When the Party’s Over: Organizing after Bernie Brendan O'Connor, Baffler #57, May 2021 https://thebaffler.com/salvos/when-the-partys-over-oconnor . . . In the aftermath of Bernie 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the George Floyd rebellion, it has become clearer than ever that one of the primary questions that the left in the United States today must answer is that of organization. Depending on the context in which this question is asked, it can be reduced pretty precisely: the question of organization becomes a question of forming a third party or seizing the Democratic ballot line; of centralization or decentralization; of reform or revolution... . . . In other words, the social movements that do exist are not yet organized in such a way that translates their cultural force into class-based political power... . . . In the absence of a campaign, movement, or organization, even alternative media is subject to the logic and incentives of the market in which it operates and the platforms on which it exists. Now, that alternative media is mutating, giving birth to degraded, populist pseudo-movements like #ForceTheVote, which sought to agitate the Bernie-supporting masses around a deeply obscure, procedural tactic its advocates claimed would expose the Democratic Party’s hypocrisy on Medicare for All—as if this hypocrisy is not already obvious to anyone who supported Sanders, or readily waved away by anyone who didn’t... . . . ...As it prepares for its biennial national convention, the DSA is approaching a hundred thousand members, making it by any measure the largest socialist formation in the United States since WWII, and thus the site of innumerable internal squabbles—and even some principled political debates—as members learn together what it means to be a socialist in the twenty-first century. Almost everyone I spoke to for this piece is a DSA member. . . . Whether the DSA contains the germ of “an independent working-class party” or can only contribute to some other, external effort is a matter of much debate. Certainly, it is an imperfect organization whose membership reflects a too-narrow fraction of the U.S. working class as it is currently composed. And yet, its power is growing... . . . No one can be merely talked into believing that a world without domination, exploitation, and oppression is possible. It is not a matter of rhetoric or propaganda, of reading the right books or listening to the right podcasts or watching the right streams, but of the transformational experience of collective struggle. Being absorbed into a party, a union, or any kind of organized, disciplined collective does not obliterate the individual but produces a different kind of individual: one who is not only valuable for the bits of data she creates as a user, viewer, or poster but someone who can participate in the shaping of her own future—not alone, but together. ###
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