Prioritizing independent political action

Tempest stands for the goal of an independent workers’ party as an essential step towards a mass socialist movement. But I think there’s a lack of clarity, and agreement, about the kind of party needed—socialist or something broader and more transitional? And there’s not enough emphasis placed on this goal in our daily political work. I believe all comrades agree that right now we must build the movements and organizations that can become the constituent elements of a new party in the immediate future. But I would argue that we must begin agitating for this party now as part and parcel of our movement-building activity.

Large numbers of workers and progressives will break from the Democrats only when there is a new party, standing for a clean break and much bigger than the Greens, to which they can gravitate. Tempest, along with others on the Left who understand that operating within the Democratic Party is a dead end, and who have abandoned lesser-evilism, should make independent political action – the creation of a new political party – their foremost goal and start working together to make it happen.

Launching a new party would not necessarily require massive forces. Fifty-six years ago, a remarkably successful attempt was made by a few hundred socialists and radicals in California. A small minority within the Community for New Politics—a semi-independent group spawned by the anti-war congressional campaign of Democrat Robert Scheer—led by members of the Independent Socialist Clubs, re-registered 105,000 voters, almost twice as many as the law required, into a new Peace and Freedom Party (PFP). PFP was organized around a program of immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and support for the Black Liberation movement. It was a failure, but for conjunctural reasons, not because failure is inevitable for a third party. PFP’s initial growth was stymied by the anti-war campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, and then, after the Democratic National Convention selected Hubert Humphrey, the party failed to attract the millions of disgruntled McCarthy and Kennedy supporters, mainly because its candidate, Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panthers, along with his chosen running mate Jerry Rubin, the Yippee prankster, ran a farcical, narcissistic campaign full of misguided mockery (“Erection Day”) and “revolutionary” rhetoric.

What about the Greens? They, or at least a majority of their members, have succumbed to campism, the tendency to act as apologists for, or even outright supporters of, anti-U.S. regimes, no matter how murderous and repressive they are. For example, the Greens have refused to support Ukraine in its highly legitimate fight against Russian aggression, and instead blamed Putin’s bloody invasion on the  “provocation” of NATO expansion. But even apart from these political debilities, it is highly unlikely that the Green Party has the potential to grow simply through slow accretion and without significant support from unions and other organized social movements, into a mass party. To bring that into being, there must be a political campaign within the labor movement and within BLM, M4BL, and the climate, women’s, LGBTQ, and Palestine solidarity movements. Out of these movements can come the needed critical mass. Labor in particular can contribute serious numbers and resources.

The potential base for a new party already exists: former Sanders and Warren supporters (more than 12 million voted for Sanders and Warren in 2020), BLM demonstrators, militant teachers and workers in the healthcare, auto, and fast food industries. The masses of courageous young people who have marched and set up encampments in solidarity with Palestine include a great many who have lost their illusions in the progressive potential of the Democratic Party. Opportunities would seem to be especially promising in the cities, in most of which Democratic rule has been palpably dysfunctional yet largely unchallenged from the Left in recent years. Mayors and city councils flagrantly promote the interests of finance and real estate. There is thus good reason to believe in the potential for mass mobilization around a program of large-scale direct investment in housing, education, health care, and job creation through public works, financed by steep taxes on wealth—even though there are severe legal limits on the power of municipal governments to implement such policies.

A new party must appeal to the widest constituency with a broad radical program. A great many on the Left have an unrealistic idea of the extent to which people in the U.S. today embrace socialism. Most Americans understand “socialism” as essentially a revived New Deal-style left liberalism, as was once championed by Bernie Sanders. Even this represents today a sharp challenge to the capitalist system. However, most of those who could be attracted to an independent party of the Left are just beginning to reject establishment politics and are not yet prepared to identify themselves as socialists. But they can be drawn into a fight for radical reforms, in the course of which they will learn that capitalism as a social system is the enemy and must be destroyed root and branch.

A mass socialist party is simply not on the agenda, given the current state of political consciousness. So, we should be building a party that would not, at first, have a socialist program. We should struggle to convince social movements to declare their political independence on the basis of their existing programs, not the abolition of capitalism and the creation of a totally new society. Even under reformist leadership, an independent, democratic, anti-corporate, pro-worker party would constitute new terrain for revolutionary socialists, who could permeate it with agitation for our politics.

Today, however, most of the Left remains attached to the Democratic Party and is thus easily associated with the neoliberal Establishment in the minds of millions of discontented and rebellious Americans. As a result, Trump-style right-wing populism has succeeded in posing as the predominant alternative to the status quo. And it can be countered only by a genuine radical-democratic alternative, one that attacks capitalists rather than people of color, immigrants, and queer folk. The bulk of a new party’s supporters would undoubtedly come from the Democrats’ voting base, but it will be necessary—and possible—to attract many who are habitual non-voters and even some of those who have been misled into supporting Trump. An anti-corporate, anti-elite political movement has the potential to win workers and others away from their racism and xenophobia by engaging them in common struggle with immigrants and people of color against the oligarchy that oppresses all of them.

A new party could be built initially around a few key issues, starting with Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, heavily taxing the rich, promoting unionization, stopping police violence, especially against Black people, curbing the Supreme Court, and codifying reproductive rights on the national level. It could call for a full-scale assault on the health insurance and fossil fuel industries and full employment through a massive public works program. Other positions ought to include substantial cuts in the military budget, nuclear disarmament, and a noninterventionist and pro-democracy foreign policy. A domestic pro-democracy agenda would call for reforming the electoral system through legislation to make voting rights consistent and enforceable throughout the country, introducing proportional representation, and abolishing the Electoral College.

All of this would mean that the party, while not socialist, would stand in clear opposition to the power of the corporate ruling class and to the two parties that serve its interests. As Naomi Klein has pointed out in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, real solutions to the climate crisis – not merely recycling and buying green products – are antithetical to “free market” dogmas, to which the Democrats cling as much as the Republicans. Klein explains that only collectivist measures might make a difference: heavy investment in rail transportation, large-scale development of renewable energy, and, above all, planning based on the common good, not profitability. That would mean a major assault on corporate “rights” and priorities, an assault that obviously would be fiercely resisted and probably could be overcome only by nationalization.

The new party would be a party of social movements, with members drawn from the Palestine solidarity, Black, Latinx, environmental, reproductive rights, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ movements, as well as a strong anti-fascist movement that will need to be mobilized without delay. Bernie Sanders provided support to social movements, but he did not represent them. A new party, on the other hand, would function as an extension of mass struggles, not an electoral alternative to them. It would see its job as escalating and intensifying social movements, not drawing them off the streets and into the polling places. It could tie those movements together and provide them with a continuous nationwide political voice, enabling them to act not as separate pressure groups, but to combine their forces in a struggle for political power. In fact, it should not be a primarily electoral vehicle, but rather use elections as one important arena for raising consciousness and building a political movement, rather than putting people in office. The party’s first priority would be promoting and supporting mass disruptive protest and civil disobedience.

By encompassing a variety of social movements, it would foster an understanding of common interests and the need for solidarity, an understanding of how struggle for union rights, climate action, universal medical insurance, public housing, police reform, trans rights, and so on are all related.

It could not be a labor party, a party of the organized labor movement. The union leadership, with only a few exceptions, is still too cautious and conservative to break with the Democrats. But it would draw supporters from unions, especially ones with militant locals, like the teachers and health care workers. It should, however, declare itself in favor of a labor-based party, urging the union leadership, as well as the rank-and-file, to break with the Democrats. And, of course, it would act aggressively in support of strikes and other worker struggles. In these ways it could act as a catalyst, pointing the way toward political independence for the labor movement as a whole.

It would stand for thoroughgoing and consistent democracy, at home and abroad. And it would stand against all forms of repression and authoritarianism, whether by corporate elites and the state security apparatus in this country or in Russia, China, Hungary, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India, Israel, Iran, Myanmar, Turkey, Syria, and elsewhere. Its foreign policy would feature calls for major nuclear disarmament initiatives, massive slashing of the military budget, withdrawal of all troops and bases from foreign countries, copious foreign aid directed at popular needs, and support for radical democratic movements everywhere. An urgent necessity would be support for national self-determination, especially for Palestine and Ukraine, but also Kashmir, Western Sahara, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Xinjiang, Tibet.

For a while, Occupy looked like an unofficial third party; it managed to electrify the nation and the world, winning the sympathy of many millions. It eclipsed the Tea Party and almost overnight forced the national debate to center on inequality, jobs, housing, and the “one percent,” rather than taxes and “Big Government.”  But Occupiers showed virtually no interest in helping to create an official third party. Nevertheless, Occupy gave us a glimpse of the potential for an independent party of the Left, and so did the next popular explosion, Black Lives Matter. Like Occupy, BLM had a huge impact on popular consciousness, this time putting the focus on racism and policing.

Meanwhile, in the past few years we have seen, and we continue to see, an unusually high level of resistance and rebellion – Palestine solidarity, reproductive rights, workers’ struggles in higher education, public schools, the auto and fast-food industries.

More mass upheavals on the scale of Occupy and BLM are likely, though unpredictable. However, we can’t simply wait for new ones. We must start preparing for them now – not by immediately proclaiming a new party, but by declaring it as our goal, our priority, and begin laying the foundations for it. Our efforts to strengthen and radicalize various social movements should be accompanied by explicit and continuous advocacy of an independent party of the Left.

We could be building support for a Declaration of Independence from the Democrats by significant segments of the progressive community. With as much support as it is possible to garner from trade unionists and social movement activists, such a declaration would announce to the public that at least a portion of the Left has decisively rejected the idea that progressive change can come from the Democrats and intends instead to challenge them, as well as the Republicans, for political power.

Tempest’s priority has been, and must continue to be, building and training a strong, politically sophisticated cadre of revolutionary socialists. But at the same time, we should also prioritize propaganda for a broad party of the Left, a formation in which our cadre could most effectively and expeditiously guide a large portion of the Left toward revolutionary socialism.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

Featured Image Credit:Image by Craig Fildes modified by Tempest.