{"id":5643,"date":"2022-02-23T08:47:23","date_gmt":"2022-02-23T13:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=5643"},"modified":"2022-02-28T21:23:22","modified_gmt":"2022-03-01T02:23:22","slug":"against-purgatory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/02\/against-purgatory\/","title":{"rendered":"Against Purgatory"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he primary journal\/website of social-democratic reformism in the U.S. has published an article<\/a> by its founder and editor, Bhaskar Sunkara, that takes us through Purgatory as an (overly) extended metaphor for the current state of the left.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The argument appears to be that the electoral Left\u2019s progress \u2014 best represented in the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez \u2014 has been interrupted, at least in part, by something called \u201chyper-politics.\u201d In order to correct this mistake we need to admit our sins and slog through purgatory toward either incremental advance or slow decline.<\/p>\n

To be sure the new socialist movement is not in good shape. The organized socialist Left \u2014 reformist and revolutionary \u2014 failed to coherently organize around COVID-19, ceding ground to increasingly fascist elements. Similarly, the organized Left failed to mobilize fully\u00a0 around Black Lives Matter (BLM). The new socialist movement \u2014 at a national level \u2014 has failed to organize or push for direct action and protest for even modest reform.<\/p>\n

I am certainly not against metaphor and being poetical. But in Sunkara\u2019s article this serves to conceal rather than reveal. Sunkara conceals the Left\u2019s failure to translate the growth of DSA\u2014 and the generational embrace of socialism (lower case \u201cs\u201d) among millions\u2014 into a militant movement that fights not just at the polls, but at workplaces, in our schools, and in the streets.<\/p>\n

What should we do in the face of our failures? In response to the ongoing disasters facing the exploited and oppressed? Jacobin, borrowing from Dante, counsels penance: \u201cReader, I would not have you fall away from good intentions when you hear the way God wills the debt be paid \u2026 Failure to confront your sins involves a more eternal damnation.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Let the Jacobin editor without sin throw the first stone. Jacobin has not only\u00a0 ignored certain social movements, and quite a few labor struggles, it has counseled against organizing in many of them. In doing so the journal\u00a0 may be the co-author of its own purgatory.<\/p>\n

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Photo<\/a> by Marko Milivojevic.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A poverty of history<\/h4>\n

Sunkara provides a micro-history of U.S. socialism. This micro-history helps explain a wider failure of imagination. Left out is the sacrifice of the Haymarket Martyrs, the great general strikes in St. Louis and Seattle, the socialists who helped organize the Union Army against the Confederacy. Also left out is the legacy of the Communist Party in the 1930s, the radical organizing of the 1960s New Left, the Black revolutionaries of DRUM and the Black Panther Party. Racism, the Achilles\u2019 heel of socialist and working-class organizing in the U.S.\u2014a nation founded on slavery and settler-colonialism\u2014is only very quickly mentioned. The great Stonewall rebellion? The mass immigrant rights marches of the 2000s? All these things are mostly absent. Except perhaps in the negative, in the negative space of so-called \u201chyper-politics.\u201d What is hyper-politics? At least in this article, it could easily be read as another way to hush queer and other oppressed folks, or to decry politics that happen outside the electoral sphere.<\/p>\n

The crises facing the exploited and oppressed<\/h4>\n

Oddly, in an article that assesses the state of the left, and positions universal class demands and interests against so-called hyper-politics, Sunkara seems to ignore the condition of the present-day working-class and the class struggle proper.<\/p>\n

There is no mention of the \u201cgreat resignation,\u201d the economic crises facing the working class (the scissors of a tight labor market and inflation), the looming threat of central bank action that could discipline and further immiserate the class, \u201cStriketober\u201d (the mini-strike wave in the fall), the hundreds of upcoming union contracts, the union organizing at Amazon and Starbucks, etc.<\/p>\n

This article is not simply class reductionist. It is electorally reductionist. The most cursory look at the state of the class struggle contradicts Sunkara\u2019s prognosis of slow decline vs. incremental advance. What Sunkara does not seem to understand is that institutions, economies, political norms, and entire industries can decline very quickly, even collapse under the weight of their contradictions. It is also possible for seemingly passive populations to \u201cspontaneously\u201d3<\/a><\/sup> move into action, as they did during the BLM uprisings in 2020.<\/p>\n