Movements of popular discontent often manifest around anti-establishment underdog presidential campaigns. In the United States, these have resulted in the successful elections of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as the failed campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, John Kerry, Jesse Jackson, and a host of others.
The consistency with which these elections brought masses of normally apolitical people into politics, the organizations built off of the campaigns and newly politicized people, and the doubtless harm reduction of their proposed policies has often attracted the endorsement and participation of socialists and communists. The hope—whether it was Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition or Bernie Sanders’ record number of volunteers—is that the people entranced by these campaigns could be won over to a more radical and more permanent politics, and that the reforms made if these candidates win (or just influence the policy of the Democratic Party) could make creating a socialist organization easier, as well as make the world a marginally better place in the meantime. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) did find success in recruiting off of the Sanders campaigns.
But the DSA’s success in recruitment is not a win yet. To use an economic metaphor, it is unvalorized value. Most DSA chapters are still wedded to the Democratic Party and have trouble turning out people except to support a local or national election of a progressive Democrat. These progressive Democrats are not usually reliable allies to socialists, as recent events have shown. They are not even always consistently progressive. A few chapters have managed to overcome this on the local level, building bases independent of the Democratic Party. There have also been gestures made in this direction on the national level from some of DSA’s biggest caucuses. If DSA wants to build a socialist movement with any ability to win, it must do so independent from the Democratic Party, which will absorb and co-opt any popular energy if given enough time, and then squander it for the pragmatic maintenance of capital, leaving the DSA holding the bag to its constituents with no power to enforce its own program or values.
Entering an election year, many in DSA are talking about whether to endorse Biden or some other candidate or refrain from making any endorsements. Individual chapters will probably endorse Biden (they may already have) as the only thing that can stop Trump and the infamous Project 2025 that will destroy democracy as we know it. Democracy is on the ballot this year, apparently.
But a wave of popular discontent has rocked the Biden administration and spooked many of the biggest proponents of a Bidenist popular front against Trump, as well as many members of the Democratic Party. The US government’s support for the genocide in Gaza has left thousands of people horrified, angry, and willing to lash out regardless of Trump as a consequence. After all, Trump’s policies on the Gazan genocide are likely to be nearly identical. In fact, most of Biden’s
economic, foreign policy, immigration, criminal justice, and fiscal policies are continuations of what was happening in the Trump administration. The main difference seems to be LGBTQ+
rights. Except most of the bills affecting LGBTQ+ rights are at the state level and the Biden administration has made no attempts to curtail them.
This discontent manifested in the Michigan Democratic primary when over 100,000 people voted “uncommitted” to show their ambivalence or disgust with all the candidates, primarily over the genocide in Gaza. Michigan DSA was vital in getting out the vote here. Biden, of course, still won and still will win the Democratic primary provided he doesn’t die first. There are no viable candidates as alternatives and even the ones who might be are generally pro-Israel or take a more “neutral” stance on the issue. Rashida Talib is probably the most likely option, but she is not going to run.
Outside the democratic party, there is the ever-present field of third party candidates in the Green Party, PSL, and two dozen others. Some have suggested DSA should unite with other progressive and socialist organizations under one of these candidates and try to create another outsider underdog third party bid with a mass movement behind it. But there’s no reason to think a third party candidate could actually bring out people the way Bernie did. There’s no reason to believe DSA could recreate that outside the Democratic Party when the primary appeal for the average person was that Bernie actually could have won. There is not even reason to believe DSA—let alone the broader Left in the US—could put aside their squabbles and critiques for a campaign like this to be worth the effort. Any attempt to harness the current popular discontent needs to be more provocative and more honest than any third party candidate has the ability to be.
That is why I suggest that the DSA calls for members of all parties to write in “Nobody” for president.
The ridiculousness and media attention such a campaign could get are part of the appeal. Mainstream media will gawk and mock and try to hold the feet of any “advocate for Nobody” to the fire to show their ridiculous and immature politics. Instead, said advocates would be given a stage to speak to the impotent popular discontent that thousands are feeling. And as a pure sign of discontent, a purely negative politics, it can also more easily build the kind of cultural and civil society institutions outside the state that are necessary for a class to develop the kind of social bonds necessary for a truly mass class-based politics.
Historically, this civil society of workers separate from the state has taken very heterogeneous forms. From workers’ choirs singing songs together to makeshift food pantries and soup kitchens to worker-controlled schools for certain trades to churches to worker councils. Shadows of these still exist in some remaining union halls and the little work all workers put in to help themselves and others socially reproduce as members of the working class. But the New Deal firmly welded these projects to the state, ultimately completely absorbing them and/or replacing them with a robust welfare net. With the state providing services workers would traditionally have had to rely on each other for, capitalism was able to easily dissolve social bonds, atomizing workers in ways never before seen. The dismantling of the welfare state beginning in the 70s with Carter and culminating with Reagan hasn’t yet seen their return. Instead, private businesses, held up mostly by speculation and rents, have been able to substitute a convincing enough simulacrum of community on the internet. The valuable work of the welfare state allowing workers to reproduce themselves is limited to its absolute minimum to maintain the whip of hunger (along with the less-talked-about whips of isolation, loneliness, and boredom from the commodification of activities, interests, and community).
There are initiatives that engage deeply with creating anew this type of social bond. Andy and Sean KB of the Antifada podcast have begun their own project called the Independent Labor Club, outlined in Sean’s article “The Left Undead.” The Southern Workers Assembly and Railway Workers United are other attempts at this. All of these are promising but require kindling, something to form bonds and organize in service of.
Kindling can look like Rallies for Nobody, inviting speakers to speak on behalf of Nobody, Potlucks for Nobody, Mario Kart tournaments for Nobody, Karaoke for Nobody, benefit concerts to raise money for Nobody, phone banking for Nobody, door knocking for Nobody. All of these things (or something similar to them) can and do come into existence with things like the Bernie campaign. Then they wilt and die with its death. But the provocative and negative nature of this campaign has the potential to push people to think about politics beyond elections and maintain and transform these provisional structures of working class community and civil society beyond election season.
There is a danger with a campaign like this similar to the failures of the Occupy movement. This campaign as I’ve outlined it so far doesn’t center on a program or focus on the immediate needs of workers. We’ve seen what “occupy everything, demand nothing” gets us. Movements without programs (or with vague programs) open themselves up to being co-opted, supplanted, destroyed, and moderated into oblivion. Communists inside and outside the DSA should try to take leadership roles in the campaign and prevent these effects from sabotaging its usefulness. But the DSA as a structure on a national level taking the lead on a campaign like this is the best antidote. It can focus on specific issues that, absent a politician, can take center stage. Nobody will give us universal health care. Nobody will abolish (or even defund) the police. Nobody will end the horrific genocide of Palestinians unfolding right in front of us.
I call this a “negative program.” This means taking the popular demands that establishment politicians refuse to enact or even entertain and highlighting their impossibility. While this holds some similarities to the Trotskyist concept of the transitional program, I don’t believe this negative program can lead directly into socialism. Instead I believe it can help rally workers and create organic bonds between them which can act as a base out of which a positive program (minimax-maximum of you like, I’m agnostic on that specific issue) for socialism could be created. It’s very difficult to create a positive program for a deeply atomized class that could only be very generously described as “a class in itself,” in Marx’s terms. The hope, then, is for a campaign like this to pave the way for a more positive politics.
There are no guarantees. It’s possible there is no way to permanently harness the popular energy of presidential elections. It’s possible that a third party run would be more successful this time, building off the successes (despite the ultimate failure) of the Bernie movement. It’s possible this would win Trump the election. As communists, I believe it is more important to look at the long-term. Democracy is on the ballot every year. We have to be acting with sober minds that it will, given enough time and enough Democrats like Joe Biden, finally lose.
-Cori Casey
