Introduction

Usually, the political problems facing the left are interconnected but heterogeneous. No single problem sits above all others. One can ask “how to articulate a socialist politics around climate change” without thinking that “how to run a successful union negotiation campaign” or “how to manage internal debate within an organization” are related questions. Each of these problems tends to take on a distinctive shape that is not congruent with the others. But in some historical moments, we can identify a prevailing problem that underlies practically all other political issues. All political problems tend to orbit this central problem in these historical situations. We live in just such a moment.

The historical problem of our time is proletarian disorganization. We have lost the class institutions and political habits of organized struggle.

What is proletarian disorganization? Although proletarians are always somewhat disorganized, in our historical situation disorganization has been generalized to systemic levels and has had morbid effects. Before the 1970s, proletarian self-organization in the US¹This essay is focused on the US context; it may be that other geographic areas have situations that follow this analysis, though we are not trying to make this claim here.—composed of formations like labor unions, labor auxiliary organizations, left civic organizations, various informal working-class social formations²Even informal networks of social organization have been in decline. Though we disagree with Putnam’s liberal and anti-communist politics, the information presented in his essay (link) is helpful. , etc.—shaped everyday working-class life. These organizations were not reflections of an existing social structure so much as political interventions against them: they were hard-won vehicles for solidaristic collective action of the working class against conditions of competition and segregation. But these institutions, which provide the ability and power to challenge status-quo politics, have been broken up and hollowed out. More conceptually, this proletarian disorganization is characterized by individualization and segmentation. Individualization: the dissolution of vibrant and dynamic self-organized proletarian collectivities across the field of struggle. Segmentation: the naturalization of divisions between groups of proletarians, often collaborating with a neoliberal ideology of classless pluralism. 

The very long arc of the workers’ movement gave life to numerous political situations, with organized workers intervening and sometimes determining the outcome of historical events.³See above link to Balibar’s work, which touches on the fact that the workers’ movement was a product of political articulation from intentional proletarian organization, rather than an automatically-generated social fact arising from the capitalist class structure. For more on the workers’ movement, see: Eley’s Forging Democracy (link); and Endnote’s “Betrayal and the Will” (link) The workers’ movement of the past benefited from organizational density that, while never genuinely centralized, produced a dynamic of ever-changing political possibilities conducive to strategic innovations for the left. Even when these situations ended in defeat, the defeat itself implied a real contest with capitalist power, which means that the movement had capacity that the entire left⁴By ‘left’ we mean socialist and communist tendencies (excluding, for example, non-profit organizations or the progressive wing of the Democratic Party), or other political tendencies that aim to fundamentally transform society towards liberatory and egalitarian ends. currently lacks. The success of the neoliberal counter-revolution demolished a large share of the traditional organized sites of working-class power that delivered might to socialist and communist movements. Disorganization of the proletariat, broadly conceived, has brought about disaster for the left and made it weak. 

Proletarian disorganization has also led to innumerable political morbidities in the recent past and the present. It’s no accident that today’s reactionary politics arose amid proletarian disorganization. Psychic distress and nihilistic angst are nourished by generalized political-organizational homelessness. Unmoored from organizations that could proudly and confidently sustain class consciousness through ongoing collective struggles, some within the working class have become susceptible to racist, nationalist and other types of right-wing propaganda, while many more have dropped out of all political activity. While it is important to emphasize this point, exclusive focus on the reactionary right can lead to a politics of liberal tailing and thus reinforce the very conditions that enable today’s reactionary politics. The rise of today’s national conservatism, its political rhetoric around “workers empowerment,” and its intentional conflation of neoliberal centrism with the historic left to sideline both, are symptoms of acute disorganization. 

No left alternative can be realistically offered without militant and active mass working-class organizations across the entire spectrum of capitalist contradictions. No left tendency—not socialism, not communism, nor serious strands of anarchism—can survive without its integration into an organized working-class movement; for a left formation without an organized proletariat is a fish out of water—a politics defined by its atrophy and destined for a slow death. 

But there is no reason to give up and embrace the cheap coping mechanism of political nihilism in the face of unprecedented difficulty. In fact, our situation was not impossible to envision. Writing over 170 years ago, Marx and Engels already understood the problem of 2022, laying out the situation in the Communist Manifesto:

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers… This organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. 

Capitalism produces endless opportunities for the class struggle, meaning that the organization of proletarians into a class followed by new forms of political organization is always on the table. 

Today’s proletarian disorganization faces us as the most decisive and central problem. Lenin’s famous question—What is to be done?—takes on a more specific form: “How do we reorganize the proletariat into an independent fighting force?” No left tendency today has a worked-out, practical answer to this question. For this reason, facing the problem calls for humility and openness. But urgency also demands facing the problem with intentionality and rigor, both in thought and action. 

The method to construct a strong socialist and communist movement is to develop a practical answer to the problem of proletarian disorganization.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency to diagnose the problems that the current organized left faces—and here we refer to our organization, the Democratic Socialists of America—as one characterized by problems of the Democratic Party ballot line, of internal democracy around electoral decisions, or about the evergreen problem of electoral discipline. To be fair, these particular problems can appear as our most immediate challenges. But examining these problems alone will never correctly represent the central problem of the moment. In reality, proletarian disorganization (1) conditions the way that each of these problems emerges, (2) limits us to an unsatisfactory set of immediate responses, and thus (3) stimulates unproductive and conflictual debate within our organization that does not get to the heart of our strategic dilemma. 

Who is prepared to claim that the general malaise affecting the left—disengagement, disorganization, flagging capacity, and so on—will find resolution by addressing ballot-line ambiguity or implementing electoral discipline? Again, these are real issues, but each misidentifies the underlying dynamics that structure today’s political situation. 

Disorganization Today

Let us spell out how proletarian disorganization figures into the innumerable problems the US left faces as quickly as possible. 

Internationalism remains primarily stuck within the discursive field, like statements, communiques, and the like; there is little organized proletarian base that can use coercive force for solidarity.⁵While the primary mode of internationalism has been discursive, some notable exceptions do exist. We can understand these exceptions as possible examples of actions or activities that could occur more regularly if working class organization becomes more dense: the dock worker and community blockades of ZIM shipments in solidarity with Palestine, demands for BDS made by working class organizations and in public institutions like schools, Wayfair worker walkouts against furniture sales to ICE detention centers, etc. 

Newly won reforms arise from circumstantial opportunities over which we have no control—reforms are developed by liberals who, sensing their momentary weakness, put forward changes that shore up their political position; in our time, ‘reforms’ are not a product of the strength of proletarian self-organization. 

Reforms are unenforceable outside of the bourgeois court system; we hold no organized coercive force that can deter bourgeois politicians from reneging, diminishing, or subverting even modest progressive reforms.

The left, unable to plant its feet on the solid ground of class organization, oscillates between left-opportunism and right-opportunism; with right-opportunism, we see electoral substitutions for the most basic forms of struggle by and for the class; with left-opportunism, we see an impatient politics that demands wholesale social changes from thin air. 

In most instances where left electoral politics are deployed, they quickly become untethered from core commitments to socialism; without sufficient proletarian self-organization, there is a profoundly structural (i.e., the lack of working-class extra-electoral capacities)—not simply formal (i.e., procedural rules internal to the DSA)—deficit of electoral accountability. 

More accommodative socialist currents too easily become activist attaches for high-level state functionaries of the liberal left who have strong links with particular fractions of the capitalist class—a situation epitomized by the relationship between progressives and centrists in the Democratic Party; where proletarian disorganization is widespread, there is no proletarian independence to be found. 

Proletarian disorganization makes movements susceptible to liberal capture. Even when significant movements and protests roil the nation, they bear the marks of proletarian disorganization, which constrains our sense of what is possible beyond street actions: in assemblies with hundreds of members, people ask ‘how we can keep the movement going’ and find as an answer only individual activities rather than collective action: talk with your friends and family members about their prejudice; get out and vote in the upcoming election. Even amid a rebellion, the power of collective action—so strange, unfamiliar, and only loosely bound together—could be understood as a call for better representation rather than something that offered a mass alternative to the current political system. 

More antagonistic socialist currents who attempt to assert “revolutionary leadership” in episodes of struggle become stuck tailing struggles that never interconnect with one another; the broad disorganization of the proletariat has produced an insularity of struggles, and attempting to chase them down does not resolve the problem. 

Because proletarian agency is conditioned by disorganization, the relationship between state and class becomes liquidated into an arrangement favorable for liberal politics; amid widespread disorganization, “class” becomes increasingly abstract, and electoral politics ascends as the exclusive site of contestation. There, cross-class constituencies whose relation to the state is increasingly defined through the language of the individual emerge as the exclusive site of official politics.

Let’s now focus on recent developments in the left and how each has found itself unable to overcome the barrier of proletarian disorganization. We orient the analysis around 2016 because liberal hegemony appeared to break down this year, resulting in an unlikely competitive primary with Bernie Sanders, an unforeseen presidential upset that seated Trump, and the unexpected emergence of a mass Democratic Socialists of America. As we will see, liberalism’s destabilization in 2016 did not arise simply because of electoral decisions made by Bernie Sanders; rather, the opportunities that appeared in 2016 were derived from other sources, such as ongoing problems of economic stagnation compounded by the repercussions of the 2009 financial crisis, and the Occupy movement that responded to this economic fallout and fundamentally altered the political terrain, preparing the way for possibilities later on.

2016 to the Present: Democratic Socialisms 

Since Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run, democratic socialist political currents have become predominant on the left in the United States. These currents are diverse (even the term ‘democratic socialism’ doesn’t have a single clear definition), but they are broadly characterized by (1) the development of public-facing, openly-socialist political organizations, and campaigns and (2) the centrality of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization within which the various currents have developed and even clashed. The largest of these currents, taking inspiration from Sanders, have emphasized running socialist candidates for office and building out an independent socialist electoral apparatus.

These democratic socialist currents take political organization seriously, which is an advance compared to the more insurrectionary tendencies popular in the years following Occupy. But despite their serious consideration of political organization, democratic socialism has largely failed to address the deeper issue that defines our time: proletarian disorganization and its antidote, class organization. Relatedly, the growth of democratic socialist currents has more to do with Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns than with careful attention to organization-building. 

There will probably not be another presidential campaign like Sanders’ in the near future, and certainly not at the same level of intensity. In other words, the temporary and favorable historical situation that has driven the growth of democratic socialist currents is coming to an end. If we want to keep growing and developing as a political force, we will have to adapt our strategy. And any change in strategy will have to reckon with proletarian disorganization.

The ascendancy of Bernie Sanders has often been mistakenly interpreted as a replicable strategy. But something like Bernie’s presidential run, and the political situation that grounded it, cannot easily be replicated. He is a unique political figure with no obvious replacement. No other current socialist has the trust, name recognition, connections, political apparatus, and lengthy history of political commitment. More than the man, the situation was also unique. Bernie’s chance at victory came with the opening of a more profound crisis in the neoliberal political consensus, most clearly demonstrated by Trump’s victory over Clinton. So far, the political center has endured that crisis and was able to beat Trump in 2020. Finally, Bernie has already run and lost twice. With historical novelty comes great energy. But as novelty is diminished by repetition, its energy also diminishes. Any of these would be enough to seriously question whether a Bernie Sanders situation can be repeated; but all of them make it nearly impossible. Without historical wind in our sails, democratic socialists will have to generate our own impetus.

Unfortunately, many democratic socialists became increasingly invested in attempting to reproduce the Bernie Sanders situation, constructing an electoral formula that attempts to mimic the 2016 presidential primary—or, at least, an ideal version. The attempt to challenge neoliberal Democrats through Democratic primaries has become the mainstay approach for democratic socialist electoralists. 

It is worth elaborating on the basic thinking of those pursuing this electoral and legislatively focused strategy, which is guided by four core assumptions. (1) The assertion that, under capitalist democracies, political activity must pass through the electoral apparatus and state institutions. Extra-electoral politics become an appendage to this process. (2) Clinching elections and passing transformative legislation becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic. With the passing of significant reform, new political capacity is constructed for passing more substantial reforms in the future. (3) Policy successes produce a surplus of positive political effects that trickle down from state legislatures or Washington DC. Not only do transformative reforms improve people’s lives, but the winning of reforms purportedly build class consciousness, augment class confidence, and even help cohere “class organization.” (4) Passing transformative legislation would not require a majority or even plurality of socialist legislators as a well-organized squad, working in conjunction with Democratic leadership in a Popular Front that would isolate the right. 

In short, the strategic wager was this: that an extreme minority of elected socialists could force through the passage of transformative legislation, which would trickle down to class formation or independent political activity. These assumptions have underwritten much of DSA’s recent political activity (particularly in the larger chapters⁶There is a problem with the outsized role that larger chapters have had in shaping the strategic discussion in DSA circles. It is important to note that many smaller chapters conduct work that does not match the above sketch. This is a problem, not merely because of an overshadowing effect, but because without proper organization-wide discussion and debate we cannot sharpen our strategic practices. This is a relevant but distinctive problem that we hope to address in future writing.), have been challenged over the last few years, and seldom have they been confirmed. In critical cases, such as the major deluge of Covid-related reforms⁷Many of the progressive reforms around Covid-19 were granted and then taken away without much fanfare. , these assumptions have been entirely repudiated. 

Democratic socialists face several significant difficulties along this path. A significant problem arises from the most fundamental aspect of the electoral strategy—the need to win across multiple electoral terrains so that transformative reforms can be legislated. Like Bernie, DSA’s electoral fortunes have been strong in places where members are concentrated and where past social movements had a strong presence. Where this is not the case, however, electoral attempts have struggled to perform. Suppose one wants to win races outside of places where social movements and socialists can already count on organized support, as this strategy requires. In that case, pivoting towards the right by sacrificing principled positions for electoral expediency makes sense.  

Moreover, the objective structural constraints of the US constitutional order—a federalized republic with anti-democratic minoritarian features⁸Such as the senate, the supreme court, the threshold for altering the constitution, etc. and legally-encoded respect for private property relations—impose themselves onto an electoral strategy that attempts to understand the enemy only subjectively as a problem of bourgeois Democratic party representation. In other words, even when socialists win office, they find themselves positioned against an electoral enemy who benefits from the objective limits of the US constitutional order. The uneven terrain of the constitutional order delivers substantial leverage to Democratic centrists who—along with their majority representation in the party—hold the high ground against electeds on the left. Fighting on this stilted terrain makes the impetus to abandon socialist principles and adopt “pragmatic” positions overwhelming. 

Bernie faced these problems as well, but he was both a viable candidate for president of the United States and an inspiring banner under which socialist electoral runs at all levels of government could be pursued. The Bernie situation—this contingent and momentary exception at the highest levels of the state—allowed electoral strategy to muddle through (though not overcome) the fundamental problems listed above. Failure to understand Bernie as a contingent and momentary exception has produced the current opening for backsliding and horsetrading among socialists in office. Bowman’s support for Iron Dome funding and recent backroom deals among electeds in the NYC-DSA arise from pressure to swap left “maximalist” demands for electoral, legislative success. The hypothesis that a circuit between elections and legislation could produce a self-reinforcing and self-expanding dynamic has not been proven. In the end, it is essential to consider political power. With a disorganized and thus disempowered proletariat, attempts to produce a sequence of ever-augmenting political power are nil. No amount of internal discipline and formal rule-making for socialists in office will alleviate the foundational problem of widespread disorganization, which constrains and disciplines the actions of erstwhile socialists in elected office or on the campaign trail. Under such conditions, democratic socialists enter the state and negotiate from a position of defeat.

While the DSA’s dominant position has been one of misidentification of the Bernie situation, other tendencies of the Trotskyist orientation rejected Bernie based on revolutionary leadership. Here, Bernie Sanders’s relationship with the Democratic Party—a party undoubtedly integrated with capitalist elites and other influential groups—is the source of dispute. Exuberance around the Sanders campaign and the strategy that mimicked it enabled the capitalist party to continue its political leadership of the working class. In distinction, various Trotskyist tendencies call for class independence, either by immediately running party-independent socialist candidates for office or instituting a strategy that allows DSA to break away from the Democrats in the near future. While class independence is a central goal of our movement, framing this problem as one of revolutionary leadership seriously misdiagnoses the problem. Mistaking systemic weakness through disorganization for bad leadership, this approach has tended to produce activists focused on internal contests for power. Speaking the language of movements but rarely having much to do with them, partisans of this approach often miss the need to generate outward-facing proletarian organization. Despite the best intentions, these Trotskyist formations have tended to become largely tailist—identifying organizations and movements with bad leadership. They concern themselves with swapping this leadership with members of their cadres. Struggles over the correct political line take precedence over efforts to build up durable fighting organizations of the working class, even when their development is a goal that the Trotskyist formations also proclaim to have.  

Inability to grapple with the most pressing problem of proletarian disorganization has been and may continue to be catastrophic for the left. Notes from a recent DSA’s NPC meeting show an ongoing membership retention problem and a growing capacity issue within the organization. People seem to be fading away from the organization. Under these conditions, success requires coming to terms with our temporary luck and setting ourselves on an intentional path. Making this adjustment is difficult, if only because it requires a sober understanding of one’s good fortune and a reckoning that it cannot be replicated. Ultimately, people compose themselves into political organizations because the organization can produce a power that exceeds them as individuals. The Bernie Sanders situation provided a brief opportunity for the belief that the DSA could produce such power. It is the sole responsibility of democratic socialist currents to make good on this belief before it turns into disappointment. But dependence on unending good luck has led to an absence of real thinking about the underlying condition of proletarian disorganization that savagely undermines the left. 

What would an intentional approach look like? It means nothing short of doing the double work of building up working-class organizations capable of carrying out the most rudimentary forms of class struggle and at the same time integrating socialist cadres into the ranks of the organized proletariat. Though stated abstractly here, a strategy of this sort would allow the Democratic Socialist current to grow alongside the rebuilding agency of the proletarian class. 

Consider the conditions that enabled the Bernie situation and the breakdown of neoliberal legitimacy in 2016. While it is fashionable among some in the DSA to reject the Occupy movement’s salience, it is perhaps time that we acknowledge the vital role that the Occupy had in preparing Bernie’s breakthrough into the mainstream. To use an obvious example, the enduring framing of a 99% set against a powerful 1% was the Occupy movement’s primary slogan. This slogan’s ability to be picked up by Bernie and used to stage a viable contest for the US’s highest elected office is perhaps the most superficial aspect of the Occupy movement’s accomplishment; the movement helped to shift the popular commonsense around inequality and class, induced political activation among the formerly depoliticized, and rewired political subjectivity in general. Certainly, other aspects, like economic stagnation and the lingering effects of the 2009 financial crisis contributed to Bernie’s meteoric rise. The lesson is that the electoral terrain can be acted on at a distance from the ballot box. Electoral conditions, problems, and possibilities are often the product of extra-electoral political changes, meaning that electoral politics can be impacted by extra-electoral organizing and action. And while class organization has not been taken seriously by the left for some time now, intensifying social movements have produced social ruptures that have, if momentarily, upended the status quo. 

Before 2016: The Insurrectionists 

Before the resurgence of democratic socialism, much of the dynamic, inventive, and creative energy in social movements such as Occupy or the first wave of Black Lives Matter stemmed from another tendency: a loose grouping of self-described insurrectionists. These “insurrectionary politics” incorporated various sub-tendencies, such as insurrectionary anarchism, proponents of communization, tiqqunism, etc. Central for left insurrectionary politics was a bullish disposition towards street actions, like riots. These tendencies understood direct street actions as the exclusive material of revolution, and they perceived class organization as only getting in the way. For them, class and political organization redirected rebellious street energy, thereby muting the revolutionary potential.⁹Of course, some organizations, and especially those of the non-profit industrial complex, have had this effect. But to maintain that this effect is a natural outcome of all types of organization is a different argument made by insurrectionary tendencies altogether. If only riotous actions could generalize without becoming altered by organization, then new potentialities for advancing past both state and capitalism would become immediately realizable. For some thinkers, pure insurrection functioned as an auto-critique of today’s logistical capitalism since an elementary aspect of the riot is about acquiring commodities through looting. 

The crisis of these insurrectionary currents arose from their misunderstanding of the relationship between proletarian disorganization and social rupture.¹⁰It should be noted that social rupture can produce the conditions from which organization can emerge, but this is another issue altogether. To be fair, some credit is due. The insurrectionist tendencies correctly interpreted moments of rupture as important events rather than irresponsible moments of passion. Though almost always unpredictable, social ruptures¹¹Note that “social rupture” differs from “social movement” used prior. Social rupture refers to a period of mass activity characterized by intense and open rebellion; social movements may contain periods of social rupture, but a social movement can also sometimes coexist in tension, but still peaceably, with the status quo liberal perceptions of acceptable protest. can have the effect of changing the political landscape, opening new possibilities in their wake. At the heart of rupture is open discontent with the status quo. Capitalist societies have constantly generated this discontent, and historically the organized left has sometimes made good use of it. But there is no guarantee that social, political, and economic discontents will crystalize into a liberatory push. If the US historical case demonstrates anything, it is that such discontents are always open to political contests by and for organized social forces and can even benefit the right.

Recent social ruptures have demonstrated an openness to political intervention by social forces with a wide range of ideological commitments. The most recent rupture—the George Floyd Movement—is an excellent example. Though at times extremely militant, the Floyd Movement found much of its political ambitions set by liberal activists and institutional forces (and in considerably fewer cases, by socialist abolitionists). In general, the Democratic Party was the primary beneficiary of the movement. The Party was largely successful in picking and choosing certain aspects of the movement¹²For one clear example of this, see Biden’s May 31 statement on the movement (link). to support in order to consolidate a sizable Black electorate under its ideological and political umbrella and generally transform a movement against police terror into a focus on problems of representation—in politics and state institutions but also private workplaces and culture more generally. The movement’s power was sometimes reoriented to launch activist-inspired personalities for social media consumption. Some non-profit organizations had successfully used the movement’s ambitions to bolster their profile, raise money, and sometimes build liberal activist campaigns. Finally, some of the movement’s energy was organized into “defund” campaigns by DSA-related and autonomous abolitionist groups.¹³Importantly, most large police departments were not defunded and many that were received funding increases over and above their initial amounts 2 years on. In the core of the uprising, where insurrectionists noted the dramatic razing of a precinct, voters elected not to replace the police when given the chance by the state (link). Democrats have also pivoted back to refunding the police, citing an increase in violent crime in advance of 2022 midterm elections (link). Despite the movement, the state continues to rely on violent repression to deal with contradictions produced by capital. Though the latter tendencies were undoubtedly the best outcome of the movement, they have mostly—so far—remained stuck at the level of electoral pressure campaigning in a period of severe backlash and active disorganization of an anti-carceral bloc. The insurrectionist wager that tactical escalation alone could produce a revolutionary situation has simply not borne out. The challenge of leadership runs deeper.

Perhaps the one rupture where insurrectionary tendency took on an active leadership role was the Occupy Movement. Let us immediately note the irony in the term “leadership” here; the classical understanding of movement leadership has been the vanguard of Lenin’s disciplined party or Bakunin’s secret society. The inability or unwillingness to identify oneself in either of these traditions was a brake to the movement when direct street action was no longer possible due to state repression. Violent repression of the Occupy movement was undoubtedly a coordinated action, a major organized event of the state’s repressive apparatus across the US. The fact of the state’s capacity to repress had not been sufficiently considered by insurrectionary tendencies, which considered the mimetic growth of rupture to have almost limitless capabilities. When these capabilities were put to the test, they failed, and Occupy encampments were torn down practically everywhere. As insurrectionary tendencies attempted to augment the quantitative aspects of mass Occupy occupations, what was required was a qualitative shift in the primary activities and organizational forms of the movement. But making such a decisive shift would have required identifying the struggle as something that can continue to exist outside of the wave of riots and protests itself—and this identification did not take place. 

The crisis of insurrectionary politics accumulated out of a misidentification with this straightforward fact: prying liberatory politics from moments of rupture shall require more than self-referentiality. In other words, you cannot organize an insurrection by circulating agitational media and by deploying replicable forms of tactical escalation. When class struggle reaches a fever pitch, it will take a densely organized working class to make history with any meaningful intention. And intention is important. As we have seen, movements can get put to use in various ways. What comes before a social rupture is as important as what comes after. When a social rupture emerges, it is too late to build the organizations necessary to navigate it. This work must be done in advance.

In hindsight, the stubborn refusal to construct organized social forces (outside of marginal informal networks, which some of these groups may have built) doomed the insurrectionary political tendencies from the start. The reasons for this refusal are surely numerous. But most decisive was the wager of interpreting the historic disorganization of the proletariat as a feature rather than what it is, a flaw. 

Conclusion: Building Proletarian Organization Today

If our primary task today is to build proletarian organization¹⁴Proletarian organization must be built, rather than “rebuilt,” because the types of organizations that must be built today will most likely look and act differently than what had existed in the past., what should that look like practically? We need mass proletarian institutions that can be used by their rank and file as vehicles for the class struggle. Still, we cannot simply reconstruct organizations as they existed earlier in history. Mass proletarian organization always coalesces around contradictions (like that between worker and boss) as they influence the everyday experience of the working class and as they relate to the larger historical situation of their time. It will not be possible to build proletarian organizations just as they existed before because both working-class experiences and the historical situation have changed.

That said, there are some persistent contradictions in capitalism that deserve our attention today, as well as some newer and promising areas of struggle. 

Labor continues to burn bright as a site of class contestation. Capitalism has not overcome the elementary worker-boss contradiction, and it never will. Even so, the conditions of labor in our time are fundamentally different. To name a few: trans-national capital mobility, the winding-down of the manufacturing base, an ever-rising service sector, and an increasingly anti-labor legal regime—even with a sympathetic general counsel of the NLRB—are but a few examples of how conditions around labor’s struggle have changed. These transformations at least call for new approaches to supplement the established ones. Regardless, union density is at its lowest point in nearly a century. We must reverse this trend and build the labor movement we all need. Luckily, recent years have seen the fits and starts of a renewed effort to organize a militant labor movement.¹⁵With the recent successes of the Starbucks Workers United campaign, the newly minted independent Amazon Workers Union, and the success of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union reform caucus, we are perhaps witness to the basis of a renewed push to organize workers. Proletarian disorganization calls for a comprehensive strategy of working within established unions to make them powerful and militant, and building new labor organization concurrently. These efforts are just a starting point, however, and it is vital for communists and socialists to systemize their lessons and bring about a new phase of militant workers’ organization.  

The tenant movement has taken on a new centrality as a site of struggle today. Though the proletarian movement has a long history with tenant organization, the rise of real estate in and through today’s financialized asset economy is decisively novel. In 2020, homeowners earned more on average from the inflated value of their property than they did from wages. This means that it has become more difficult than ever to break into the home market, rendering millions of proletarians into perpetual tenants, and bolstering the long-term trend of rent extraction as a critical element of contemporary capitalist accumulation. This has made the tenant-landlord relationship a key contradiction of our time, and tenants have begun building the foundation for mass tenant unions. These efforts are promising, but they will require continued support and experimentation from militant communists and socialists if they reach their full potential. 

The abolition movement also holds real promise for proletarian organization today. While nodding to the past, the contemporary abolition movement is responding to a relatively new situation of mass incarceration and the expansion of the domestic repressive apparatus. These features accelerated with the transition to neoliberalism, taking on strides of growth in the 1980s and 1990s. As a newer type of struggle, the problem of abolitionist organizing will require innovations in content and form. How to produce an abolitionist method of organization that can facilitate mass association and enables proletarians to fight against police power on terrain that is not exclusively electoral is currently an open question. The potential for this form of organization is great. If we are successful at addressing the problems present in abolitionist organizing, abolition could help reconstitute proletarian organization with renewed vigor. 

Successful proletarian reorganization will reconstruct the foundations of class struggle and bring about new strategic possibilities. In other words, desirable opportunities that currently appear impossible can become unlocked, and they can even combine to drive each other forward.¹⁶The perpetual separation of struggles remains a serious problem of our time. The climate crisis particularly begs the question about the need to bring distinct struggle together. The ecological situation seems to interact with every single aspect of the mentioned areas of struggle, which makes it a good framing problem. But actually accomplishing this will require deep and serious work within these areas of struggle, otherwise the climate issue will appear activist and unserious to those involved. Regardless, we understand that the climate crisis is an important question and we hope to think and write more about it soon. Consider, for example, how the age-old question of reform and revolution appears today. Ironically, proletarian disorganization currently blocks both transformative reforms and revolutionary change. No amount of sectarianism between the two can overcome this barrier, as the option for either is simply not on the table in our present. As with the electoral-first push, even when reform politics gain momentum, they immediately become vulnerable to systemic pressures that force significant compromise regardless of conviction. Revolutionary politics are likewise pigeonholed, as calls for revolutionary action become quickly consigned to micro-sect marginality or islanded prefiguration. This is a difficult reality to confront. But we will face the truth now, or we never will. We need to shift our focus and energy to proletarian reorganization, putting reform and revolution back onto the historical agenda. And while reformist and revolutionary politics now clash in a destructive spiral, neither with real hope of success, on the foundation of a reorganized proletariat they may resonate. On this new foundation, the fear of revolution may drive forward reforms as successful reforms strengthen the revolutionary will. 

Densely organized proletarians fundamentally change the balance of power between classes; their organizations and capacities produce a fundamentally different social structure¹⁷Even at the micro-level, class struggle must be understood as inscribing changes onto the social structure. A striking Teamster intimated this at a recent picket line: “A young fellow, probably an economics student, buttonholed me explaining the strike was useless because it couldn’t overcome market forces which decided our work pay and working conditions. I yelled at him: ‘Look at my picket sign. This is a market force!’”’ (link). with unique opportunities for the communist and socialist left and, therefore, with newfound difficulties for those to the right.

Proletarian reorganization will require strenuous activity to overcome challenges that today’s left has largely failed to confront. But this activity is nevertheless possible and necessary. Preceding militants have accomplished more difficult endeavors and under conditions less favorable.