America Needs A Left
This morning Jean-Luc Mélenchon tweeted that “The US could not choose the left: there was none. When there is no left, there is no limit to the right.” He is correct. The enthusiasm generated by the Bernie Sanders campaign and resistance mounted to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 has been exhausted in the Democratic Socialists' broken marriage with the Democratic Party. Over the same time period, the French radical left was able to break with their liberals and build a force capable of resisting the rise of the far-right. ¹
There are, of course, many differences between France and America that make it impossible to copy-and-paste the success of the France Unbowed across the Atlantic. However, the Unbowed can and should be studied as Americans try to rebuild a left from the wreckage of 2024. To begin, we should go back to 2016 and work forward from an interesting wrinkle of history: the Unbowed took technology from the Sanders campaign. This marks the beginning of the differences in strategy which have led to relative success and failure.
The 2016 Sanders run spilled over into the Democratic Socialists of America, a post-New-Left holdover. The DSA has the form of an association with (nominally) dues-paying members participating in local chapters. The first Trump term grew the organization fifteen-fold, and it has since sprouted caucuses that fill out the lack of regional coordination on broadly ideological lines—and contend for influence within the organization's internal democracy. The Sanders campaign itself would get rebooted for another go-round in 2020.
Meanwhile, the Unbowed took the Sanders campaign's technology and repurposed it to build a new, modern platform: Popular Action. The Popular Action website allows anyone to sign up to order materials, attend events, and connect with local Action Groups, which are usually neighborhood-scale committees of a dozen or so people. The Unbowed do not structure themselves as an association or a political party: there is no membership or dues per se. Rather, people are free to participate as they wish, coming and going as they see fit. There are various leadership roles at a local and regional level like facilitating Action Groups or managing social media accounts, but there is not the kind of internal democracy or formal tendencies like in the DSA. Ultimately, each Action Group is autonomous, with only a national ethics committee intervening if the established Principles of the Movement are not respected. Instead of abstract ideological consistency, the Unbowed are united by their shared commitment to a practical program: The Future in Common.
As the 2010s waned, American democratic socialists saw several stars rise, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These celebrity politicians connected directly with the public via social media. The push for key policy proposals like Medicare for All and The Green New Deal motivated activists to seek concessions within the orbit of the Democratic Party. Although the Democrats had been caught undermining the Sanders campaign, he decided to support them again in 2020. As far as I can tell, Sanders' theory of the case was the same as in 2016: by running for President he could use the bully-pulpit to advance a broadly social-democratic agenda within the Democrats' center-left coalition.
By contrast, the Unbowed had produced a coherent theory of action as elaborated in Mélenchon's book, The People's Era. In short, the current French constitution, the Fifth Republic, is insufficiently democratic and must be abolished as a critical step in social revolution. Specifically, the constitution gives too much power to the President. The solution is to win the Presidency and use it to abolish itself. To build a coalition, the Unbowed continually develop their holistic and detailed program. By constantly mobilizing in and with labor, ecological, peace, etc., movements the Unbowed hope not only to gain the votes needed, but the support in the streets necessary for revolutionary social transformation: a rupture with the capitalist world-order.
And what about those social movements—like the George Floyd Uprising or Palestine solidarity encampments? You tell me what the Democrats did. The Unbowed came out and joined the Yellow Vests.
Sanders and AOC rode with Biden all the way into the ditch, and only the smoke drove them out of the wreckage. They contorted in undignified ways, junior partners in a party and supplicants of an administration arming and funding genocide. Democratic Socialists became split on how to respond, with the DSA national and New York City leadership publicly contesting whether or not to endorse AOC. Ideological fissures within the DSA became more pronounced as old-timers accused entryists of trying to capture the organization. Harris spat in the face of her base, trotting Bill Clinton out to Dearborn to inform this key constituency that Israel was “forced” to kill civilians. And of course, Harris lost to Donald Trump. In some Dearborn precincts she came in third place, after Jill Stein.
In France all the polls said that Le Pen's far-right National Rally was supposed to win the snap legislative elections. And yet, the far-right did not win. The left won, because the Unbowed were able to build a left coalition on the basis of their program and mobilize people all over the country to do the groundwork. Note something important: the Unbowed left the center-left Socialist Party and deviationist Communist Party—and in a few years the Unbowed were able to build a coalition on the basis of their program. The Socialists and Communists are the junior partners in the New Popular Front.
So what can we take away from this comparative summary?
- A new American left is necessary.
- That left needs to be radical, not liberal or social-democratic.
- That left needs to organize as a movement and work with other movements.
- That left needs to be independent, not hitched to the Democratic Party.
- That left needs to be programmatically unified, not ideologically homogeneous.
- That left needs to avoid internal tendency battles and entryism by avoiding the form of a party or association.
- That left needs to theorize the present, not rehash the failures of the past.
In 1898, the great socialist Eugene V. Debs wrote about his time, and how the experience of European comrades influenced American politics: ²
It is scarcely necessary to observe in this connection that capitalism is the same everywhere, that like causes produce like results.
Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation.
If we believe the situation is hopeless, what is there to do but get drunk and lie down in misery? If we choose to hope that a better world is possible, let's stand with dignity and fight like hell for the living.
1. For details see the new book published by the Institut de la Boétie, Extrême droite : la résistible ascension. ↩
2. Eugene V. Debs, “The American Moment”. ↩