So You Want To Be A Radical

Don't define yourself by what you hate, define yourself by what you do about it

Bernie Sanders and AOC just held a “fighting oligarchy” rally in Denver that had a record breaking number of attendees — 34,000. This was around 10,000 more attendees than Bernie’s largest rallies in either of his two presidential campaigns. Over three days, the turnout for these rallies totaled 84,000 people. The majority of the attendees were not even Bernie primary voters. These are people who were not necessarily convinced of the need for left-wing policies during the last two presidential elections, but have seen the destruction under Trump and Musk with zero opposition from the Democratic Party and are finally seeking answers. While Sanders himself has eschewed the idea of starting a new political party (he has suggested people run as independents that would presumably still caucus with the Dems), the numbers in these crowds show that something important is happening.

Despite this, the reactions I have seen from many former Bernie-supporting influencers and media figures who have radicalized beyond social democratic politics was anger. Anger that Bernie and AOC will likely just use the energy of these newly activated people and funnel it back into the Bad Outcome Machine that is the Democratic Party. Anger that those who attended are not politically advanced enough to understand that voting will not get us out of this mess. Anger that, I guess, the tens of thousands of attendees are not dedicated communists yet?

I had the opposite reaction. While I am deeply critical of both Bernie and AOC and their theory of change, what I saw was hopeful. I saw a bunch of working class people who have finally realized that the Democratic Party is failing them, and that the country is being put in immense peril with zero opposition. Instead of tuning out and becoming totally disaffected, these people decided to look for a way forward outside of the traditional channels. While it is almost certainly true that Bernie and AOC will never suggest a break with the Democratic Party, they aren’t who I am interested in. I am interested in finding some sign of life among the American working class. Some sign that we won’t sit idly by and accept our fate as the human sacrifices used to power a capitalist hell machine. In these rallies, I see a new group of people who can be reached by socialist organizers and led into a real working class movement, and away from the dead end politics that dominates our country.

We as Americans are some of the most cowed people in the world. We are too comfortable, too individualistic, we have virtually no class consciousness, we could almost never conceive of a situation in which an alteration to the Social Security age would spur months long protests across the nation like it did in France. We frankly tolerate entirely too much. While there have been some moments in the last 15 years that were hopeful - Occupy Wall Street, Bernie’s two presidential runs, the BLM protests, the protests for a free Palestine - we have failed to move the needle or transform those movements into something big enough and lasting enough to make change. We have failed to radicalize a large, organized group capable of extracting demands. In the last 15 years the country has been on steep decline and we have failed to even slightly slow it. The situation is dire and there isn’t any real coalition currently capable of mounting a tangible opposition. Half the time it feels like we as a nation are sleepwalking into oblivion. But for the first time in a while, I feel like that could change.

Arguably the failure of the Bernie campaigns was not in the fact that he didn’t win the primaries, it was in the lack of on the ground organizing from the socialist left that could’ve taken people who were open to a working class message of economic populism, educated them, and funneled them into a lasting movement. Many of us tacitly relied on the idea that a Sanders presidency would do the job for us. Now that we have moved beyond Bernie-style social democratic politics, we feel anger and betrayal at Bernie and AOC and similar politicians for continually insisting that the only thing we can do is keep voting for the lesser evil and change the party from the inside, someday, maybe, despite the evident failures of that strategy over the last decade. But what if, instead of getting angry at social democrats for doing what social democrats do, we channeled that anger into getting off our asses and showing up to the places where these newly activated people are and organizing them?

Fury that the majority of the population does not have the same level of political advancement as you is not how a radical reacts. A radical sees a population that isn’t sufficiently class conscious and understands it is their job to change that. If you want to be a radical, it takes a lot more than just having the best opinions. Having perfect ideas that stay trapped in your brain or on the timeline isn’t anything. If you are furious that social democrats will just keep feeding people back into the Democratic Party, then you have to get up and take action to feed them into something better!

This sort of anger among the left is an expression of chosen powerlessness. You are absolving yourself of your responsibility as a socialist to raise the consciousness of the working class and instead being outraged that someone else isn’t doing it for you. There is a nihilism that has taken hold in a lot of the left post-2020 that has seemingly given up on the idea that a better world is possible, and has stopped trying to fight for it. Instead of using a materialist lens to understand why the working class is the way it is, you deride them as stupid, as gullible, as rubes, as voting for their own oppression. In one breath you say we don’t live in a democracy (and this is true), but in the next you decide that people who vote in this system are fully responsible for every awful thing the ruling class does. You make your whole personality about not voting rather than what you are doing instead of voting. You define yourself through negation: what you don’t do, who you don’t like, what systems you oppose; instead of what vision you have for the future: what you support, what you believe in, what you are willing to fight for. Hating the right things doesn’t make you radical. You have to take action to make the world into what you believe it should be.

If you are worried that Bernie and AOC will just funnel people back towards the same dead ends (and they will probably try), then you need to take action to make sure those people get funneled into something useful instead. We have to be honest about the fact that these people didn’t just fail us, we failed ourselves, we failed those who can be reached and haven’t been, and we failed the working class. We can choose to look at these rallies as opportunities for us to get out there to reach more people with a radical politics that will make change, or we can feed back into the same cynicism that virtually guarantees things will continue to get worse.

I definitely do not have blinders on about the seriousness of our situation but I believe that to overcome it we must try to hold onto a kind of revolutionary optimism that seeks out every opportunity we can find to spread the message of a future that is better than our present. Becoming angry, misanthropic doomers gets us nowhere and doesn’t make us the most radical person in the room. The most radical person in the room is often the person in total control of a spreadsheet of the people they met at the last rally. It’s the person who still holds a boundless hope in their hearts for the future of the working class. The person who feels that victory is inevitable but only when we act.

If you want to be a radical then you have to radically shift your perspective to one that is always looking for the next opportunity to bring people into the movement. You need to abandon the idea that people with false consciousness or bad ideas or liberal sentiments are fixed and immutable and incapable of growth or change. Once upon a time, you and I were liberals too. To be a radical is to see the potential in every moment and in every person; not to deride those who aren’t as politically advanced as you are. You must do away with your narrow view of the world and what it can be. A true radical doesn’t just react — they look for the dialectic at work in every situation and search for the contradictions that can drive change.

Here’s how I see it:

Workers are seeking out answers because the Democratic Party has failed them. In our system, the leftmost strata of the possible is represented in two social democrats — Bernie and AOC. They are offering some answers in their theory of change — a partial resolution to the contradictions of the Democratic Party’s pro-capitalist orientation, by advocating for policies that attempt to ease the discontent of workers while keeping them within the framework of capitalism, yet this approach also avoids confronting the deeper class antagonism between their ruling class party and the working class’s interests. The workers however, are only turning to social democrats because their material conditions include an absence of a revolutionary socialist formation. Without a true socialist movement, the workers have absolutely no means to fully negate their present reality. The class consciousness of the workers of this country is undeveloped and currently incapable of overturning the current system. This is a stalled dialectic — the contradiction is evident, but the opposing force has not emerged and it cannot presently be resolved. Instead of viewing this as a dead end, the socialist views the present conditions as a snapshot of an ever emerging process that must be acted upon. We must ourselves become the negation of the negation: a broad working class movement. But we can only do this if we are honest about the reality of our situation, and are willing to meet these people where they are and develop their political understanding.

You can punch at the sky all you want but anger alone will never bring the changes we seek. Anger at the working class for not having developed class consciousness will only serve to push yourself further away from masses and the creation of a movement that can resolve the conditions of our oppression. We must start with an acceptance that we aren’t where we want to be, and then an embrace of the idea that this is not a fixed condition but a constantly changing process we can participate in.

“take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own” - Mao Zedong, The Mass Line

If you want to be a radical, the first step is to not extricate yourself from the political process by retreating into anger and disillusionment, but to instead seek the cracks in the armor of this system and work to widen them wherever you can. The best revolutionaries had optimism about the inevitability of their success. They had a deep faith in the workers and their ability to eventually throw off their chains. They didn’t deride the naivety of the working class, they viewed it as a call to act. We know that consciousness can only evolve through struggle, so we must find the places where we can struggle with workers, seeing their revolutionary potential before they themselves can. Cynicism about our situation has failed us. A radical sees a working class that is stirring and moves to wrest that energy and transform it into something that changes the course of history. You can nurture your pessimism and refuse to act, or you can let your belief in the power of the masses to rise up guide you. The choice is yours.

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Tangible actions you can take:

• Join a socialist organization

• Start a socialist book club

• If you are a member of a socialist org, go to these rallies and connect with the attendees

• Join or start a union

• Take part in your local mutual aid groups

• Tell everyone you meet about socialism