Occupy the Party

The political question this poses for the left is whether we want to join the battle tearing apart the Democratic Party. Instead of treating the party as some kind of authority with the power to co-opt our message, we need to treat it like any street or park and occupy it. The more we engage, the more damage we can do, at every turn demonstrating the gap between people and practice.

Occupy the Party: the Sanders campaign as a site of struggle
ROAR (authored by: Not An Alternative); February 16, 2016

Bernie Sanders’ campaign to be the Democratic Party’s nominee in the 2016 US presidential election presents the far left in the United States with some hard questions.

For those convinced that the electoral process is a vehicle through which the capitalist class enlists the rest of us in consenting to our own subjection, Sanders’ campaign makes us ask why this time might be different. For those focused on internationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism and worker control of the means of production, there seems no principled reason to support Sanders. And for those convinced that only a politics that develops outside the system can change the system, it’s unclear how the campaign is anything but another iteration of the society of the spectacle: enthusiasm is mobilized and directed until redirected onto the next new thing.

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The hard questions involve how, exactly, the left conceives of political change and what we are willing to do to bring it about. The hard questions involve the relations between principle and practice. The more we uphold left principles, the less likely we are to have the capacity to implement them. Our principles become barriers to their own realization. Conversely, the more we get our hands dirty by engaging in the processes that might bring about significant political change, the less left and less significant these changes are likely to be. We will have had to compromise, water down, rank and involve ourselves with strange bedfellows. The dilemma of left politics is that we appear stuck between beautiful souls and dirty hands ...

more here: https://roarmag.org/essays/occupy-democratic-party-sanders-campaign/

Photo: ... Bernie Sanders for President | by Phil Roeder