In Part Two of his analysis of strategy for the modern-day left Hank Beecher takes a look at three recent case studies and tries to draw conclusions on how the left can move forward.
In polemics for and against electoralism, leftists of various stripes invoke historic examples as proof that theirs is the more plausible road to power. They analyze the Russian and Finnish Revolutions of a century ago and Allende’s Chile of half a century ago. Less attention is given to contemporary events that might inform us of how different strategies fare as engines of social transformation in today’s United States. Marx himself maintained in his day that a peaceful means of attaining socialism might be possible in the United States and certain parts of Europe. How might today’s social landscape in the U.S inform the question of an electoral road?
In Part I, I expounded on the problems with electoralist arguments against non-electoral means of building class power outside the state. I looked at how the climate crisis must be centered in our analysis of present material conditions. The climate crisis is one far-reaching aspect of a general crisis in the reproduction of capitalist social and ecological relations. Here, I look at how the struggle for power is playing out in the fissures opening as capital cannibalizes its own foundation. I explore how electoral struggles fare in addressing various facets of these crises, particularly when reform threatens the profits and hegemony of the capitalist class. Each of these cases focuses on an aspect of the intensifying crisis of social reproduction, specifically, the disintegration of working-class housing and the unraveling of the climate, each exemplifying some aspect of left electoralism and how the capitalist class fought back. In two cases, the left was defeated despite winning the electoral battle. In the third, the socialists prevailed but benefited from a long history of class struggle.
These cases illuminate important tools in the capitalist arsenal against significant reforms. More importantly, they show how the landscape of power and regional contours of class vary immensely in the U.S. Thus an electoral strategy that is appropriate in one setting might be a counterproductive dead-end in another. Crucially, the power struggles that shape these conditions happen largely (though not exclusively) outside the state and are conditioned by uneven patterns of capital accumulation and crisis. Socialists and the working class must adapt our repertoire of tactics accordingly. Ballots, bullets, and various forms of strikes can all play a role and the need for each varies with context. What remains constant is the necessity of drawing the masses into the struggle for a socialist future.
CASE 1: Seattle Head Tax
Strategy
This case is a paradigm of a socialist electoral strategy combined with mass, grassroots mobilization in the streets. It details an event in which socialists leveraged the position of the most prominent socialist third-party politician in any major U.S. city as well as a robust local activist culture. Thus the campaign was two-pronged: electoralism + activist mobilizing. The site of the struggle is the city of Seattle.
Context
Seattle is a locus of concentrated investment in real estate and tech, exemplifying the highest peaks in capitalism’s uneven contours of development. In recent years it has had the nation’s sharpest increases in living costs, fueling skyrocketing rates of homelessness and displacement. Waves of capital have washed away the old city, residents and all, and replaced it with sterile citadels of glass.
The struggle
In 2018 the Seattle City Council deliberated ways to mitigate the crisis facing the city’s burgeoning unsheltered and rent-burdened population. As housing has become increasingly commodified, the built environment has grown more and more hostile to the needs of working-class residents. This problem is ubiquitous beyond Seattle and is a paradigm example of capital cannibalizing its own base.
To raise a fraction of the money needed to diffuse the struggle for housing, City Council considered a modest tax on the thinnest top layer of the city’s richest companies. Seattle is an extremely business-friendly city with a tax burden that falls almost entirely on the working class, leaving corporations and the wealthy relatively unscathed. The city began deliberating a so-called Head Tax, which would negligibly shift that tax burden toward the capitalist class. The most fierce advocate for the Head Tax was Seattle’s sole socialist council member, Kshama Sawant. The tax was backed by community groups, most labor unions, and the more progressive wing of city council. The battle in the streets was led by Socialist Alternative, the party to which Sawant belonged, DSA, and the socialist-adjacent NGO Transit Riders Union. Flyers, rallies, press conferences, and canvassing monopolized the activist agenda. Every City Council meeting was packed beyond capacity. The tax was billed as the “Amazon Tax”, playing on the general public discontent toward the city’s largest business, which had transformed the landscape into a playground for the rich. The outlook was promising.
Then big business rebelled.
Amazon’s Capital Strike
Amazon owns or occupies nearly a quarter of the office space in Seattle and its growth plans are robust in the region. It is a major driver of real estate development and its building projects employ thousands of workers, particularly in the building trades. When lobbying city council failed to obstruct the Head Tax, Amazon pulled a capital strike and suspended construction projects downtown. Immediately, an enormous swath of the area’s living-wage, blue collar economy evaporated. Though the building trade unions had already opposed the Head Tax, the threat to the stable livelihoods of fellow workers gave other unions’ bureaucrats justification to flip sides and join the capitalist revolt. For organized labor, opposing socialists became a matter of solidarity with fellow union workers whose livelihoods were at risk. Socialism was reckless radicalism that endangered the working class.
The capital strike and consequent revolt of union bureaucrats was enough to force City Council to blink. They immediately scaled back the proposed tax, halving its effective rate, further restricting the number of companies to which it applied, and setting it to expire after five years. The business community still objected to the diluted bill and socialist activists unleashed one of the most pavement-pounding public outreach campaigns in living memory. Against the continued opposition of capitalists and a growing share of organized labor, this weakened bill passed and the left claimed victory. It seemed the formula had prevailed: electoralism + mass mobilization = socialist victory. Unfortunately, big business had other plans.
Hijacking democracy
Ballot initiatives and citizen referendums are considered one of the best examples of direct democratic control of the state apparatus. Ballots remove legislative power from the hands of politicians and allow citizens to generate and enact policy reforms directly. In theory, citizens and community groups can draft and enact legislation themselves by gathering a certain number of voter signatures and passing the bill via majority vote. In appearance, such mechanisms are the purest example of direct-democracy in the legislative functions of the state. However, even these channels can be hijacked by capital to bring other, less compliant factions of the state to heel. Precisely this turn of events occurred after socialists in Seattle had achieved an electoral victory on the Head Tax.
After the Head Tax was passed by City Council, a coalition of businesses, led by Amazon and Starbucks, immediately drafted a citizen referendum, or a ballot, to repeal it. However, they did more; they also snuck in a rider that would repeal an uncontroversial levy that was being used to provide desperately-needed funds to Seattle schools. In essence, big business offered city council an ultimatum: repeal the Head Tax or we will repeal it ourselves, and we’ll take away education funding along with it.
The business coalition poured in money, luring in canvassers from out of state. In exchange for each signature on the repeal referendum, the coalition paid amounts dwarfing what canvassing firms usually offer. It was a gold rush for canvassers who flooded into Seattle streets and spread patent lies about the Head Tax. If the socialist mobilization to enact the Head Tax was unprecedented, the frenzy unleashed by big business, through the very channels designed to empower the masses, was jaw-dropping. Within days it appeared the coalition would have the signatures to repeal the reform (and defund Seattle schools for good measure). City Council succumbed, and repealed the reform they had enacted only days before. The vote was 7-2 in favor of repeal. Socialists and those struggling for housing were defeated.
Amazon’s capital strike weakened the bill and damaged the perception of socialists amongst organized labor. Not content with suppressing their potential tax burden, big business thoroughly captured the ballot apparatus to force an intransigent city council into compliance. The fiasco placed workers and tenants on opposite sides of a pitched battle for the right to the city. It also turned much of the organized labor force against socialists. Indeed, shortly after the fiasco, my Teamster local launched its own political action committee to use membership dues on campaigns to wrest Seattle politics back away from “socialists and left-wing radicals that are out of touch with what working people need.” With the region’s socialist groups largely composed of high-earning activists rather than organizers embedded in the daily lives of the working class, this narrative has been difficult to counter.
Conclusion
While the electoral socialist movement in Seattle has not been permanently defeated, and Kshama Sawant did go on to win re-election and revamp her “Tax Amazon” campaign, consider the tactics and scale of revolt against a tiny business tax. Suppose socialists in Seattle completely consolidate electoral power. As they attempt to exercise state power in more drastic ways to enact an anti-capitalist agenda, it’s hard to imagine why the capitalist class wouldn’t simply expand and escalate its arsenal, particularly in a city whose economic well-being is so dependent on a handful of tech giants. If the Head Tax fiasco has taught us anything, it’s that when socialists don’t build class power outside the state and win over workers to the cause, even our successes end in defeat.
CASE 2: The Practice Coup in the American West
This case study looks at the failed attempts by the Oregon legislature to enact a climate bill in 2019. It details a complex struggle with many players and complicating factors, but for our purpose we will focus on a conflict between two forces: 1) a left/progressive movement that has consolidated state power, bolstered by the relatively democratic nature of state institutions that encourage high levels of citizen participation, and 2) a right-wing minority squeezed out of government but bolstered by uniquely well-developed anti-government militias. Thus the conflicts can be articulated as a state thoroughly captured by reform-oriented progressives vs a reactionary social movement. The conflict resembles a situation of dual power except that in this arrangement, the state is the more progressive force, and the second power, the “state-within-a-state”, is thoroughly reactionary. The former enjoy democratic legitimacy and, outside a few strongholds, the latter is mostly fringe. The particular manifestation of the struggle was a relatively tepid attempt at slowing climate change and softening its sharp edges. In the end, reactionary dual power prevailed.
Progressive capture of the state
Regarding the first of these features, Oregon has some of the most democratic voting laws in the U.S. The actual process is uniquely easy and participation in elections is among the highest in the nation. In recent years, this characteristic has helped reform-oriented progressives come to dominate the state’s elected posts at all levels. Democrats hold a supermajority in the state legislature and the governorship, with many of these officials being committed to environmental stewardship. Local officials have been eager to respond to public pressure and place themselves as the vanguard of a new movement using local zoning laws to obstruct interstate and international fossil fuel development. Because of these efforts, they have been among the nation’s most innovative and formidable opponents of the fossil fuel industry.
At the national level, Oregon has proven itself to stand solidly to the left of most other blue states. In 2016, its electorate overwhelmingly voted for insurgent Bernie Sanders against establishment-favorite Hillary Clinton. In addition to taking the entire state by double digits, Sanders won all but one of the state’s counties. Furthermore, one of Oregon’s Senators, Jeff Merkely, became the sole federal Senator to buck party consensus and back Sanders over Clinton.
Clearly, the situation in Oregon does not amount to socialist capture of state power through elections, but the situation remains informative. The state approaches universal suffrage, is decidedly to the left of the national liberal establishment, and has multiple institutions of popular power such as ballot initiatives. It is nearly a best-case-scenario for those seeking an electoral route to socialism. And while these qualities hardly amount to a socialist government, the counter-revolution would be even more intense against a truly leftist consolidation of state power.
The “counter-revolution”
On the flip side, the Republican Party in Oregon has found itself increasingly backed into a corner. Indeed, if electoral success is an indication of a political movement’s legitimacy, the right-wing of U.S. politics has been profoundly delegitimized in Oregon. Facing this dearth in political power, the more reactionary segment of Oregon’s ruling class has begun formally and openly allying with the region’s Patriot movement. The ongoing fusion of state Republicans with reactionary paramilitaries increasingly threatens the more progressive currents within the government.
In fact, in much of the Pacific Northwest, the Republican relationship with the Patriot militia movement is less a fusion of two separate political entities and more simply the “inside” facet of a two-pronged “inside-outside” strategy. As geographer Phil Neel details, the Patriot movement sees “resistance forming first in the far hinterland, where local residents can be organized into self-reliant militias and local governments can be won over to their cause to create a rural base of power, parallel and opposed to that of the federal government. These are the core unifying features of the group”.1 Thus Patriot militias and some Pacific Northwest politicians are in many cases flip sides of the same coin. Neel describes the “inside-outside” approach as follows:
This strategy puts an equally strong emphasis on “inside” work via formal administrative channels (facilitated by entry into local government and the Republican Party) in a way that synthesizes well with the “outside” work they do in defunded timber country or along the U.S.–Mexican border, where they prepare and establish parallel structures of power. While filling in the holes left by underfunded law enforcement in [rural Oregon], for example, Patriot-affiliated politicians were also leading the opposition to new property tax measures that would have allowed the hiring of more deputies. This, of course, helps to widen the funding shortfall further, helping extra-state militias to step in and begin building their own power within the county. The Patriot parties thereby seek to extend and secure the economic conditions for their own expansion.2
This strategy works by building networks of mutual aid and support in rural communities blighted by disinvestment, the loss of public services, the decline of extractive industries, and ecological collapse. Neel explains,
In the midst of a far-right movement dominated by Internet threats, spectacular street brawls and run-of-the-mill white male terrorism, the Patriot groups stand out owing to their focus on self-reliance initiatives. Faced with devastating declines in government services, many have stepped in to provide basic social services and natural disaster training. This is particularly notable in rural counties in states like Oregon, where the combination of long-term collapse in timber revenue and dwindling federal subsidies has all but emptied the coffers of local governments.3
As Neel insists, these organizers are already responding to the unfolding crisis in capitalism’s most neglected hinterlands. This strategy of building power where the state and capital has receded resembles the dual power strategy of leftist organizations such as Black Rose/Rosa Negra and Cooperation Jackson. As fissures emerge in the terrain of uneven development, organizers fill the voids with structures of mutual aid and counter-power.
For instance, when the government of Oregon’s Josephine County became so underfunded that it couldn’t pay prison guards or cops, the Sheriff was forced to release prisoners and warn citizens that their lives were in their own hands. Neel explains that in this context, the Patriots offered “community preparedness” and “disaster response” courses. They helped form parallel governance structures such as community watches and full-blown militias. They volunteered for community service, painted houses, built a handicap playground, and constructed wheelchair ramps for elderly or infirm residents.
The main feature differentiating this approach from a true dual power strategy is that it does not seek to establish the hegemony of the dispossessed. As Neel says, “While often winning the hearts and minds of local residents, these new power structures are by no means services necessarily structured to benefit those most at risk” (30). Indeed, much of the movement’s publicity arises from defending mining companies and ranchers against accountability to the federal government. Hence the reactionary character of the movement.
Much of the Patriots’ growth also flows from its intervention in rural land struggles. As Neel explains, it is most active in areas where disinvestment has altered the form of exploitation faced by most working-class people. Instead of corporations extracting surpluses through wage labor, the state extracts rents through various land-use regimes run by hostile agencies. But the Patriots’ growth go beyond building a base by “serving the people and fighting the power” in rural communities.
The Patriot movement has had notable success running candidates as Republicans in Oregon as part of its “inside” strategy. In recent years, Republican Party officials in Portland, Oregon have voted to formalize their relationship with militias by using them as security against left-wing protestors. In Eastern Washington, another militia movement aiming to create a white ethno-state encompassing parts of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon has fused with factions of the Republican Party (though by-and-large, the Patriot movement has taken pains to distance itself from explicit white-supremacy). Thus, in western regions of the country where electoral politics is increasingly dominated by mostly-urban liberals, reactionary politicians and paramilitaries are merging into a counter-revolutionary, anti-democratic alternative.
The Oregon political scene represents almost a best-case scenario for an electoralist seeking to capture state power and usher in a new era of progressive reforms. On the other hand, the social landscape of the Pacific Northwest is prime for counter-revolution. This context conditioned the outcome of a 2019 cap-and-trade bill that aimed to reduce the damage companies operating in Oregon could do the climate.
Climate action and the practice coup
The climate bill was drafted by a coalition including community groups and the state’s oldest farmworkers union. It was backed by all nine of Oregon’s federally recognized tribes, the state’s utilities, and some major companies including Nike. Governor Kate Brown incorporated it into her most recent electoral platform and campaigned heavily on promises to sign it into law.
When the Democratic supermajority introduced the bill, it was widely expected to pass. Republicans, who tend to represent counties devastated by the decline in extractive industries (primarily timber, which accounts for most of Oregon’s carbon emissions) intensely oppose virtually any action on climate change. They lacked enough seats in the legislature to pose any challenge on the floor. In response to their near-absence of formal political power, their options were limited. They chose to jettison even a pretense of democratic procedure at all. The sequence of events unfolded as follows:
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- All the state’s Republican lawmakers refused to show up to work, denying the legislature a quorum to hold a vote.
- The governor instructed the state police to apprehend the absentee Republicans and bring them to the courthouse so the vote could proceed.
- Republican lawmakers went into hiding and fled the state, issuing death threats against any officer who came to apprehend them.
- Militias publicly pledged support for the Republican lawmakers in self-imposed exile, offering to defend them against the state.
- Democratic leaders expressed their intent to hold a special legislative session to vote in the absence of a quorum.
- The heavily-armed militias assemble at the capitol as a threat to legislators in order to prevent the special legislative session.
- Fearing violence at the hands of the militias, Democratic leadership canceled the session and told lawmakers to stay home for their own safety.
- Two Democratic lawmakers defected and came out against the bill in order to de-escalate, entice Republicans to return from self-imposed exile, and to move on to other legislative priorities.
It was later revealed that lobbying efforts by Boeing likely also played a role in peeling off Democratic support for the bill. However, it wasn’t until the situation escalated that Boeing’s lobbying efforts succeeded, and the Democratic lawmakers’ express justification for defection was to bring Republicans back to the table. Indeed, the outcome was no doubt a victory for Republicans and their allied militias and a defeat of the more democratic aspects of Oregon’s government. Thus, the events can only be understood as the political defeat of 1) an elected, reformist government enjoying broad public legitimacy and a popular mandate, by 2) an anti-democratic government-in-exile backed by reactionary paramilitary forces. Though the personnel within the legislature did not change in this course of events, it became clear who calls the shots. Despite widespread electoral success, the left and the working class lost.
Conclusion
The growth and increasing boldness of the militia movement in the Pacific Northwest, along with its increasing fusion with the politically-cornered Republican Party, maybe a lasting trend. The rise of Trump has accompanied a metastasis of this social movement that defies historical precedent. Furthermore, the movement is finding purchase in conflicts which are emerging as the crisis in eco-social reproduction intensifies. The Bundy standoff was fueled by conflict over land use regimes on ecologically degraded range, unable to support the scale of commercial ranching it once did. The Malheur Reserve standoff of 2016 occurred in a region economically devastated by the decline of extractive industries. The proto-coup at the Oregon Capitol was fueled by state action to mitigate the climate crisis. It’s no coincidence that authoritarian measures have emerged as bourgeois democracy proves itself unable to resolve these and similar crises. As these crises unravel, such conflicts can only increase, as will the boldness with which the most reactionary elements in the capitalist class respond.
Indeed, the events surrounding the climate bill can be seen as the latest escalation in the militia movement’s path to relevancy in the American West, as a stage in something like a counter-revolutionary protracted people’s war. While the 2014 events in the Nevada desert represented a successful challenge to federal sovereignty over an entire swath of desert, in 2019 the militia movement served as the paramilitary arm of an illegitimate party, successfully hijacking the legislative processes of an entire state. If this does not qualify as some sort of proto-coup, it certainly qualifies as practice for a real one.
It would certainly be wrong to conclude from these considerations that the folks of the rural West are irredeemably reactionary. Indeed, as Neel explains,
If white ruralites were as inherently conservative as the average leftist would have us believe, they should be flooding into far-right organizations in unprecedented numbers, demanding a platform for their racial resentment. But the reality is that [the] far right has only been capable of attracting newcomers in rural areas in a spare few locations.4
Yet despite the geographical limitations of their success, the Patriots have had an outsized influence on the politics of crisis from these strongholds. If leftists were as systematically engaged in similar rural base-building, we could perhaps reclaim the countryside as a hotbed of working-class radicalism.
It would also be incorrect to conclude the rural hinterlands should occupy the bulk of leftist efforts as they have for the far-right. Rural America is gradually emptying out and becoming depopulated as economic opportunity moves to coastal cities and the exurbs. Not only does the countryside contain fewer people; it also contains fewer strategic chokepoints in processes of capital accumulation. However, the rural working-class also cannot be ignored and must be involved in any project of social transformation. Islands of municipal socialism adrift in a vast sea of reaction will not get us to a just society.
CASE 3: New Yorkers’ One-Two Punch
In 2019 socialists and progressives in New York delivered a one-two punch to the real estate state. First, New Yorkers defeated an enormous power grab by Amazon when the company sought to plant its second headquarters in western Queens, at great cost to the city and its working-class residents. This defeat was an enormous blow to real estate speculators who had been banking on the deal to inflate the value of their housing portfolios. Then, after a wave of progressive officials swept centrist Democrats and Republicans aside in the 2018 state election, the legislature passed an enormous expansion of statewide rent control. The real estate and landlord lobbies remain up in arms as they’ve watched future profits evaporate. Both of these victories, though not perfect, represent the defeat of entrenched corporate interests, costing capitalists enormous losses in profits and power.
The electoral efforts of socialists played a central role. In many ways, these victories are a paradigm case of the electoralist strategy of taking state power through elections, while applying mass pressure from below to keep officials accountable. In other ways, however, these movements leaned heavily on past projects of building immense counter-power which, though mostly absorbed by now into the bourgeois status quo, still retain varying degrees of social, political, and economic power. Few, if any, major cities in the U.S. are so decisively shaped by a turbulent history of incessant, organized class struggle at every level of society. The result is a labyrinthine knot of intertwined political and social actors for which even the world’s most powerful company was ill-prepared.
Amazon HQ2
The fight in New York against Amazon HQ2 was a fight for the right to the city. It was a fight against gentrification and a struggle over who decides the fate of the neighborhood. Socialist elected officials played a very visible role. While the deal was secured by the Democratic old guard, particularly Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, it was vocally and vociferously opposed by professed socialist Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the federal legislature and Julia Salazar at the state level. Indeed, these two high-profile politicians helped galvanize and legitimize a broader movement against HQ2. More importantly, long-time establishment politicians read the tea leaves and came out against the deal as well. After socialists ousted career politicians in the upper echelons of the region’s Democratic establishment, corporate centrists took the cue. Queens career politicians Jimmy Van Bramer and Michael Gianaris were crucial in luring Amazon to Queens in the first place. However, after DSA became a force to be reckoned with in Queens politics, Van Bramer and Gianaris pulled an about-face, coming out as the foremost opponents of the HQ2 deal. These political dynamics were likely crucial in Amazon’s defeat. The new progressive coalition of electoral socialists, community activists, and politicians with their feet to the fire helped deliver Amazon perhaps its first major defeat ever. However, by the company’s own admission, the deciding factor was something else.
The landscape of social and political power in NYC is far more complex than Amazon was prepared for. Unions are central to these contours. New York City has the highest union density of any major city in the US. The history of unionism in New York, as elsewhere, is a combination of radicalism, cronyism, corporate cooptation, and rank-and-file reformism. Some unions began as real institutions of working-class power. Others were permeated with anti-communism and xenophobia from day one. The result is a mass of intertwined bureaucracies permeating nearly every facet of local politics. On one hand, unions bureaucrats often serve as extensions of the managerial class, enriching themselves by overseeing a brokered peace between workers and the corporate class. To the extent that many do advocate for workers, they do so as a de facto extension of the state, negotiating and enforcing better laws for workers under their jurisdiction.
On the other hand, some unions retain the shells of their radical histories and provide space for workers to organize and collaborate. For instance, a good-cause firing provision in a contract between a union and company does not in itself increase worker militancy on the floor, but it provides a legal shield that permits workers to take greater risks in their organizing. Union halls also provide physical spaces in which workers can mingle and develop social bonds. Shop stewards often act as important leaders in building struggle. It’s no surprise, therefore, that unionized workers still often organize and win power on the shop floor and beyond. While the vast majority of union bureaucracies have been incorporated into the ruling class’s mechanisms of worker control, they certainly complicate the landscape of power and provide opportunities for building rank-and-file militancy.
The role unions play in NYC politics, particularly in the fight against Amazon HQ2, reflect these dynamics. Many unions, particularly the building trades and service sector unions, strongly supported the deal. However, the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and the Teamsters adamantly opposed it. These unions proved to be perhaps the most central players in defeating the coalition of Amazon, Mayor de Blasio, and Governor Cuomo. Specifically, it was the union’s threat of organizing workers at Amazon’s most important logistic node in the city that slammed the door on the deal.
Amazon has a documented history of anti-union tactics. When critics of the HQ2 deal pointed this out to Mayor de Blasio, he responded that New York City has a way of rubbing off on companies and that if they welcomed Amazon to the city, the company would change its ways. RWDSU called the bluff and announced an organizing drive at the company’s Staten Island warehouse, its most important footprint in the city. The union then publicly asked Amazon to agree to remain neutral and let its workers organize. The company refused. In public hearings, politicians opposed to the HQ2 deal reiterated the call for a neutrality agreement. Again, Amazon refused. There would be no union at Amazon, the company said, and that was final. The ongoing insistence by politicians, organized labor, and a few token workers ultimately proved to be more than Amazon could stomach. It backed out of the deal, the threat of unionization the most decisive factor in its retreat. The company, the governor, and the mayor were defeated by the threat of organized workers.
This account does not dismiss the importance of the electoral and activist coalitions that helped turn up the heat on Amazon. It aims simply to point out that more factors were at play. Crucial among these was the threat of organized workers and the knotted political and social contours formed by over a century of intense class struggle. Not every location has such a dense and intractable tangle of institutional and social power. However, it’s important not to divorce one side of the coin from the other. There is no doubt that the movement for workers’ power and the campaign by activists and politicians were synergistic and complementary. It seems unlikely either would have succeeded on its own. It’s also crucial to note that the vast majority of unions in New York City, and indeed in North America, are thoroughly co-opted by various sectors of bourgeois society and, though they may play a role in undermining corporate welfare deals, are possibly too compromised to play an immediate role in revolutionary transformation of society.
The Battle for Rent Control
Rent control in New York has been characterized by a routine ebb-and-flow of tenant protections since the early 1900s. In the century spanning 1919 to 2019, rent control in the state swelled from nothing to its apex in the post-war period, before being chipped away by an unholy alliance of Republicans, centrist Democrats, developers, and landlords. By the early 2000s, the suite of rent control laws was virtual Swiss cheese, speckled with so many holes that landlords were spoiled for choice when it came to finding ways to deregulate their units and displace low-income renters. In 2018, the real estate industry appeared to be at the height of its power, with the city and state governments firmly in its iron grip. Then the tables turned. In a massive grassroots mobilization, community groups and leftist organizations hit the pavement, ushering in a “blue wave” to sweep the unholy alliance from power. Progressives and socialists took over the state legislature. For the first time in generations, comprehensive rent control appeared more than a pipe dream. Housing as a human right was back on the agenda. In 2019, the impossible happened: the real estate state was delivered a resounding defeat, as speculators and landlords saw future profits disintegrate before their eyes. If any contemporary event supports the electoralist thesis, this is it.
However, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions too quickly. The most recent victory must be situated in the history of class struggle in the urban slums of New York and beyond. The oscillations of rent control directly mirror the historic contours of proletarian power. The 2019 victory amounted not to a leap forward for working-class renters, but rather to organizers clawing back victories won by radicals of a bygone era, reforms that eroded with the decline of class power in subsequent generations.
The first wave
Prior to New York’s first rent control law, immigrants and socialists had already been busy organizing tenant unions for years. The fight against landlords and real estate speculators was global in proportion, part and parcel of the international revolutionary ferment against capitalism. While Engels and many founding members of the Socialist International considered the housing problem to be an inevitable side effect of capitalism, radical socialists in urban centers viewed the fight against rents and evictions as a crucial terrain of revolutionary class struggle. As Mike Davis explains in Old Gods, New Enigmas, tenants from Petrograd and Berlin to Barcelona, from London to Glasgow, and from New York to Buenos Aires waged militant and persistent class war against landlords and real estate speculators for decades. These tenant movements were an extension of the broader specter of revolution and fused with radical labor unions and political parties. Rent strikes were common and increasingly vast. Davis explains,
the tenants’ movement in the Lower East Side was galvanized by the apartment shortage and rising rents that followed the construction of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1900, which displaced 17,000 residents. The socialist Daily Forward, the Yiddish- language newspaper of the Lower East Side, instigated the United Hebrew Trades, the Workman’s Circle, and the Socialist Party to organize a tenants’ movement that after a preliminary strike in 1904, regrouped under more strictly Socialist leadership for the ‘great rent war’ of 1907 in midst of a short but severe national recession. Jewish tenants in the Lower East Side, Harlem and Brownsville (a “Socialist stronghold”) hung red flags in their windows, battled police to prevent evictions, and mobbed the schleppers (movers). In the end, Robert Fogelson observes, “the strike fizzled out in January 1908,” but New York’s Socialist had learned important lessons: “The strikers would have to come not from one or two neighborhoods, but from dozens. They would have to include not just Jews, but Italians, Irish, Germans, and Poles – and even native-born New Yorkers.5
This movement, again, was simply the local manifestation of a wide-ranging assault against the capitalist class, a struggle spearheaded in many places by parties affiliated with the Socialist International. From Paris to Buenos Aires, tenants began to cohere as an important force against the more vicious advances of capital.
As World War I exacerbated crises of social reproduction, intensifying food and coal shortages in Europe and the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, urban struggles began to take on revolutionary dimensions. Crisis intensified class struggle. By 1919, socialists in New York had organized 25,000 tenants into the Greater New York Tenants League, which lead mass rent strikes at 500 buildings. As Davis details,
A massive rent war was fought out in a series of battles from 1917 to 1920 and spread across the East River from Harlem and the Lower East Side to Williamsburg and the south Bronx under the aegis of the Greater New York Tenants League. As news of the revolutions in Russia electrified New York’s tens of thousands of Socialist Party supporters, the “Bolsheviki rent strikes,” as landlords began to call them, sometimes took on the air of revolutionary rather merely reformist struggles.6
Around the same time, socialists were gaining a minority of seats in the New York legislature and introducing legislation for rent control. As Davis concludes, “Despite continuing repression of the Socialist Party followed by the infamous Palmer raids and the mass deportations of immigrant radicals, the stubborn movement ultimately prevailed, forcing the legislature in Albany to introduce rent controls in 1920 – a major and enduring working-class victory.” Rent control was such an affront to the capitalist status quo in New York that socialist politicians were forcefully purged from the state capitol, losing their seats in the legislature in something of a mini coup.
The movement to win the first rent control laws thus had at least three important local factors: 1) militant, socialist-led labor unions engaging in industrial action, 2) well-organized tenant unions engaging in mass collective action including rent strikes, and 3) socialist politicians pushing for rent control in the halls of power. 1) and 2) are clear examples of counter-power outside the state. All three, again, worked synergistically as catalysts for one another. Crucially, the movement was a local manifestation of a global revolt against capitalism, one that reached its zenith with the Russian Bolsheviks and sent the threat of revolution rippling across the world.
The second wave
As the 20th Century continued, so did this dynamic between tenants, militant labor unions, and elected officials. In the 1930s, the movement was led by Jewish socialists in the Bronx and black communists in Harlem. Accelerated by new crises of social reproduction intensified by World War II, coalitions of leftist labor unions, militant tenant unions, and civil rights groups waged collective struggle in the streets, and left-wing politicians again won office and brought the fight to the capitol. After a full-fledged riot paralyzed large tracts of New York City, rent control became the only viable option to quell the passions of a well-organized and angry working class. Again, the synergy between counter-power outside the state and electoralism won the day.
Then came the erosion of class power. This synergy animating the working class began to collapse shortly after the civil rights movement. The fusion of militant labor unions and robust tenant associations that defined much of the first half of the 20th Century, particularly in New York City, is a perfect example of what Jane McAlevey calls “whole worker unionism”. It is a cornerstone of real working-class power. In essence, the worker exists not only in the workplace, but also in homes and neighborhoods. Accordingly, social reproduction is just as much a terrain of working-class struggle as is what occurs on the shop floor. But as the mid-Century subsided, unions largely took a turn towards brokering peace between workers and companies, trading class militancy for legal contractualism pertaining strictly to bread-and-butter issues in the workplace.
As the labor movement purged itself of communists and leftists, union bureaucracies willingly transformed into institutions of bourgeois hegemony. Thus the movement for tenant power was severed from the very organizations that once fought for the whole working class in its multifaceted existence. Only the shells of independent class power remained. This provided an opening for the forces of real estate capital to chip away at the hard-won reforms. By the turn of the millennium, hundreds of thousands of units had been deregulated and rent control was in terminal crisis.
The third wave
In 2019, these weakened rent control laws expired. The opportunity presented itself not only to renew but to strengthen tenant protections and close the loopholes that had been opened over the previous decades. In the years leading up to this moment, the Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance emerged. It is a coalition of tenant associations, unions, unsheltered New Yorkers, and community groups. It incorporated many of the shells of independent class power that had been developed over the course of the 20th Century, as well as groups that had emerged during the Great Recession and the Occupy Wallstreet movement. The group drafted the platform that would ultimately become the bill that strengthened rent control. To support this bill, the Alliance mobilized masses of housing-insecure New Yorkers to hit the streets and take the fight to Albany. Subsequently, groups within the Alliance such as New York City DSA martialled unprecedented swarms of volunteer canvassers to knock on doors, register voters, discuss rent control, and encourage residents to vote for socialist and progressive candidates. Efforts paid off. Left-leaning candidates swept the state legislature. In June of 2019, the majority of the Alliance’s platform became a reality.
Conclusion
It’s easy to conceive of these events as a vindication of the electoralist strategy. In many ways, they are. But three points stand out. First, socialists won the legal precedent for rent control, indeed the entire framework and the foundational laws themselves, through decades of building independent class power outside the state and strategically engaging in electoral politics. Indeed, the original victories were won in the context of a global revolt against capitalism, the crisis of World War I, and socialists posing a viable threat of revolution to the elites in New York. As the threat of revolution waned and independent class power subsided, the forces of capital were able to weaken the once robust suite of tenant protections. Yet the remaining spaces created by past struggle remained as a scaffolding upon which today’s organizers could stand. In short, the fighters of 2019 stood on the shoulders of the fighters of 1919. In 1919, the threat to capital was global and revolutionary. Indeed, the victories of 2019 mostly just reclaimed and reinstituted what radicals had already won and subsequent generations lost. However, this was no small feat and we must not understate the role of electoralism in regaining these protections, or the synergism between electoralism and non-state power in early 20th Century New York.
Furthermore, many facets of the 2019 Alliance itself grew partially from the shells of past institutions of class power and from new organizations forged in the political, social, and economic fallout since the Great Recession. This points to the resiliency of worker-led institutions even after half a century of bourgeois cooptation. It also highlights the importance of crisis as a catalyst for working-class militancy.
Finally, the dynamic between independent class power and electoral success illuminates how muddled the debate about electoralism actually is. Electoralists typically do not advocate electoral engagement as a sole strategy. They usually also advocate for grassroots pressure from below to keep politicians accountable. The question arises, then, what the difference is between building this grassroots power from below and working toward dual power institutions of working-class power, ones capable of posing revolutionary threats in times of crisis. To invoke McAlevey again, part of the difference might be between mobilizing and organizing (though even organizing alone is not necessarily revolutionary). Mobilizing, in essence, means turning out activists to hold rallies. It means getting masses of bodies into strategic places for one-off events. It is ineffective in most contexts. Organizing, on the other hand, means building lasting organizations in which the working-class members themselves participate in collective action that exerts material force. The latter is where class power lies, though organizing in itself is not necessarily sufficient for socialist transformation. It must also take on radical aspirations. It’s not just that without militant organizations posing an existential threat to the capitalist class, revolution is impossible. It’s that without an organized working class that can viably make this threat, even reforms fails. In the long term, electoralism isn’t even enough for reformism.
CONCLUSION
This survey is not meant to be an exhaustive account of conditions in the United States. Indeed, it’s intended to demonstrate the immensely varied political terrain that exists. Whereas it’s unlikely that New Yorkers need to worry about proto-fascist paramilitary forces any time in the foreseeable future (except perhaps the NYPD), this possibility is on the horizon in parts of the American West. Furthermore, a company town like Seattle, in which an enormous share of economic activity flows from a tiny handful of mega-corporations, capital strikes are a predictable response by the ruling class to reforms that threaten bourgeois power. Leftists must be prepared to counter this economic power with economic power of their own and deep roots in the working class. On the other hand, some places have a history of radicalism that is deeply embedded in the social fabric, a history that has etched out spaces in which the working class can fortify itself and organize for protracted struggle and bottom-up pressure. Where such spaces don’t exist, they must be forged by organizing the working class into independent organs of class confrontation.
The capitalist arsenal must shape our strategies and inform what tools we use. This arsenal is, in turn, shaped by uneven patterns of development and geographies of capital accumulation. For instance, at sites of intense capital investment, a capital strike is a powerful weapon the bourgeoisie can wield against the state and working class. This fact should temper our temptation to rely heavily on electoral campaigns. On the other hand, in regions that have already been shaped by chronic disinvestment, a capital strike is not in the cards, but reactionary, paramilitary violence might be. For regions in which the extraction of rents is the predominant form of exploitation, rather than extraction of surplus through wage labor, anti-government and land-based struggles can be a plausible entry point into socialist politics. On the other hand, where private investment in labor-intensive industries (such as logistics) is crucial to local patterns of capital accumulation, organizing militant rank-and-file labor unions is a more appropriate strategy. Finally, in areas squeezed by both forms of exploitation, such as areas rapidly gentrifying from an influx of real estate capital, tenant and workplace organizing may be comparably appropriate. In sum, our strategy, and what tools we use, must take account of the capitalist arsenal and history of conflict in our locality.
We might conceive of the tools in the socialist toolkit to be bullets, ballots, and strike actions (both rent strikes and labor strikes). Indeed, depending on geographies shaped by the uneven development of capital and the shifting contours of class struggle, different times and places call for different tools. Furthermore, anti-state, anti-boss, and anti-landlord struggles should all be taken as legitimate entry points into the struggle for socialism. The task, however, is always the same: to draw the masses into the struggle for social transformation, to win them over to the socialist vision for a just society, and to organize the working class into a material force capable of enacting that vision. While the most effective means of building proletarian agency will vary greatly from place to place, it’s unlikely that elections will anywhere be the dominant domain of socialist organizing, and where elections are appropriate, they must synergize with efforts to build independent working-class power outside the state. In all instances, organizing (as opposed to simply mobilizing) the masses into institutions of class struggle, and establishing proletarian hegemony within the movement, are crucial.
