominant business model” (a particular reorganization of the work process). The combination of technology and work reorganization that produces the greatest amount of increased profit rate is widely copied by competitors. Therefore it becomes a standardized new work experience for workers in an ever-increasing number of companies and countries.
Despite the Wide Range of Employment Statuses, Neoliberalism is Standardizing Key Features of Workplace Experiences.
The standardization of the work and life experience creates a basis for the second stage, the decision by some people facing the new conditions to engage in collective actions to demand changes from employers and/or governments. This is the process of political composition, of building a movement through active struggle, and with new analyses of the problems and new demands for solutions (theory), as well as new strategies and tactics, and knowledge and skills and effective micro-level methods learned from practice. Because people’s lives, in and outside work, have been changed in similar ways, there is an objective basis for them to develop a similar consciousness, and for that consciousness to spread as quickly and as widely as the capital-initiated changes.
There will be multiple efforts to launch a new movement. Some approaches will have some success while others will not. Eventually one struggle is a visible success and its example spreads, both to other people in the same kind of situation (e.g. workers in a workplace) and to other movements altogether (e.g. movements around race or gender or war or sexuality issues). More trial and error innovation in theory and ‘framing’ of issues, strategy-tactics, and micro-level culture/practices/methods, occurs and spreads and becomes modular across movements and places. The number of struggles and range of movements and level of militancy build up, then plateau at a relatively high level, and with some ups and downs and zigs and zags, eventually go down again. Movements spread and rise and fall like a wave.
Workplace-Based Struggles May or May Not Become Central in the Near Future. But Capital is Created by Labour in Workplaces. And An Important Part of Our Social Consciousness is Shaped by What Goes On There.
Most left activists would agree with Milburn that the ways in which capitalists extract profit with different technology and reorganized and intensified work processes will shape the concerns and consciousness of everyone who works. And no movement can hope to be a genuine people’s movement, with both the legitimacy and social power to win real change, if it does not mobilize the large majority of people who are some kind of working class or middle class. But this is not the same thing as saying that the movement will be centered in the workplace, let alone that people will eventually build a common class consciousness across a wide range of different occupations, industries and workplaces. Milburn is simply saying that there is a basis for an emergent common consciousness among working people due to workplace changes, and that the left is going to need the power and leverage that only workers in workplaces can provide if we are going to win any real change.
What then is the homogenized set of changes in the workplace and non-workplace environment that over 40 years of neoliberal globalization transformation of Economy, Culture and State have wrought? We need to summarize what we know, because understanding the new concrete circumstances is critical to our ability to address what the people we seek to educate and mobilize are going through, what they currently think about it, and what their aspirations for change already are. They will change the world for the better, not (just) us.
Waves of Protest Rise and Fall. Each Wave is Responding to a New Economy and Society. What Exactly is the New System that is Shaping Our Lives Today? What Has Changed in Workplaces?
Milburn cites Sergio Bologna and others in order to contrast the spontaneous consciousness of workers in two high periods of working class struggle in Italy, the factory occupation-strikes of 1918-19 and 1968-69. In the first, skilled craft workers still led in the production process, and they had the knowledge to be confident in seeking to make revolution through ‘workers control’, where they would run the factory without the capitalists. In the second, Fordist assembly line fragmentation of jobs into semi-skilled narrow tasks and Taylorist methods of close managerial control left workers without that kind of knowledge. They spontaneously fought managerial control, hence were receptive to the watchword of ‘Autonomy from Capital’, but they mostly sought liberation from work, seen as indistinguishable from deskilling and oppressively tight managerial control. What is the equivalent core spontaneous consciousness of what I would call the ‘Postmodernized and Neoliberalized Subjects’ (including those in Post-Fordist workplaces) of today?
Milburn does not pretend to answer that question in his short book, and I will not do so here either. But he does highlight a key concept in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that is highly suggestive as a starting point – the resistance to the ‘privatization of everything’ expressed by the idea of The Commons. This obviously aligns with the nature of sharing of information and ideas ‘for free’ on the internet, the so-called sharing economy, the fact that immaterial products like software are more obviously created by many people building on the earlier work of many others, and other objective circumstances factors. For me, it especially aligns with the thesis that the shared class circumstances of today’s global working class are those of an emergent Post-Work Economy (where most working people are somewhere on a continuum of employment circumstances that expands in the direction of the fully unemployed and outside-the-formal-economy end of the spectrum), as argued by Srnicek and Williams in Inventing the Future (see How to Use Left Populism to Win a Post-Work Economy ). I will return to this briefly below, but it is a topic for future posts.
Protesters Stressed Two Messages: Rising Inequality was Caused by Capitalism, and Capitalists were Corrupting Democracy.
Another clue to the circumstances and consciousness of the 2008 political generation is provided by the themes that have predominated in major struggles. What was the message of the 2011 Occupy and Arab Spring protesters? Of those who led in the 2015 Syriza-Sanders-Corbyn-Podemos Electoral Turn? Two main ideas were central across most of the campaigns.
First, not just the fact that there was rising inequality even in the richest countries, rising inequality that dated back to the early to mid 1970s, but that it was free enterprise capitalism given free reign by policies promoting structural reform ‘austerity’ and globalization that was the main cause. This was a direct challenge to perhaps the most powerful justification for capitalism, that it produced ‘economic growth’, an ever-expanding pie. Hence while it might be true that capitalists (and the managers and professionals and skilled technical workers who act on their behalf and are paid out of profits) grabbed most of the pie for themselves, enough trickled down to the rest of us. Polls in the USA in 2016 and since showed that, even in the country whose people have benefitted most materially from world capitalism for at least a century, close to a majority of the younger generation were disillusioned with capitalism. They were in some sense anti-capitalist (although fewer were ready to call themselves socialists).
Second, complementing the consciousness about the failures of the Market to produce rising equality, was an anger about the direct role of States in serving the interests of profit-making domestic and foreign private businesses, instead of the interests of the citizens who voted them into government (including in most autocratic states from Egypt to Russia, where they also have elections). There was anger about corruption of a specific kind, the buying of elected democratic politicians by private commercial interests, not so much to enrich either politician or lobbyist individually, but in order to produce legislation and policies that served capital collectively ahead of working class and middle class people or citizens collectively. (This post will not take up most of the issues related to the analysis that current left movements have developed about what is lacking in real existing liberal democracy. Several posts have already addressed this, and there will be more to follow.)
Disillusionment with Capitalism Does Not Translate into Any Particular Idea About What Either Post-Capitalism or Reformed Capitalism Would Look Like.
To sum up, both Milburn’s summary description of what capitalism has been doing to create a particular set of economic circumstances and prospects, and a distillation of the two main themes of post-2008 movements, lead to the same conclusion. The days of hegemony of postmodernism and neoliberalism are over. The most socially aware and politically progressive members of the Millenial generation know from personal experience, and have worked out intellectually, that capitalism is the main source of the problems in our society (rising inequality, weakening democracy).
The main driving force behind the worsening of most problems from increasing poverty to systemic racism to global warming is therefore the relation of Capital to Labour (multi-gender, multi-ethnic etc Labour which is also enmeshed in structures of patriarchy, white supremacy etc that are both separate and interlocking). And this means that we must pay special attention to workplaces and to the economy of production and distribution of goods and services, because it is in workplaces that labour creates capital, and it is in workplaces (including banks and stock markets and insurance companies and Google type IT companies) where the circuit of extracting and realizing and reinvesting profit can be disrupted. Extraparliamentary street protests are foundational to left organizing, but they rarely impinge directly on capitalist profit-making (and they leave state power intact).
The immediate target of most protests is the State, rather than capital. We need to target both, or rather disrupt both (as much as possible non-violently, but all disruption involves exercizing the right to use a space or institution in ways that the authorities usually dictate) in order to build up a popular counter-power. Protests petition the State to intervene in some way to enact a policy, or even more often to reverse some reactionary policy and back off in its repression of dissent or of some targeted social group. Given the typical complete ignoring of the issues that protesters are raising by business and state and mainstream media, the protests, while usually mainly non-violent at the outset, have to engage in some kind of disruption of ‘business as usual’ in order to be heard at all.
Street Protests Can Help Change Public Opinion and Thereby Challenge the Legitimacy of the State. To Get Leverage on Capital, We Need to Do More. We Need to Figure Out How to Disrupt the (Often World-Wide) Chain of Profit-Making.
Regardless, if the protest is successful in arousing public opinion, the protest event and sometimes those involved in organizing it or being identified as ‘agitators’ in the protest itself, can expect to be repressed with selective, or sometimes more sustained and generalized, violence by police in the streets and sometimes after arrest. There are multiple causes of this, but arguably the main one is that a protest that succeeds in being heard is perceived as a challenge to the very basis of any State, its legitimacy, its right to exercize a monopoly on the use of force to impose the law and order of the ruling regime.
The problems we face in doing organizing that disrupts capital are two: first, the trend under neoliberal globalization has been to the increasing differentiation of employment situations (not everyone in the same factory situation or in extreme poverty without a job, as seemed possible in Marx’s day), so how do we organize people around a common class consciousness and set of claims and organizational forms?; and second, the scholarly work to develop empirical analyses of the current post-Fordist Neoliberal Economy is not as advanced as it needs to be. We do not know where the points of vulnerability in the global supply chain of production, distribution, financing and profit-making are, let alone how to disrupt them.
PART TWO: THE 2011 OCCUPATION TACTIC AND CRITIQUE OF SPEAK YOUR TRUTH ASSEMBLIES
While Milburn gets us to pay attention to the workplace experience and overall class situation of people, and insists that to organize workers in or outside of the workplace we need to understand what their spontaneous fighting back consists of as a starting point, he also underlines that nothing is automatic. There is no inherent consciousness of exploitation as expressed in spontaneous resistance that just needs to be drawn out. Although he does not use the term, he says that we all start out with false consciousness, with a distorted and often inverted analysis of the problems that we face and who and what is mainly responsible for creating them.
Experience Alone Does Not Give Us the Concepts and Facts that Paint a True Picture of What Oppresses Us and How and Why.
All of us, even the most critically-minded activists, have been shaped by a postmodern and neoliberal common sense. Our critical understandings and progressive ideas for solutions, our liberated consciousness, is hard won through study and struggles and learning from both. It is with this perspective that Milburn looks at the very widespread left tactic of occupying public spaces and inviting people in to participate in general assemblies.
(To be clear, both Milburn and I are criticizing the most advanced parts of the current left with the view that it is the most advanced, it appeals to the public the most, and succeeds in mobilizing them around the most serious issues the most. The critique is perhaps most aptly directed at the movements in the USA and Western Europe. Clearly the Arab Spring application has involved heroic fighting with violent repression and more outreach and the preceding and followup of struggles in workplaces and neighbourhoods. They are operating at a higher level of struggle, with higher stakes, than we are. But the issue of how to improve our internal processes exists everywhere.)
Forty Years of Neoliberalism Have Taught Us to Blame to Blame Ourselves for Not Doing Enough Self-Improvement to Be Worthy. Speaking Our Truth in Protest Meetings Helps Us to See Our Common Condition.
Milburn cites the results of Jennifer Silva’s interviews with 100 young working class Americans. Silva “ found a subjectivity ‘characterized by low expectations of work, wariness towards romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health’”. Silva also found that these young working class people framed all of these problems as pathologies of the self, that required going deep into the self in order to find the blameworthy cause of their problems, so that they could engage in self-improvement to heal the self. Silva contrasted this with the 1960s women’s movement consciousness-raising, which brought women together to tell their individual stories in order to gradually see the commonality in their experiences, to recognize that The Personal is Political. “’[S]elf-awareness, or naming one’s problems, was the first step to radical collective awareness. For this [2008] generation, it is the only step, completely detached from any kind of solidarity’”.
Milburn sees this reality as a reason why contemporary movements have put such a stress on creating participatory democracy type experiences at the heart of all extraparliamentary protests. More specifically, it explains the assemblies of various kinds that are organized around giving everyone equal time to give testimonials to their individual experiences of oppression, as part of a process of achieving a consensus in favour of some decision about what actions to take together after the assembly. “Testifying in public about your conditions helps overcome the shame and self-blame” (p73).
Meetings are also consensus-building exercizes because, while most people have come together because they are upset by some specific problems, people do not share a collective understanding of even those very specific problems, nor do they agree on a general program of solutions. The Occupation Wall Street protest camps of 2011 were in a situation, Milburn says, where the “aims and politics of the camps had to be built instead of assumed… [so the] “emphasis was put on allowing people to express themselves, at the expense of efficient decision-making” to organize campaigns that go outside the meetings to educate and organize others (p72).
People who go through these experiences without any prior experience with activism can find what Milburn calls The Process of these meetings “life-changing” in part because they are “[b]eing listened to and taken seriously by others while taking collective control” over a liberated space (p74). For those with prior experiences of activism, there is a similar positive experience that is usually framed as part of prefigurative politics, of ‘practicing the alternative we seek to achieve’, in order to ‘change the self to be better able to work for a change in society’.
The Process of Leaderless, Consensus-Building, Equal Voice Meetings is Often Life-Changing.
Milburn is critical of the sanctification of The Process, in particular what he sees as the error of thinking that such processes are what democracy in a post-capitalist society would look like. If I could put his idea a bit crudely, The Process will not be able to get the railways to run on time (to use a very out of date expression). It will take a very long time to build a new democracy, that is both genuinely able to ensure that decisions align with what the public can agree to want through an elaborate set of deliberative processes, and is also able to organize all the activities of an economy and State and culture more effectively than they are presently organized. Exhibit A for this assertion is what happened to the Occupy assemblies themselves, that ended up being taken over by people with an agenda to impose or very personal grievances and traumas to act out (p76).
Put another way, the irony of the Occupation-style assemblies is that they need to be therapeutic in order to enable a Personal is Political process of consciousness-raising, they need to build a shared collective consciousness about shared problems (if not so much solutions) that does not pre-exist, but at the same time they are structured around achieving a consensus -- in order to make decisions about some kind of new solution to those problems, or more mundanely to decide what to do beyond the meeting. The two objectives cannot be realized in the same process. Perhaps we need to have separate consciousness-raising sessions the way 1960s feminists did.
Building a consensus is a process of finding lowest common denominator solutions to a problem of ‘what should we do?’ “that everyone can live with” (p71). It is not well-suited to debating divergent perspectives in order to come to agreement on what might be called ‘highest common denominator solutions’, ones that require a lot of changing of minds when exposed to new facts and ideas presented in the form of arguments -- issues of basic social analysis, social change goals, overall organizing strategy, or even tactics.
We Need to Shift the Emphasis Away From Perfecting Our Internal Processes Towards More Outreach, and to Demanding that Governments Enact a New and Better System of Democracy.
Finally, there is the issue of achieving the best possible balance between fighting for democracy within the activist movement itself and fighting to defend democracy in the existing State and to push for radical changes to democratize it further. The general point made by Milburn is that there is no single ideal Process of democracy to be applied equally within the left, in the existing State, in a future post-capitalist society and State, within all sorts of associations and institutions pre and post. We need to start developing specific democratic processes for each different context and purpose.
In sum, Milburn argues that the standard Movement tactic of General Meetings where every individual is given equal time to speak their subjective truth, while using consensus-building methods to arrive a decisions, is ineffective in two ways. It does not work as a vehicle for serious debate about analysis, social change goals, strategy or tactics, or as an exercize in democratic decision-making leading to organizing activity beyond The Process itself.
PART THREE: WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE LIMITS OF DOING LEFT-WING ELECTORAL POLITICS?
Milburn pointed out something else about the post-2008 left that I had not thought of before. He noted that the period of Occupation-style organizing gave away to a certain extent to what he calls The Electoral Turn in about 2015-6 (Syriza, Sanders, Corbyn, Indignados into Podemos, Hong Kong Umbrella protests into Democracy campaign for the City Council, some Egyptian Tahrir Square protesters into national elections, same thing more successfully in Tunisia etc). What Milburn grasped that I had more or less missed was that this turn was the direct result of the fact that the surge in protests in 2011 was met with a stonewalling refusal by governments to pay any attention to the demands of the protesters, and in many places was met with brutal repression.
The Electoral Turn was a shift in strategy towards winning the support of voters to get political parties infused with extraparliamentary activists into governmental power. The goal was to oblige the elected part of the State to seriously address the issues raised by the movements, and hopefully to reduce the level of repression. Activists had learned a lesson from 2011. They could not themselves ignore the State. They had to have some kind of strategy for taking power in the State, even if this raised the usual problems of working within an unreformed State that exists in order to organize and defend capitalism and imperialism.
The Electoral Turn of 2015 Aimed to Get Movement People into Government so that Our Demands Would No Longer Be Ignored, and Our Increased Legitimacy Might Protect Protesters Somewhat from State Repression.
This leads to the final point made by Milburn that I will deal with in this article. Having explained why the electoral turn was a necessary and smart thing to do, he reminds us that even in the ideal circumstance where a left-leaning government gets elected, that government can only withstand the attacks of capital and anti-left forces if there is a powerful popular mobilization outside government. Making the electoral turn does not make extraparliamentary organizing secondary.
The problem is that the logic of electoral politics is very much to make it secondary. The argument made by those who are trying to get a left-leaning party elected is a plausible one: if the left isn’t quiet, if it fails to reduce the visibility of protests, strikes, radical speech etc, then this will arouse fears in part of the left’s potential voter base about social disorder, and about radical changes that those voters have not yet come around to understanding and supporting. (Actually the main effect will be to radicalize and incite those who support non-left political forces. It can actually educate and win support from left voters. See the impact of the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.)
The mainstream media, and the ‘leaders of society’ that they cite as authoritative and representative of public opinion, argue non-stop that ‘the sky is falling’: because of left-wing extremists who are ‘unpatriotic’ (because they criticize our country’s wars and other actions in support of Western rich state domination); because the left is the cause of ‘violent’ disorder (because they engage in non-violent civil disobedience and strikes and occupations); because the left is a threat to the economy and people’s jobs (because domestic and foreign businesses threaten to shut down businesses and move, or they provoke a run on the banks and currency, or because the left wants to eliminate fossil fuels and reduce money spent on armed forces, police and weapons of mass destruction). The job that was done on Jeremy Corbyn and his youthful core of supporters from 2015 through to the December 2019 election is a case in point.
Milburn is Right that Everything About Real Existing Capitalist Democracy Pushes Electoral Parties to the Right. But There are Many Reasons Why It is Crucial to Continue to Build Left Movement Parties.
So yes, “the day-to-day conduct of electoral politics pulls to the Right” (p99). But it will remain crucial for the left to invest significant energies in electoral politics for three reasons that go beyond the short-term tactic of ‘neutralizing’ the State as a repressive force against the left by becoming legitimated political actors, by becoming ‘part of the mainstream political system’ with the right to advocate for its left-wing views within the bounds of that system.
The first reason is that having a Movement party like Podemos form part of a governing coalition or being one of the opposition parties, or even just getting a few individuals elected who are in the left-wing of social democratic or liberal parties (which may be all that is possible in the US or UK or perhaps other countries with ‘first past the post’ elections and a two-party system) gives the left a platform to speak from in the mainstream media. It amplifies the reach of the left message by a lot, even though its message will be misrepresented.
Second, while left-wing governments that actually try to enact a left-wing agenda will be rare, and anything that people elected to legislatures manage to get passed into law and policy will be undermined by the unelected part of the State (courts, police, armed forces, civil service) and by lobbyists and ‘capital strikes’, it is still possible to make modest but significant changes in laws and policies that help the people materially, and make it easier for popular movements to organize ‘from below’ (e.g. labour laws). And this will increase the legitimacy of the left in the eyes of the public, even the not yet left parts of it, to the extent that it shows that we do not just criticize and oppose, we exist (like a trade union) to do every little thing to make the lives of people at little bit better.
Electoral Parties Provide a Bigger Platform to Speak From, and Give Us Chances to Make Small But Important Changes in Laws and Policies, and Put a Spotlight on the Need for a New and Better Democracy.
Third, having a visible left electoral party (or strong left-wing within a party) that sees itself, and presents itself, as the electoral wing of a much wider overall Movement of movements puts a focus on the ways in which real existing liberal capitalist democracy is not democratic enough. The electoral wing will fight for specific laws and policies within the basic (constitutional and court jurisprudence) laws and rules of the game, but it will increase its influence if it joins the rest of the left in movements for different and better basic laws, rules and institutions, for much more democracy and for much better democracy.
This leaves us still with the question of what to do to offset the strong pressures resulting from involvement in electoral politics to secondarize and even silence the extraparliamentary movement. In the final section, I briefly sketch the idea of building up a third zone of organizing to be much bigger and more important to the overall Movement than it is today.
POINT FOUR: BUILDING AN ECOLOGY OF ‘ORGANIZE THE ORGANIZERS’ AND ‘MASS VEHICLES OF STRUGGLE’ ORGANIZATIONS.
The third zone of struggle that we need to expand and develop is the same zone that Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (henceforth S+W) write about in Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015), what they refer to as an ‘ecology of organizations’ of many types specializing in different functions that are necessary to the success of the overall Movement in any given campaign.
The left needs to get better organized, but we do not agree on how. There is a clearly hegemonic view of organization, one that distrusts any organizational structure or process that is not local and face to face, involves a regularized division of labour into Weberian (bureaucratic) offices or even a temporary and less formalized hierarchy, acknowledges leadership, or delegates decision-making authority. There is also an underlying rejection of anything that resembles the Marxist-Leninist model of a vanguard party, that is part and parcel of wanting to make a clean break from the history of Marxist-Leninist States. There is disaffection with the practice of parliamentary socialist parties that subordinate, silence and betray extraparliamentary movements, and uncritically accept bureaucratic hierarchical organization in parties, governments, unions and all types of association.
Instead of a Single Perfect Type of Organization, We Need a Whole Ecology of Organizations Performing Different Functions for the Overall Movement.
S+W agree that the concerns with the past practices of both the Leninist and parliamentary socialist lefts require a fundamental rethink. But they disagree with what they call folk politics, the unwillingness to do serious theoretical analysis of social structures and to develop conceptions of alternative structures for an organized new society. A folk politics approach is unwilling to create a whole universe of organizations that are necessary to wage Gramscian politics, whereby the left works both inside and outside the State and other existing institutions to expose dominant ideologies and counter-pose alternative society ideologies.
S+W criticize the fetishization of one particular type of ‘correct’ organizational process and structure, the idea that only localist and horizontalist processes and structures are acceptable for all types of organization that exist for all types of purpose. They call for a “diverse ecosystem of organizations” that carry out a variety if tasks that are essential in any campaign, including “awareness raising, legal support, media hegemony, power analysis, policy proposals, the consolidation of class memory and leadership, to name just a few. No single type of organization is sufficient for performing all of these roles and bringing about large-scale political change” (pp162-3). They recognize that in any struggle “leaders will arise, but there is no vanguard party – only mobile vanguard functions” carried out by a plurality of organizations doing different things (p163).
We Don’t Want a Single Vanguard Party. But an Ecology of Organizations Can Stress the Work of Organizing the Organizers of Future Mass Movement Struggles.
The third zone that I am proposing is slightly different than what S+W are proposing, at least in emphasis. I am saying that what we need above all is to develop Organizations of Organizers whose main task is to educate and train people in workplaces, schools, local communities, and voluntary associations of all kinds to be more knowledgeable and skilled as organizers of mass struggles, and coming out of them, Mass Organizations. But the list of what I am referring to as organizations of organizers (i.e. organizations made up of activists) is essentially the same list as S+W’s list of the specialized function groups that would make up the ecology of organizations performing temporary vanguard (i.e. leadership, activist, organizer) functions.
Here is a partial list of organization types that would fit the definition of organizations of organizers, whose activities would include educating and training people within mass struggle contexts, with the main goal of seeding and strengthening the emergence of mass vehicles of struggle:
** Universities, research groups and think tanks that do theory development, research and analysis, and publication of ideas and findings. Many of the people doing this work would also be working in mainstream scholarly institutions. Others would not. These independent left scholarship organizations would publish ideas and findings that raise the level of knowledge of left activists and people generally. They would be a periphery for those within intellectual production institutions who are in a minority and need support and resources in waging counter-ideology struggles within those institutions (even something as simple as publications to use in courses and to cite in academic journal articles and books).
What Kind of Organizations? Research Institutes, Movement Schools and Camps, Left Media Outlets That Provide Experience-Based Training and a Supportive Periphery for Those in Mainstream Media, Welfare State type Services, Amateur Leagues and Festivals of Arts, Science, Sports and Hobbies.
** Movement schools, summer and winter camps and festivals of all kinds. On the right, American evangelicals have been especially good at doing this kind of thing at the level of specific denominations and churches. Socialist and communist parties and some trade unions used to be very good at this too. This category admits for a very wide variety of school/camp/festival of activities types that are aimed at people of different ages and occupations and social characteristics (e.g. racial minorities, genders, sexualities) and pre-existing interest in organizing around a particular issue.
** Media organizations. This would include publications and radio and TV and online social media text, podcast and video, theatre groups and all sorts of performance spaces. But the emphasis should always be on educating and training people to do media within mainstream structures, to challenge the content of mainstream media from within, and to get the media content generated in independent spaces into mainstream platforms where it can reach a wider audience.
** Welfare state type services projects that operate on the same terrain as churches and governments. They might provide legal aid and support for people who have been arrested or imprisoned, women’s health and general physical and mental health clinics staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses and paramedics and others, free or cheap food and food supplies, support for tenants and tenants associations in their conflicts with landlords, community-based hubs for the organizing of workplaces. Again, the primary goal is not to build a separate utopia, but to help people to help themselves. So these projects would especially aim to help people create and expand advocacy groups of all kinds to demand that governments, corporations and other mainstream institutions meet the needs of the people differently and better.
Specialized Organizations Provide Services to Campaigns and Struggles. They Also Educate and Train Organizers.
** Recreational, artistic, scientific, humanistic, sports, hobby, entertainment associations and events. I am thinking of what was done by the socialist parties in Germany and Austria and elsewhere in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, but admittedly that drew upon the resources of elected governments as well as mass political parties and unions. And it was a different era, when those kind of amateur associations and leagues were less available than they are today. These type of organizations are more like non-partisan tents to draw people into that exposes them to the other organizations led by the left. This idea needs more work, but my hunch is that we want to encourage this kind of thing too.
To sum up, Keir Milburn has advanced some important ideas, most notably an analysis of the post-2008 Millennial led left that leads to the conclusion that we need to pay special attention to workplaces, and to organizing people across a wide range of employment statuses, and to building upon a spontaneous disaffection with capitalism and with Post-Fordist modes of exploitation (that we have yet to adequately analyze). Milburn makes a useful critique of the tendency in the left to sanctify a single Process of democracy as the one and only kind. He warns about the built-in conservatizing nature of electoral politics.
Milburn Opens Up a Debate about the Importance of Workplaces in Left Organizing. He Also Challenges Us to Do the Theory and Analysis Work That Can Inform Better Strategies and Tactics.
My main takeaway is that we need to give priority to expanding a third zone made up of Organizations of Organizers. Those organizations are necessary to provide crucial resources and services to both extraparliamentary protest campaigns and electoral politics (the functions served that Srnicek and Williams draw attention to). But they are also needed to educate and train people to be more effective in leading local mass struggles that sometimes seed longer-lasting mass organizations.