In the short term, our focus should be on the things C4SS comrade William Gillis discussed eight years ago in the aftermath of Trump’s election to his first term: minimizing our exposure to harm, and building an infrastructure for support, protection and mutual aid. Kelly Hayes sums up this general approach as well as anyone could, arguing that mass protests and purely symbolic disobedience are of very limited use at best; instead she recommends that defiance “be woven into the fabric of our daily lives.”
Some refusals will be visible, but many quiet acts of disobedience — like a healthcare worker’s refusal to aid in criminalizing a patient — have the potential to save lives and interrupt state violence….
There are many defiant actions that we can and should undertake that will create legal risks without necessarily resulting in arrest. Many people will undoubtedly help people seek medical care, including abortion care, that has been prohibited in their areas. Undocumented people and other targeted individuals will be lent shelter. Unhoused people and people being forced from their homes will need to be defended. Buildings may be reclaimed. Life-giving supplies may be liberated and redistributed. Community defense efforts will undoubtedly be grown and established. Solidarity networks and mutual aid projects will bring neighbors and communities together, as people navigate the violence of austerity and the chaos of Trumpism, and some of that work will happen outside the law. We all have parts to play, and whatever courage we can muster, or cultivate in collectivity, will be needed….
This is a good time to establish and fortify small, adaptable groups that can take action and reduce harm, while communicating securely and taking other precautions to avoid arrest or exposure….
Reflecting on communal strength, my friend Shane Burley, author of Fascism Today, Why We Fight, and co-author of Safety Through Solidarity, recently told me, “A strong community is what keeps people safe in times of crisis, and that can be as simple as a tight-nit, autonomous group of trusted friends who can be relied on as things get worse. This type of relationship is the centerpiece both of staying safe as state repression worsens, but also has the effect of creating a model for the types of relationships a new kind of society could be built on.”…
There are so many ways that we can support each other and gear up to assist and defend each other in the months and years ahead. Remember that well-organized people, with sound communications and security practices, can learn together and adapt quickly as conditions evolve. We must be thoughtful, caring, and strategic in our movements.
But in the longer term, we need to address the structural issues that brought us to this pass, and focus on building the basic social infrastructures needed to cushion and support us through the coming time of troubles and bridge the way to a just and humanly appealing successor society.
A robust post-capitalist infrastructure at the local level — cooperative, commons-based, and directly democratic — that provides alternative means of subsistence and livelihood and cushions the poor and unemployed against the vagaries of the wage system, would be both a means of present survival under capitalism and the nucleus of a new society. What’s needed is an entire ecosystem of local counter-institutions, like those being created by Cooperation Jackson and municipalist movements in European cities like Madrid and Barcelona: community social justice campaigns, local labor federations, local alternative media, community workshops, coliving projects, tool libraries, community land trusts, squats, tenant unions, community gardens, homeless shelters and food pantries, local currency and credit systems, networks of worker and producer cooperatives, copwatch patrols, and the like.
Such community institutional ecologies are not only the seeds of the future society, the future society in being today, but a source of local resilience against economic collapse and police state repression.
I should note here, before we go on, that I am writing from a position both as an anarchist, and as an unapologetic electoralist and lesser evilist. To put it in Erik Olin Wright’s terms, my view is that the process of transition to a post-capitalist, post-state society — or to a far less capitalist and statist society — will be interstitial rather than ruptural. That is, it will be a gradual and emergent process, in which the successor society coalesces from a wide variety of seeds in the interstices of the present one and finally supplants it. The transition process will not be accomplished primarily by revolution or by seizing control of the state, but through the counter-institutions that arise here and now as a way of surviving the terminal crises of the existing system.
Those who dismiss electoralism and lesser evilism have a mistaken view of the proper role of electoral politics for anarchists and anti-capitalists. The goal is not to take control of the state and implement post-capitalist transition through state policy, but simply to choose the least bad available background against which to carry out the process of constructing a post-capitalist society. The process itself — our primary goal — is the interstitial construction process itself.
Every argument I’ve seen against electoralism and lesser evilism has amounted either to “the worse, the better” accelerationism, or to Stalin’s Third Period denunciation of the Social Democrats as “social fascists.” I’ve never yet seen a plausible scenario for the former, or anything but hand-waving. The latter — equating mushy centrist corporate neoliberalism to actual fascism — reflects a total lack of contact with reality. And in practice, the self-proclaimed adherents of the “pox on both their houses” philosophy are even more out of contact with reality; they usually wind up going down the Jimmy Dore or MAGA communist red-brown rabbit hole, and asserting that while “shitlibs” are “the real fascists,” there might be some hope of finding common ground with Nazis.
So I’m operating from the assumption that the state will persist throughout much or most of the transition process; hence, the state is a reality that we must engage with strategically like any other reality. Further, control of the state by centrist forces is far preferable to control by a fascist regime — not only in terms of immediate human suffering, but as the more congenial ground on which to build a better society.
Unfortunately, Democrats are doing their dead level best to sabotage their own chances of appealing to working and middle class voters. Retail progressive policies — all the wonky stuff like targeted tax credits — won’t do a damn thing for public perceptions unless they’re bundled into a package as a grand, systemic vision.
Although this is obviously necessary at the level of national politics, it is largely irrelevant to our present considerations; any such transformation of the Democratic Party at the national level will most likely result only from generational change and the aggregate influence of grassroots constituencies. Where anarchists can most effectively make our influence felt is at the municipal level.
The local institutional ecologies we need in order to survive and thrive also coincide with what many on the progressive or left end of the Democratic Party spectrum prescribe, based on their post mortems of the election.
At The Nation Pete Davis, citing the work of scholar Theda Skocpol, ties the Democratic Party’s failure to the collapse of the “civic ecosystem.”
In the early 20th century, according to Skocpol, civic life was mostly based in mass-membership organizations — religious congregations, unions, fraternal organizations (like the Elks or Rotary clubs), and political groups (think the NAACP or the League of Women Voters). They were made up of local chapters that hosted in-person meetings, managed annual calendars of neighborhood events, fostered friendships between members, and contributed to the places where they were based. These chapters are organized (or “federated”) into state and national conventions and committees. By pairing local participation with centralized coordination, the national leadership and the local membership could communicate ideas, concerns, mandates, and marching orders back and forth.
But American civic life started changing in the latter half of the 20th century. Mass communication became easier — and civic leaders fell in love with direct-mail fundraising campaigns. Federal politics became more complicated, and a class of expert activists who knew the ins and outs of legislative advocacy started professionalizing in Washington, DC. National groups began hiring “donor management” and “member relations” consultants to get the most dollars, votes, and petition signatures out of ordinary citizens. Civic organizations started wondering why they were bothering with all the local pageantry and community-building in the first place. Soon enough, Skocpol says, “membership” no longer meant meeting up with one’s neighbors; it meant being on a list — a list of people who would send checks to national managers in centers of power in exchange for a bumper sticker, an annual report, and the occasional call to action to do a few days of door-knocking, phone-banking, or letter-writing.
During the decades when this transition progressed, America’s civic ecosystem collapsed…. And most significantly, millions of Americans stopped feeling like public life was something of which they were a cocreator and co-owner.
The Democratic Party was swept up in this civic transition. Today, the party focuses almost exclusively on election campaign sprints optimized… for short-term mobilizing (squeezing donations and volunteer hours out of current members) rather than for long-term organizing….
Likewise, Ned Resnikoff notes that to the Democratic Party, “person-to-person outreach almost always means “ground game” or get-out-the-vote efforts. But GOTV isn’t intended to reconstruct or strengthen social attachments; it’s a form of direct sales, relying on brief, goal-oriented interactions with voters.”
Davis’s prescription for the Democrats is to rebuild local civic infrastructure via such expedients as membership cards, neighborhood captains, meeting halls, and mutual aid (e.g. disaster relief, homeless shelter volunteering, welcome committees, and block parties). Resnikoff proposes community centers that host movie nights, provide free meals to children in the manner associated with the Black Panthers, etc.
Sharon Kuruvilla, also using Skocpol’s work as a jumping off point, is more ambitious, calling on the Democrats to “re-vitalize unions and create new civic spaces,” and pointing to the Social Democratic Parties in Austria and Germany, “where there were whole eco-systems involved with being a party member.”
Democrats, to be blunt, are quite awful when it comes to implementing populist economic measures at the state and local level. We need look only at California, where — despite the state’s reputation among right-wingers as a “People’s Republic” — housing policy reflects the primary influence of landlords and real estate speculators, and brutal homeless sweeps are the norm.
Establishment Democrats are congenitally incapable of creating local institutional ecologies on their own initiative, at least until there’s a thoroughgoing generational change and leftward shift in the Party apparatus. So if it’s done, it will have to be done for them.
Creating such local civic infrastructures is, for us, a means of constructing the future society within the shell of the old; any electoral benefit is a secondary consideration. But it does, indeed, also meet the specifications of Kuruvilla and others.
These infrastructures won’t be created or funded on the Democrats’ initiative, obviously, even though if they had any sense Democrats would see how vital they are to their political future. Since Democrats are horrible at this, it will have to be done by someone else, and then they’ll have to be dragged kicking and screaming into alliance with the people who are actually accomplishing things on the ground. But if anarchists and others on the left build them ourselves, we’ll be in a position to tell the Dems, in effect, “come with us if you want to live” — that is, use of our ready-made civic infrastructure to mobilize for them, at the price of their running political interference on our behalf and giving us breathing space to build.
Interstitial construction is at the center of our strategy, with or without electoralism. And like it or not, for the foreseeable future the outcomes of electoral politics will have a profound effect on how hard it is to do these things. We might as well leverage our efforts to secure as favorable an outcome as possible.
