This piece was written by Josh Messite, Director of W&M Prison Labor Committee

“To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.” — Karl Marx

“An unperceived limit entails catastrophe. An unperceived potential, tragedy.” — Chuang

Where are we, where are we going, and how do we get there? These aren’t just the disoriented questions you’d be likely to hear Joe Biden ask one of his handlers after a debate; every socialist needs to agonize over these questions. We must constantly try to clarify the conditions of our current situation, envision a better world, and then determine the path that’s most likely to lead us into the future. Why am I saying this? Because I’m concerned that we’re getting swept up in the hype, taking the most convenient approach rather than the most effective approach, and allowing our sentimental attachments to distract us from some glaring red flags. Socialism requires “ruthless criticism of all that exists.” We can’t afford to take anything for granted when the stakes are this high.

Let’s talk about Bernie Sanders. I feel a great deal of affection for Bernie. Both of us are Jews with roots in Brooklyn who love baseball. I admire his consistent and authentic compassion for the millions of Americans who can’t afford decent housing, health care, or tuition. His vocal support for labor organizing and workers’ rights come as a much-needed alternative after decades of neoliberal union-busting. I appreciate how radically different he is from the rest of the politicians in Washington. His willingness to take on the vast powers aligned against him is inspiring.

And yet I believe there’s strong reason to fear that the Sanders campaign and a potential Sanders administration could be absolute disasters for our socialist movement. Sanders is doomed, and I don’t want our movement to go down with him. I don’t know when this failure will take place, but I’m certain that it’ll happen.

Before you write me off as an ultra-left extremist who prefers morally-pure abstractions over imperfect reality, hear me out.

On The Campaign Trail

As I’m writing this in January 2020, Sanders seems likely to win both the primary and the general election. Even so, it’s still possible that Biden wins, or that he fades down the stretch and Buttigieg wins, or that the Democratic Party schemes to rob Sanders of the nomination at the convention, or that the media and the Democratic Party sabotage him in the general election. If any of those unfortunate possibilities come to pass and Sanders doesn’t become president, won’t we suffer the consequences of putting all of our eggs in one basket? We’re betting the house on getting one guy elected against tough odds. If he loses, could we really justify our decision to devote this much of our limited capacities on his campaign rather than on other organizing projects?

His slogan presents a compelling counterargument to those doubts: “Not Me, Us.” Many have argued that the Sanders campaign is much more than just an attempt to win office — it’s also a vehicle for the self-organization and empowerment of the working class. By organizing for Sanders you’re raising class consciousness, mobilizing people who were previously demoralized or disconnected, and reinjecting labor rights and class struggle into the public discourse. Even if he loses, the position of the working class will have been improved by his campaign.

There’s a great deal of truth to this line of thinking. Sanders has grabbed hold of a massive audience, and he has used this platform to reopen possibilities that previously seemed permanently shut. Ideas consigned to the dustbin of history have been retrieved and dusted off. His campaign represents something genuinely new and confrontational after decades of politically-monotonous neoliberalism.

However, there are a couple of major holes in this narrative.

The first is that it gives him and his campaign credit that rightfully belongs to the tens of thousands of radical organizers who have worked tirelessly since the Great Recession to revive the long-dormant Left. They have primarily accomplished this through non-electoral organizational forms: Black Lives Matter, rank-and-file union organizing, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, migrant justice groups like Mijente, tenant unions, prison abolition organizations like Critical Resistance — the list goes on and on. Sanders has benefited tremendously from their efforts, and as such he should be understood strictly as a messenger or a spokesman — not as a messiah. As Eugene Debs put it, Sanders isn’t “a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness.” Again, Sanders’ rhetoric does reflect an understanding of this point. But when his supporters claim that contributions to Sanders’ campaign are simultaneously contributions to union organizing on the basis of Sanders’ strong support for unions, it’s a false equivalence at best and a bait-and-switch at worst. They’re revealing a lingering belief in Great Man Theory, transforming Sanders into a savior who single-handedly brought emancipatory politics back to life in all of its forms. This attitude is wrong. His presidential campaign is only one of many ways to raise class consciousness and organize the working class.

Ample political infrastructure and organizing networks have already been constructed around the Sanders campaign, and that work will be done with or without us. So many sources of suffering, exploitation, and injustice have been allowed to fester since the American Left collapsed half a century ago. It would be wise for socialists to spend more time doing the crucial work that has been neglected for so long rather than leaping onto the flashy, crowded electoral bandwagon.

Another flaw in the “raising class consciousness” argument is Sanders’ habit of spreading harmful misinformation. He has contributed to the rise in popularity of “socialism,” but which socialism? Sanders defines socialism as the government-backed guarantee of basic needs like housing, health care, education, and retirement. He has equated his socialism with the New Deal social democracy of President Roosevelt. He complains about “socialism for the rich and powerful,” accusing Trump of supporting socialism “for billionaires or massive corporations.” This idea has been rendered effectively in the form of a sarcastic meme: “socialism is when the government does stuff, and the more stuff it does, the more socialister [sic] it is.” This sentiment is in line with Sanders’ decision to empty the word of all of its original meaning, as evidenced by his explicit denial that his version of socialism has anything to do with the means of production or the destruction of capitalism. When he criticizes capitalism, he prefaces it with qualifiers like “rugged,” “rampant,” or “unfettered,” implying that compassionate, stable, or controlled capitalism are possible.

There can never be a version of capitalism that isn’t fueled by worker exploitation, infinite and ruthless expansion, environmental destruction, and imperialist extraction. The problem isn’t neoliberalism: the problem is capitalism itself. Neoliberalism is just a tactic capitalists used to increase their power. Reversing neoliberalism wouldn’t address the root cause. By inspiring false hope that capitalism can be moderated or patched up, Sanders is spreading false consciousness, making it harder for socialists to convince people that we need to build something entirely new.

Keeping Promises

Sure, but what if he wins? President Sanders could give us universal healthcare, free college tuition, student debt relief, affordable housing, and an end to endless wars! Who cares about a bit of hero-worship and ideological confusion in light of those massive improvements to the lives of millions, maybe billions of people?

This is the part that worries me the most.

For starters, it’s extremely unlikely that President Sanders would be able to pass landmark programs like Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, or College For All until 2023 at the very earliest. The first problem is the 2020 Senate election: based on the seats that are up for re-election this year, there’s a strong possibility that the Republicans retain control of the Senate. This would make the passage of ambitious legislation an impossibility until after the 2022 elections, which are considered more favorable for Democrats.

If the Democrats do take both the House and the Senate in 2020, would Sanders get a majority of legislators to vote for any of those major bills? No. To get anything through the Senate, the Democrats would need to abolish the filibuster, an idea which is deeply unpopular among powerful party members worried about Republicans using it against them down the line. Even without the 60-vote Senate requirement, Sanders still couldn’t pull it off. In the House, the 25-member Blue Dog coalition of fiscally-conservative Democrats recently called for a Constitutional amendment requiring Congress to produce a balanced budget every fiscal year — do you think any of those people are going to vote for Sanders’ huge spending plans? Many other powerful Democratic Representatives and Senators have signaled their firm opposition to all of Sanders’ major proposals. The Democratic Party as it’s currently constituted would be far too internally divided to pass any of them.

The solution that’s been proposed can be called “the movement theory of change”: the application of constant pressure on moderate and conservative Democratic officials through mass mobilizations and primary challenges. Gigantic rallies and protests would send a signal to Congress that “the people” are behind the President’s agenda. Encouraged by Organizer-in-Chief Sanders, radical activists would hound resistant politicians, disrupting their events and publicly embarrassing them. If shaming and irritating them into caving in doesn’t work, then the Left would kick them out of office, replacing them with someone radical.

This strategy probably won’t work because the numbers aren’t there. Be brutally honest: what are the odds that we could successfully unseat and replace dozens — maybe even hundreds — of elected officials across the country? Our attempts to primary incumbents have been a mixed bag so far. Some incredibly impressive victories, but also many disappointing defeats. To sufficiently change the ideological composition of Congress, we’d need our success rate to become almost perfect in the span of a few years. And I haven’t even mentioned the strong likelihood that our reactionary, unaccountable court system will get in the way, just as it did with President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs; our powerful capitalist media will constantly smear Sanders as a dangerous, Trumpian tyrant; our finance-controlled Federal Reserve will manipulate liquidity; our conservative bureaucracy will undermine his policies and publicly condemn him.

In the meantime, it seems likely that President Sanders’ approval rating would be in freefall. How could it not be? The Establishment said that he was too radical to get things done, and there’s a good chance they’ll be proven right, at least for the early years of his administration. We promised people that if they voted for Sanders their lives would drastically improve, and it’d probably be a long time before a Sanders Administration could fulfill that promise. Socialists will look like liars. If we latch on to his administration and they’re unable to achieve their goals, the public perception of our ideology will be one of failure and naive idealism. The demoralization that would ensue after years of legislative deadlock could set us all the way back to square one.

Suffering from Success

Now put all of that pessimism aside. Let’s get to the best case scenario: Sanders wins, and the leftist movement is so large and well-organized that it either succeeds in shifting moderate Democrats to the left or successfully replaces them with radicals in 2022 or 2024. Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, College for All, and affordable housing legislation are all signed into law. Millions of lives are improved, and we’ve taken a giant leap in the direction of socialism.

Then, one of two things will happen: 1) The already-fragile economy collapses/the economic crisis which has already started becomes far worse or 2) the coordinated backlash unleashed by the capitalist class will be so vicious and enormous that Sanders stands no chance of defeating it.

Profits are the ultimate goal of capitalists. Without profits, capitalism couldn’t reproduce itself — corporations would go out of business and financial institutions would have no incentive to invest in production. Unfortunately for capitalism, profitability has always had a fundamental tendency to decline. Classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo noticed this but were baffled by it. Marx hypothesized that the decline comes from the change in investment priorities caused by capitalists’ desire to improve efficiency. The exploitation of workers is the source of profits, but capitalists increase the share of capital devoted to machines and technology relative to the share of capital devoted to workers. Since capitalists only get a bang for their buck when they’re extracting surplus-value from their employees, this change in proportion drags down their profits even as it increases their efficiency. Empirical studies done by economists like Fred Moseley, Andrew Kliman, and Robert Brenner have confirmed this long-term macro-level connection between declining profits and the increasing automation/mechanization of capital.

According to economist Michael Roberts, the general rate of profit in the United States reached a peak in the early 1950s at approximately 35%. By 1960, it was all the way down to 25%. The profit rate rallied for a little while, but by 1965 the Golden Age of Capitalism was already coming to an end, and the profit rate steadily declined until hitting rock bottom at 22% in 1980. This sparked the rise of neoliberalism, which was able to keep the profit rate afloat through the 1980s and 1990s. It peaked at 25% in 2005. But profitability then experienced a sharp fall, and this culminated in the Great Recession and an all-time low of 20% in 2009. It has barely recovered since then — as of 2018, it had only risen to 22%.

Why does any of this Econ matter? It’s a warning against trying to repeat the past. The Sanders campaign appeals to the American Left’s deep nostalgia for the era of strong unions and a strong safety net, but that was only possible because profits were exceptionally strong. It’s no coincidence that capitalists put an end to class collaboration once profit rates descended, and the ridiculously-high profitability that allowed for the existence of New Deal policies is never coming back. Profitability transcends individual corporations and concerns the aggregate profits of the entire capitalist class, and so the effort to prevent a decline in the rate of profit unites them in a shared struggle against threats to their collective profits.

Business owners don’t destroy labor organizations simply because they’re greedy people. The exploitation of workers is at the core of profit-making, and when workers unionize, the level of exploitation that capitalists can get away with is diminished. Therefore it’s completely rational for them to attack unions. This is the context in which we should be talking about neoliberalism: unions were getting too strong, profits were getting too low, and so the capitalists attacked workers’ rights (in addition to privatizing public services, imposing austerity on their working classes, and shifting production to lower-wage workers in less-developed countries) in order to save profitability. An inverse relationship exists between capitalists and workers — what’s good for owners is bad for workers, and what’s good for workers is bad for owners.

For this reason, we can be sure that the capitalist class will resort to extreme measures to prevent Sanders from succeeding. Sanders would try to use his executive power and his Bully Pulpit to return unions to their former strength, posing a serious threat to already-low profit rates. His spending programs would also terrify the capitalist class: welfare spending funnels money that would otherwise end up in the pockets of the capitalist class towards the masses. His rhetoric alone strikes fear in the hearts of capitalists, who have gotten accustomed to capitalist hegemony. They aren’t going to simply suck it up.

I know I’m not shocking anybody by saying “capitalists will fight Sanders,” but the disturbing truth is that the capitalists are going to defeat Sanders. These are the people who own the means of production. Peter Camejo was right that the ruling class is not all-powerful with regards to the masses, but ownership of the means of production does give them ultimate power over the system of government that’s built on top of their system of production. Any attempt to fight capitalists that stops short of seizing their source of strength is like fighting with both hands tied behind your back.

Here are some of the ways they would exercise that economic power: closing factories and stores en masse, laying off unprecedented numbers of workers, moving their capital overseas, ceasing imports, cutting off credit. Any combination of these actions would bring the economy to a screeching halt, plunging us into a terrible economic and political crisis. The danger posed by this massive, organized economic pressure is how capitalists have consistently defeated democratic socialists in Europe: most famously François Mitterand in France, and more recently Alexis Tsipras in Greece. In every case, the democratic socialist government had no choice but to surrender to Capital, agreeing to make painful compromises and reversals in order to avoid complete societal collapse. As Sanders similarly intends to cut into the capitalists’ profits without taking away the economic veto power that they have over his policies, I can say with high confidence that this is what would happen to his administration if he succeeded in passing his agenda.

A Peaceful Death Star

Would he at least be good on imperialism? Even if it’s true that he won’t be able to implement his domestic policy agenda, it’s also true that the president has a large amount of unilateral power over foreign policy. Sanders has been a vocal opponent of military interventions throughout his long career, and in light of the burgeoning crisis in Iran, that factor alone could be enough to justify prioritizing his election. No other Democratic candidate can be trusted to oppose war.

Yes, Sanders would reduce militarism and emphasize diplomacy. This distinction is extremely significant — it could mean the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East. But Sanders’ record on US military intervention isn’t as spotless as many of his supporters believe. He supported catastrophic military interventions in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya (although he recently expressed regret over his support for intervention in Afghanistan). When he endorsed the bombing of Kosovo rather than pursuing a ceasefire, his policy analyst resigned and anti-war protestors occupied his office. Sanders had those protestors arrested. During the 2016 primary he promised that he’d continue the Drone War — are we ready for socialist drone strikes?

Still, it’s true that Sanders is in a league of his own compared to the other options. But Sanders’ superiority relative to the rest of the candidates doesn’t make him an anti-imperialist — it makes him a uniquely-compassionate imperialist. We usually talk about imperialism in terms of stealing oil, military invasions, and anti-leftist CIA coups, but imperialism goes much deeper than that. This is a quote attributed to Cecil Rhodes, an all-time great British imperialist, in the context of increasing anxiety over class unrest: “The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.” Advanced capitalist nations are actually faced with two existential threats: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the threat of working class revolution. Imperialism is an elegant solution to both of these problems. By extracting natural resources and the value produced by the workers of less-developed peripheral nations, empires can bolster their stagnant economies and use their stolen wealth to offer bribes to their unruly working classes. Sanders frequently says that “the richest country in the history of the world” should be able to provide basic services to the people who live here, but he doesn’t mention a major source of our riches: the surplus-value produced by workers brutalized by our empire. One answer to the bad-faith “How will you pay for it?” question that gets posed to Sanders is “by taking from the oppressed masses of the world.”

Additionally, by demonizing the targets of imperialism, capitalists have an easy villain who can absorb the unrest and anger of their country’s workers. Rather than finding common cause with the non-white masses of countries like Mexico and Syria, white workers in imperial nations like America and Britain are taught to hate and fear them. When those people flee the countries that our empires have impoverished and destabilized, they seek physical safety and access to higher wages in the imperial core. They can’t be invaded by an empire if they live in it. While Sanders is better than most other Democrats on immigration, it’s telling that he opposes open borders because “there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people [migrating] from all over the world. Can’t do it.” How different does this really sound from right-wing rhetoric? The parallel comes from a shared refusal to acknowledge that imperialism is what causes the flow of impoverished non-white people into wealthy nations dominated by white people.

Sanders won’t confront imperialism or sufficiently address the oppression of immigrants because that’d require him to dismantle capitalism. In an interview with Rolling Stone and a speech at Georgetown University, Sanders made it very clear that he does not support the overthrow of the capitalist system. As long as there is capitalism, there will be imperialism. Imperialism is capitalism’s life support system — capitalist empires are like vampires, sucking wealth out of peripheral nations to sustain their decaying economies.

It’s crucial to understand the true nature of imperialism because any socialism that stops at our borders is guaranteed to fail. Nothing we build in isolation can last. We shouldn’t only refuse to compromise on imperialism on the basis of justice and morality — it’s also a fatal strategic error to perpetuate imperial power structures, because they strengthen our enemies at home and weaken our allies abroad. How are we supposed to form and maintain strong, mutually-beneficial bonds with the workers of the world if we’re too busy pledging our loyalty to a president who’s raining missiles down on them? I, for one, am not looking forward to reading “The Left-Wing Case for Bernie’s Drone Strikes.”

If you think I’m exaggerating, look at the way democratic socialists acted in Britain or France while they were in power: social democracy for their own people, horrific violence for the masses of oppressed nations. The same year that the Labour government created the NHS, they also massacred Malaysian anti-colonial rebels to maintain their control over the colony’s tin and rubber supply. The French Socialists who accomplished massive gains in welfare, education, and housing for the people of France were simultaneously torturing and executing Algerian anti-colonialists to maintain the flow of cheap Algerian agricultural imports. If we accept that socialists must be internationalists in order to succeed, we must learn from shameful historical episodes like these and make sure that we don’t repeat them.

If You Want Something Done Right, Do It Yourself

My message isn’t that Sanders is secretly a monster, or that we shouldn’t support him at all, or that electoral politics is a total waste of time. I think he’d be able to reduce harm as president, and that reason alone is enough to make me feel like I have a moral obligation to vote for him. I believe his campaign and his potential administration do offer some promising opportunities for socialists. But that’s only true if we first acknowledge the inflexible limits of social democracy as a policy platform and electoralism as a socialist strategy.

Perhaps you see no reason to take seriously the skepticism of a random college student with only a couple years of organizing experience. To account for that, I’ll provide you with some appeals to authority. Marx warned that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Instead, the working class should aim to “smash” the “bureaucratic-military machine.” The second-most important German revolutionary after Karl, Rosa Luxemburg, came up with a memorable line: in Reform or Revolution, she wrote that proposals to transform capitalism into socialism through the use of government power are like trying “to change the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness by progressively pouring into it bottles of social-reformist lemonade.” Take it from one of Sanders’ heroes, Eugene Debs, the most famous socialist politician in American history: “Voting for socialism is not socialism any more than a menu is a meal.”

Times have changed since their lives ended, but we still can’t elect our way to socialism. Wielding state power isn’t the same as wielding economic power. As long as the exploitation and profit-seeking of capitalism persist, we’ll never be able to rupture from it, no matter how many socialists we elect. There’s no legislation we could pass to dismantle the logic of capitalism. We must expand our idea of politics, moving beyond what Alain Badiou called the “brutal finitude” of the state into the “infinite mobility of politics” by pivoting away from office-seeking towards forms of organizing that are much less rigid and constrained.

This isn’t a philosophical thought experiment or a matter of personal preference — circumstances are going to present us with a concrete, binary, political choice to either stay the course or leave it behind. So in addition to being just one mode of transportation among many, electoralism is also a vehicle that should come equipped with an Eject Button. We should think of it as an example of planned obsolescence, even if we can’t predict the exact time it’ll become obsolete. If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this piece, it’s that socialists must be ready to move past Sanders when he fails. There are some concrete demands which can never be won through electoral politics. What will we do when political and/or economic obstruction prevents or reverses his efforts? We’ll say: “See? We tried working within the system, and it got us nowhere. Now it’s time to try something new.” In his often-quoted book Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin compares ultra-leftists to children for stubbornly refusing to participate in electoral politics. But he doesn’t do this because he believes that reforms can bring us closer to revolution, or because he thinks the election of leftist politicians could push the government in the direction of socialism. Instead, he calls for socialists to support social democratic politicians with the knowledge that they’re bound to fail, so that their failures can serve as high-profile and undeniable evidence for the masses that operating within the confines of the capitalist system will inevitably reach a dead-end. He illustrates his point with a dark joke: socialists should “support” the electoral campaigns of social-democratic politicians “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man.”

There’s going to be another recession in the near future. Profit margins are tight, production is weak, global growth is slowing, and corporate debt is high. Revolutionary transformation doesn’t only require a strong working class — it also requires a weakened ruling class. When economic crisis strikes, it’s up to us to take advantage of the opportunities created by a disorganized, fragmented capitalist class. At the very least, organizing the masses and strengthening class solidarity will make it far easier to weather the deprivation of living through a recession, because people will have the means to look out for each other.

We can’t prepare for the next recession by prioritizing electoral politics. Rather than putting our faith in President Sanders’ ability to protect us, we should take matters into our own hands. Instead of counting on his administration to provide affordable public housing, we should contribute as much as we can to housing justice campaigns like Stomp Out Slumlords, Housing Justice League, and Moms 4 Housing. Climate change won’t be solved until the capitalist drive for accumulation and extraction is abolished, and no climate bill, no matter how ambitious, could make that happen. We’ll never see 218+ Congresspeople and 51+ Senators pass the “Ecosocialism Act.” That’s something we’ll need to achieve on our own, through the construction of anticapitalist ecological mass organizations. Unions didn’t build their power through the advocacy of worker-friendly politicians and the appointment of worker-friendly bureaucrats: the rank-and-file organized themselves into a formidable force in the face of ultraviolent repression and hostile courts. Because immigrants are an easily-exploitable source of cheap labor, they can’t trust that a government which owes its existence to capitalist profits will give them the rights they deserve, thereby making it difficult for capitalists to continue super-exploiting them. The groups that came together to protest ICE detention facilities didn’t look to politicians for guidance. Incarcerated workers and activists who have formed organizations like the IWOC and Jailhouse Lawyers Speak aren’t waiting around for the Democratic Party to swoop in and save them. Harsh crackdowns from wardens and retaliation from corrections officers haven’t stopped people like Askari Danso and Uhuru Rowe from courageously speaking out and building solidarity. A political system that can’t continue to operate unless the circulation of commodities remains smooth has no incentive to disrupt the supply chain, but shipping and transportation workers, on the other hand, are uniquely positioned to grind capitalism to a standstill.

Primarily because the economy wouldn’t function without our participation in it, the organized masses have more political power than socialist politicians could ever have. If we define “democracy” as radical political egalitarianism, the control of the masses over our own lives, we come to understand that non-electoral forms of politics allow for far more democracy than the capitalist political system.

The best way to avoid wishful thinking is to keep our eyes on the prize. Our goal as socialists is to permanently end the status quo and create something completely different. That’s why Sanders can’t take us to the finish line. Audre Lorde insisted that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” but the approach taken by Sanders is even worse than that: he wants to use the capitalists’ tools to improve the capitalists’ house. His goal is insufficient and his method is guaranteed to be ineffective. Attempting to secure a strategic foothold in his campaign is like buying a first-class window seat on the Hindenburg.

It would be a serious mistake to expend all of our energy and effort on a campaign that can’t possibly provide an adequate return on our investment. Mass mobilization isn’t a dinner party. It requires an immense amount of passion, time, and resources. Especially when you consider the relatively small size of the DSA, it’s clear that organizing is more of a zero-sum game than the All-In For Bernie people are willing to admit. Opportunity costs are real. If we’re going to all of that trouble, it needs to help us achieve our goal, and in this case it won’t.

Let’s take “Not Me, Us” seriously. It makes no sense to hand the latent power surging within the masses over to individual politicians who won’t even be able to effectively wield it. Organizing the masses as an electoral coalition is not as valuable as organizing them as a class. Instead of organizing voters, we should organize immigrants, workers of all kinds, tenants, people who can’t afford housing, people targeted by racial oppression, people targeted by the carceral state, people who are oppressed and super-exploited on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity, and so on.

At some point we’re going to have to abandon the training wheels of electoral politics and reach our destination on our own. The sword will outwear its sheath, as Byron said. This future is scary, but it’s also exhilarating — we have a world to win.