‘Election days come and go. But political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end.’ The speech with which Bernie Sanders closed his Democratic primary election campaign began with these sentences; it ended by expressing the hope that future historians would trace all the way back to the ‘political revolution’ of 2016 ‘how our country moved forward into reversing the drift toward oligarchy, and created a government which represents all the people and not just the few’.24 It is tempting to treat as ersatz the rhetoric of revolution deployed here, taking the meaning of the word from the sublime to the ridiculous, or from tragedy to farce. The last time an American politician vying for the presidency issued a call for a political revolution it came from Ronald Reagan. But for all the limits of Sanders’ populist campaign, the national attention and massive support garnered by a self-styled democratic socialist who positively associated the term revolution with the struggle against class inequality in fact represented a major discursive departure in American political life, which can be a resource for further socialist organizing.
Of course, the specific policy measures advanced by Sanders were, as he constantly insisted, reforms that had at some point been introduced in other capitalist societies. But when the call for public medicare for all, or free college tuition, or infrastructure renewal through direct public employment, is explicitly attached to a critique of a ruling class which wields corporate and financial power through the direct control of parties, elections and the media, this goes beyond the bounds of what can properly be dismissed as mere reformism, even if the demands hardly evoke what the call for bread, land and peace did in 1917. And it is no less a significant departure, especially in the US, to make class inequality the central theme of a political campaign in a manner designed to span and penetrate race and gender divisions to the end of building a more coherent class force. By explicitly posing the question of who stands to benefit more from high quality public health care and education and well compensated work opportunities than African-Americans and Latinos, Sanders highlighted the need to move beyond the ghettoes of identity.
The key question is whether Sanders’ campaign really could lay the grounds for an ongoing political movement capable of effecting this ‘political revolution’. Sanders’ argument during the campaign that he could be sustained in the White House amidst a hostile Congress and imperial state apparatus by a ‘mass movement’ marching on Washington D.C. was not very convincing. Much more serious was his call after he lost the primary campaign for a shift from protest to politics at every level, including ‘school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures and governorships’.
The very fact that the Sanders campaign was class-focused rather than class-rooted may be an advantage here. It opens space for a new politics that can become ‘rooted’ in the sense of being grounded in working-class struggles but committed to the radical transformation of the generally exhausted institutions of the labour movement. This ranges across turning union branches into centres of working-class life, leading the fight for collective public services, breaking down the oligarchic relationship between leaders and led, contributing to building the broadest member capacities, emphasizing the importance of expressing a clearer class sensibility, and even becoming ambitious enough to introduce socialist ideas. This also applies to Workers Action Centers, which have spread across the US but which are so often overwhelmed by having to reproduce themselves financially in order to continue providing vital services to Black, Latino, immigrant and women workers. Becoming more class-rooted and effective would require building the institutional capacities to creatively organize workers in different sectors into new city-wide organizations, as well as develop a coordinating national infrastructure.
Similar challenges would need to be put to consumer and credit co-operatives, which are broadly identified with the left, but whose primarily narrow economic activities need to be politicized, above all in the sense of opening their spaces to radical education about the capitalist context in which they operate, actively participating in left campaigns, and contributing a portion of their revenue to funding organizers to carry out such tasks. And to get beyond the frustrations so often voiced in the environmental movement with workers’ defensive prioritization of their jobs, turning this into a positive rather than negative class focus by speaking in terms of ‘just transitions’ to a clean energy economy would also mean raising the necessity for economic planning to address both environmental and social crises, with the corollary of challenging the prerogatives of private property and capitalist power structures.
A new class politics cannot emerge ex nihilo, however. The Sanders campaign, initiated by an outsider in the Democratic Party, confirmed that if you are not heard in the media you are not broadly heard. Yet whatever the advantages of initially mobilizing from within established institutions in this respect, the impossibility of a political revolution taking place under the auspices of the Democratic Party needs to be directly faced. After it had become clear he would not clinch the nomination, Sanders and the movement that had begun to take shape around him appeared at risk of falling into a myopic strategy of internally transforming and democratizing the Democratic Party. In part, this is one of the contradictions in Sanders’ choice to run as a Democrat. While the Sanders campaign showed that Democratic Party institutions offer certain bases from which to advance a left politics – lending his campaign a certain legitimacy and credibility within mainstream discourse – in the long run, an alternative political pole will have to be constructed around which social struggles can condense.
It was far from surprising that the thousands of Sanders supporters who gathered at the People’s Summit in Chicago after the primary campaign ended did not come there to found a new party. What happened there, as Dan La Botz described it, ‘was about vision, not organization or strategy’, so that one could at best only hear ‘the sound made by the Zeitgeist passing though the meeting rooms and the halls, brushing up against us, making its way, sometimes gracefully, sometimes clumsily, to the future’.25 One key test will be whether, as it ‘makes its way’, lessons are learned from the US Labor Party project of the 1990s, and links are made with attempts already underway to spawn new socialist political formations, escaping the traces of either Bolshevik sectarianism or ‘Third World’ romanticism as well as the naïve admiration for Canadian and European social democracy that has long characterized so much of the US left.26
This takes us from Sanders to Syriza, the only party to the left of traditional social democracy in Europe that has actually succeeded in winning a national election since the current economic crisis began. Syriza’s roots go back to the formation of Synaspismos, first as an electoral alliance in the 1980s, and then as an independent, although factionalized, new party in the early 1990s. This was part of the broader institutional reconfiguration inaugurated by the Eurocommunist strategic orientation, searching for a way forward in the face of Communist as well as Social Democratic parties having lost their historic roles and capacities as agencies of working-class political representation and social transformation. This search went all the way back to the 1960s and accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and social democracy’s embrace of the ‘Third Way’. In Greece especially, the Eurocommunist orientation was characterized by continuing to embrace the tradition of political revolution as experienced in the Civil War after 1945, even while distancing itself from the Soviet regime; and it would increasingly be characterized by the inspiration it took from, and a willingness to work with, new social movements.
Synaspismos through the 1990s offered enthusiastic support for European integration, but as the neoliberal form of Economic and Monetary Union buried the promises of a European Social Charter, the grounds were laid in Greece, as elsewhere on the European radical left, for a more ‘Eurosceptical’ orientation.27 This new critical posture towards the European variety of capitalism was a crucial element in Synaspismos explicitly defining, by the turn of the millennium, its strategic goal as ‘the socialist transformation of Greek society’ while increasingly encouraging ‘dialogue and common actions’ not only with the alter-globalization movement, but with radical ecologists and political groups of a Trotskyist or Maoist lineage. The goal of the Coalition of the Radical Left, with the acronym Syriza, which emerged out of this as an electoral alliance was designed, as Michalis Spourdalakis put it, ‘not so much to unify but rather to connect in a flexible fashion the diverse actions, initiatives and movements … and to concern itself with developing popular political capacities as much as with changing state policy’. But actually turning Synaspismos, and through it Syriza, into such a party was, as Spourdalakis immediately adds, ‘more wishful thinking than realistic prospect’.28
As the eurocrisis broke, however, with Greece at the epicentre of the attempt to save the euro through the application of severe austerity at its weakest point, all the elements of Syriza threw themselves into the 2011 wave of protests, occupations and strikes, while supporting the 400 or so community solidarity networks around the country to help the worst affected cope. This prepared the ground for Syriza’s electoral breakthrough of 2012. Syriza’s active insertion into the massive outbursts of social protest from below across Greece the year before was a source of radical democratic energy that went far beyond what can be generated during an election campaign, however successful. What this meant was eloquently articulated at Syriza’s Congress in 2013 when it finally turned itself from an electoral alliance into a single party political organization.
The conclusion to Syriza’s refounding political resolution called for ‘something more’ than the programmatic framework that resolution set out. Since ‘for a Government of the Left, a parliamentary majority – whatever its size – is not enough’, the something more it called for was ‘the creation and expression of the widest possible, militant and catalytic political movement of multidimensional subversion’.
Only such a movement can lead to a Government of the Left and only such a movement can safeguard the course of such a government … [which] carries out radical reforms, takes on development initiatives and other initiatives of a clear environmental and class orientation, opens up new potentials and opportunities for popular intervention, helps the creation of new forms of popular expression and claims … Syriza has shouldered the responsibility to contribute decisively to the shaping of this great movement of democratic subversion that will lead the country to a new popular, democratic, and radical changeover.29
This sort of language, articulating this sort of understanding, was rare on the European radical left, let alone anywhere else. Yet as the Syriza leadership contemplated the dilemmas it faced as it stood on the doorstep of government, its concern to appear as a viable government in the media’s eyes led them to concentrate, as was evident in the Thessalonika Manifesto proclaimed just a year later, on refining and scaling down the policy proposals in the 2013 party programme. This was done with little internal party consultation. Moreover, the leadership was mainly concerned with finding enough experienced and efficient personnel to bring into the state to change the notoriously clientelistic and corrupt state apparatus. Little attention was paid to who would be left in the party to act as an organizing cadre in society.
Notably the increase in party membership was not at all proportionate to the extent of the electoral breakthrough. Even when new radical activists did join, the leadership generally did very little to support those in the party apparatus who wanted to develop these activists’ capacities to turn party branches into centres of working-class life and strategically engage with them, preferably in conjunction with the Solidarity Networks, in planning for alternative forms of production and consumption. All this spoke to how far Syriza still was from having discovered how to escape the limits of social democracy.