The Left Undead

For civil-social organization as pre-political task

It might sound unbelievable to many, but the United States is the most fertile ground for socialist organizing in the world right now. Not only does it remain the nerve center of global capitalism—where the synapses of finance and the self-consciousness of capital’s tenuous rule reside—it is also a uniquely free nation in terms the civil liberties and social rights necessary to confront capitalist rule. If the United States seems farther away from socialism than any other place on earth it is because we have lost sight of what is revolutionary about the bourgeois epoch and what it will take to move humanity past it. It is not the relative degree of state regulation of the economy or social life that makes communism possible, but the capacity of the working class to organize outside the state and assert its own self-organization as the sole solution to the escalating crises of a mode of production long past its progressive phase. In this sense, we in the capitalist core have the unique opportunity, and the obligation, to create the kinds of working class civil society organizations that might begin the long, patient process of recomposing the socialist workers movement.

The Great Malaise

Everyone can sense that we’re on some sort of precipice. The wild fires. The wars. The economic chaos and social isolation. The great movements of millions upon millions of people from the fracturing periphery into the teetering core. I fear these already alarming catastrophes are just beginning. I think all of us fear that.

Those prone to crisis theory have been predicting this for a while. And, yet, now that our various prognostications about what’s now called the ‘polycrisis’¹ have proven correct, it’s hard not to feel a general sense of malaise. I had always assumed we’d be better prepared to confront the chaos attendant to the demise of this systemic cycle of accumulation.² I assumed some manner of independent working class organization would arise to meet the challenges of the post-neoliberal transition. As it turns out, instead of 1970s-style industrial discontent, we’ve mired ourselves in a 1970s-style social malaise. Instead of class politics, we’re inundated by culture war anti-politics. Crisis theory itself often breeds a strong species of anti-politics, and I have to confess I myself have been anti-political for quite a long time. The malaise is coming from inside the house.³

The general dislocation and discontent of bourgeois society we are living through derives from the ‘polycrisis’, but can’t be reduced to it. It’s not just a delegitimated political system or a planet in deep peril. It can’t even be chalked up to what liberal technocrats like Will Stancil would call ‘material conditions’. The fact is that the public sphere has expired, replaced by an anomic hellworld that prevails when all institutions of civil-social life have been drained away, leaving us, the atomized masses, in their wake. This social graveyard is the culmination of a 200-year process of capital accumulation. And we are its cursed progeny.

To understand this general malaise and where it comes from, we need a brief historical coda on society, freedom and the state.

The Land of (Counterfeit) Liberty

In its period of ascendance, the bourgeoisie had a historical mission: to overthrow the old feudal order of privileges and estates by freeing up markets in land and labor, while shackling the unchecked authority of prelates and aristocrats. This epoch-making world transformation began in the English countryside and the Italian merchants’ republic, but it spread on both its economic basis (productivity increase through doubly free labor) and with its political expression (the bourgeois republic). The republican movement for self-governance, rule of law, and liberal values didn’t just provide an ideological project that could unite ‘we the people’ under a national state within a national market; it was also a practical mission to remake the world in the image of the commodity and its bearer.

It took a few hundred years of political struggle and social enclosure, but capital won, decisively. The historical mission of the bourgeoisie is now completed but, crucially, because of the historic failure of the communist movement⁴, humanity no longer has a consciousness of its own development. It no longer even has a sense of how to look beyond the real but one-sided freedoms represented by the historically-specific commodity form of social production.

The United States was born of this world-historical movement and still holds a central place within it. What is the much-vaunted ‘rules-based international order’ but the American ruling class’ overweening imprint of capital’s power on the rest of the globe? No doubt many of you reading this essay are from the U.S., but everyone knows that nowhere else in the world are the ideals of the ascendant bourgeoisie more inscribed on the popular consciousness than in the ‘land of liberty and justice.’

These scare quotes around liberty and justice are where we on the left are meant to stop: To halt here and point out all the enslavements, genocides, imperial interventions and hypocrisies at the heart of the American project. It is right that we do so, given all the blood that drenches the fetish symbol of the American Flag, not to mention the everyday manner in which U.S. patriotism excuses all sorts of domination and imperialism. And yet we cannot stop here, not unless we want to continue impotently indexing past crimes while doing nothing to address their root causes. Our task, if we can remember it, is not to document the contradictions and depredations of capital and the state but to overcome them. If we don’t grasp what is revolutionary about the U.S. experience, we are going to let ourselves, workers who are heirs to a particular revolutionary tradition⁵, continue to be defined by the narrow chauvinisms of shopkeepers, regional oligarchs, and online grindset grifters.

The fact is that Americans are uniquely free, and therefore have a unique burden placed upon them by history.⁶ This burden is only greater considering the relative power and prosperity of the United States. The New Left generation lost this radical potential by chasing all over the world looking for some other revolutionary subject. But some today are trying fitfully to revive the American revolutionary tradition. The very real social existence of US republicanism gets transmogrified by the online left into a posting battle between Patriotic Socialists (for) and Third Worldists, Sakaists, etc (against).⁷ This is an important discussion because, regardless of how we might feel about the U.S., its long-term historical trajectories have become present-day social facts. Republican subjects are just built different: our conceptions of liberty, our rough egalitarianism, our hatred of pretense and unjustified power; all these are baked into our everyday understanding of life and rights in the United States.

There is only one way to redeem ourselves of our dark history: to confront it proactively and overcome it through self-organization. There are other options, of course. We can pay penance for our dubious privileges like medieval monks in hair shirts. We can get into moralistic spats about the events of 1917 or 1968, shorn of any context, while quote-mining leaders of the past. We can dispatch ourselves as willing shock troops whenever the Democratic Party finds a pressure issue to leverage against the other capitalist party in the next election cycle. We can look abroad for the oppressed of the periphery to do our work for us. We can do all these things, and many have for many years, but none of this activity gets us closer to the task at hand, which is to build a working class movement, born of independent working class organizations, capable of challenging impersonal domination, the despotism of the workplace and the haughty power of the state. This is the radical republican tradition we must learn from and build upon.

The Death of our Social World

One advantage to taking up Marx’s radical republican communist tradition—and discarding the Popular Front dead end of the 20th century—is that, instead of cutting against the grain of mainstream political thought, this tradition is consonant with the classical workers movement before its liquidation into the New Deal order. It also fits with (and subverts) commonsense notions of freedom inhered within American political thought. But the task has changed from that of the nineteenth century and we’ll see why.

The main way the bourgeois social order formed and reproduced itself before the great increase of state capacity in the 20th century was through the base-level production of civil-social institutions outside the state. This robust public sphere arose in response to the contradictions of burgeoning market society and industrialization. From Chambers of Commerce to Kiwanis Clubs to Philological Societies to American Legions to Knights of Columbus to the NAACP to the Ku Klux Klan and Wednesday night bowling leagues⁸, these middle class associations in the civil-social sphere contained a whole social world that (re)created the ‘traditional’ social bonds between individuals that the capitalist mode of production severed. Some of the civil-society organizations above were odious and some were heroic, but, whatever they were, they were civil-social expressions of the capacity for popular self-organization within the bounds of the capitalist social order.

The proletariat, of course, had its own series of civil-social movements that often looked beyond capitalism. Each arose to confront a particular crisis brought on by proletarianization and industrialization: consumer cooperatives for surviving within the cash nexus, trade unions for collective action on the shop floor, mutual aid societies for social welfare, choral societies for entertainment, workers educational outlets for learning, ethnic clubs for national community and so on. These self-organized workers institutions existed alongside middle class and capitalist class civil institutions like country clubs, science societies, Rotary clubs, churches and the like.

Up until the great stagflation and political upheaval of the 1970s these diverse institutions—middle class or working class—structured whole lives. They expressed the human need for ‘community’⁹ and joined together all the atomized social elements of bourgeois order. But, as we sit here after fifty years of so-called neoliberalism, these civil-social institutions are all dead as dirt, having expired under the combined forces of:

• Mass social media

• Corporate consolidation

• The decentralization of production

• Commodification of social reproduction

• State-ification

• Middle class culture wars

• Partisan political branding

• Proliferation of NGOs

• and the tendential secularization of society

All of these trends in civil life were, of course, reflections of the internal tendencies towards separation, individualization and fragmentation of social life under the reign of capital. These were the exact tendencies attendant to accumulation, in fact, that led, two centuries ago, to the creation of civil institutions in the first place! But capital abhors a site of social power that can’t be profited upon. And the state, securing social peace in service of expanded production, grew to arrogate independent social functions unto itself.

The trade unions in the United States shared the same fate as the rest of bourgeois civil society in the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. This wasn’t just a reflection of the relative balance of class forces, or just a betrayal of the post-war labor compact. The actual defeat of the classical workers’ movement in the U.S. took place not in the 1970s, but in the 1930s — thanks to its subordination to the state, the beginning of the 90-year Popular Front with Democrats, and the union movement’s self-liquidation as an autonomous civil-social agent. If the Marxist workers’ party was meant to be the amalgamation and coordinating body for all the various proletarian civil-social institutions of society, how in the world could we even begin to theorize or form the socialist party, when its actual historical social basis has been completely destroyed?

The Left (and Right) are Dead

The general drift of the Bernie left into conspiracism, campism, and media careerism is a reflection of the social democratic left’s failure to think and act critically in the face of this much broader historical defeat.

A few years ago, after the final sad demise of the second Bernie Sanders campaign, Matt Christman and I spoke about what might be done in its aftermath. We agreed that any new working class movement would have to be built orthogonally to the liberal Democrat, conservative Republican political divide. I still believe we can build a new workers’ politics neither by splitting the difference between the two poles of capitalist politics nor by opportunistically taking reform positions from either side, but by recognizing that each holds, in its own obscure way, some partial truth about the contradictory totality of bourgeois society.

There are rational kernels to be seen in even the stupidest libertarian philistine imaginary. After all, the welfare state was constructed, at least in part, to do the work of and ultimately replace what had been self-organized within society, including working class mutual aid societies and organs of independent class power like trade unions and civic associations. It doesn’t follow that we should line up behind Trump and tail his Project 2025 to politicize the administrative state, but this realization does help illuminate the contradictions that are pulling at different factions of capitalist society.

Is a civil-social organization dedicated to building working class self-determination and self-organization against the subordination of our interests to the state and corporations a liberal proposal, or a conservative one? More to the point, can a project of this sort offer a pole of attraction for workers that might overcome that very duality? If we allow ourselves the courage of breaking with the Popular Front/New Deal mentality, we might just be able to find out.

But positioning ourselves as the activists most committed to pressuring the capitalist state into doing a better job of what it’s already doing for social control reasons will always be a dead end. After all, subordinating ourselves to The Left (which is to say, the Democratic Party) necessarily precludes our ability to distance ourselves from the consequences of the totally state-ified/mass media hellscape that the last fifty years of capitalist politics, right and left, has produced. We need our own voice and our own institutions.

Everybody wants to offer some alternative to the dead social world of capital. And the most advanced want to move forward and build the Marxist party. As we have seen, for the last hundred or so years, they inevitably end up in 57 flavors of failure.

It is clear by now that for structural reasons, it’s impossible for working class political parties to attain any independent existence apart from the mainstream capitalist parties — unless they have a civil-social basis in working class life. At their base, these must offer diverse organizational expressions of the various conflicts produced by the capital-labor relation, market society, social division of labor and so on. Without unions independent of the capitalist parties, there can be no independent working class political movement. Without work alongside internal migrant communities there can be no actually-existing internationalist party. Without a network of independent working class civil organizations, there can be neither the social cohesion nor the social base — let alone the mass consciousness — to make any incipient proletarian party¹⁰ more than a reading group, a sectarian newspaper, or a pet project for déclassé intellectuals.

If the last fifty years have made a graveyard of bourgeois civil society, let’s not think we can whistle past it on our way to power. Let’s not be so pure or historically minded that we ignore this opportunity to assert, among this ‘American carnage,’ the rebuilding of society on proletarian terms as a necessary precondition for the patient work of party or union building.

Capital has cleared the social field of all activity not devoted to commerce or law and order. Any successful initiative must pose itself not as one pole within the civil-social matrix of class society, but as the one force capable of producing a better world. The middle classes and bourgeoisie have evacuated the terrain that we need to storm.¹¹

Independent Labor Club

What would an initiative that addresses these problems like in practice? We will have to find out together. But with our Independent Labor Club, we will have the opportunity to ameliorate our own conditions while preparing ourselves for the hard road ahead. After all, the COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have blasted a huge hole in social life that’s been filled with rage, depression, and self-harm.¹²

We will have monthly in-person meetings to build our capacity for trust and activity. We can put together outward-facing assemblies to share our project. We can create a place for militant workers to organize outside of the Central Labor Council. We can report back and discuss the already-existing union drives and social initiatives in our area. We can do workers inquiries on ourselves and others to understand the terrain of life and work in the 21st century. We can build among ourselves a class fellowship and community¹³. Maybe we’re not so cynical that we can’t adopt, in radical labor republican tradition of our ancestors, the rituals and regalia of a group like the Knights of Labor. Perhaps a solemn oath or two is order, who knows?

Our Independent Labor Club may be based in New York, but we walk with fellow travelers from Virginia to Ottawa, just to name a couple of places from which attendees to our first meeting plan to join us. What could we do with chapters across the country, across borders? We could organize real responses to economic crises or climate breakdown. We could develop practical theory attuned to the needs of fellow workers in struggle. We could create linkages between unorganized migrant workers and organized workers in traditional industries. We might assert, through our determination, self-discipline, and self-organization, the international working class as the subject of history once again. But none of this can happen if we stay wedded to the failed strategies of the past or if we jump directly to building political parties or workers councils before the pre-political conditions are in place.

Most of all, the Independent Labor Club will quit subordinating ourselves to the Popular Front with ‘progressive capitalists.’ As the hundredth anniversary of this ‘alliance with (D)emocratic forces’ gets closer, we must build capacity for a decisive break from that dead and decaying politics and the social abyss it has thrown us into. Dare we imagine striking out on our own? To battle against the middle class nationalism of the flag? To reject constitutionalism, legalism and bourgeois rule? To stand by our own lights at the point of production and beyond? To redefine freedom on our own terms, reflecting the true diversity and international character of the working class?

It will take courage and strength, but it is possible. Above all, and as a beginning, the Independent Labor Club says, ‘One hundred years of the Popular Front is enough!’¹⁴

It is high time we declare our independence.

1. I prefer the term ‘Triple Crisis’, which I’ve been using since about 2020. Then again, I’m no Adam Tooze.

2. C.f. the podcast work we’ve done around Giovanni Arrighi https://archive.org/details/s6c69czz8xct1idnmczpk0vo8axes46qljwym6um

3. In a roundabout way my politics have returned to those I held in the 2000s, libertarian communism. It’s just now that I’m beginning to understand the historical roots of left-wing anti-domination and how it relates to the communist project.

4. Without the working class as an organized social antagonist, capitalists can only ever muddle through and make things progressively worse. This is pretty obvious of late imo.

5. This tradition arose at the very beginning of American political life with a radical republicanism, often artisan in form, that spooked early observers like de Tocqueville.

6. While, at the same time, Americans are uniquely unfree in a very specific way: despite formal freedoms and civil liberties, the composition of society shows the vast power of capital to structure politics and social life. The average laborer’s time spent under the direct domination of capital at the point of production is much higher than in other capitalist core countries.

7. This largely reflects their lack of organic connections to the broader working classes.

8. The Black Panthers in the 1960s would be another great example and perhaps this is why the state considered them so potentially powerful they had to be destroyed. I’m not calling for the resurrection of any of these particular groups (most certainly not the KKK!) but the point is that these served as civil-social expressions, autonomous of the state, of the underlying conflicts and contradictions of bourgeois society. I think one of the great fears among the middle classes is that any working class self-organization will inevitably lead to fascism because of Settlerism or Hitler Particles or whatever. This is very much a Post-WW2-global-capitalist-order justification for subordinating working class civic life to political parties and the state. To the extent that the official left takes this up is the extent to which they hate/fear workers who don’t subscribe to the progressive capitalist line.

9. Often, but not always, cross-class community.

10. The same is true, of course, with trade union organizing. We will need to form strong bonds of community and self-organization as a necessary precondition for struggling within the difficult conditions imposed upon working class militants in the increasingly likely event of a post-NLRA world. But just as we are not ready to Build the Party, neither do we have the social basis to build successor organizations to the Wagner/Taft-Hartley business unions... yet.

11. By going beyond it, of course.

12. We all know that these are among the chief social maladies that workers are dealing with in the US and abroad. The rational kernel within the metaphysical shell of the online ‘dissident right’ is that these elements of social dislocation and need to be addressed. I, for one, think it would be better if young, atomized and angry workers and the unemployed came to hang out at the weekly ILC-NYC bowling night to vibe instead of watching Andrew Tate videos alone or browsing r/gooners.

13. One of the tendencies passed down to us from the Popular Front period is to go ‘down to the masses.’ It will be much easier for our group, since we are composed of workers who seek to… organize ourselves.

14. The hundredth anniversary of the New Deal is in about a decade. Seems like a good opportunity to inscribe on our banners, “One hundred years of the Popular Front is more than enough!”