In Between Days
What could possibly be next for the US left?
for Hilary Plum
This is a plea for unruptured movement memory in a time of scattering, of enforced forgetting.
The last year of my dad’s cancer was the first year of Trump’s first term; one of our last conversations was about Antonio Gramsci. I spent the afternoons of that summer of 2017 up at his and Kathy’s house—the 90s vinyl-sided quickie I grew up in, tucked in the suburban woods north of Seattle—sitting with him while he dozed in a recliner, drank his spirulina mango smoothies, and managed his pain with CBD gummies shipped up from a relative in the Southwest.
When Finn would come up with me, my dad would read to them, books about trains or ghoulish gorgeous creatures of the deep sea; Kathy would help my dad with his meds, help him up when he needed the toilet, help him with his phone, pat him back to sleep when he woke up moaning in his living room bed, do laundry, spend hours with insurers or talking to CNAs. When it was just me and when he was lucid, my dad was voluble from the weed; in that last year, he talked more than in my whole preceding life about his own young adulthood in Marxist and radical anti-war politics.
Now, six months into Trump’s second term, I’m thinking of my dad thinking of Gramsci.
My dad, just out of college in 1968, appealed and won his CO status in front of a scowling draft board at Fort Hood. He worked at the Oleo Strut. He got beaten by a police billy club at the March on the Pentagon. He was in the crowd at Harvard that blocked Robert McNamara’s car when McNamara came to speak, forcing him—LBJ’s Secretary of Defense and the Vietnam War’s chief architect—to climb out onto his car’s roof and debate one of my dad’s anti-war classmates. He was there at Students for a Democratic Society’s ugly irreparable rupture in June 1969, pulled over by a Chicago cop with a trunk full of Weathermen flyers that the police mercifully didn’t bother to read before letting him go. And he told me when he was dying that I wish we—my friends and I from ‘67 to ‘83 or so—had had a little more of what Gramsci called “pessimism of the intellect.” Gramsci said it was the necessary balance to the organizer’s other quality, “optimism of the will.” That we had plenty of. All of us spent those years chasing something. We believed that the whole country, the whole world, was on the verge of revolution, and we all knew we wanted to be right on the leading edge of it when it came.
(These are my notes at the time with his voice in my head, not quite his words.)
So we chased it. We left behind causes, communities, organizations; we split bitterly, bitterly, over ideology. But we all agreed that wherever we found ourselves—starting a new party or doing small-arms training or going into the trades to revolutionize the proletariat or whatever—was the thin end of the wedge, that the whole edifice was rotten, and that it’d split apart under just the right driving pressure. None of us could see that reaction was already hardening around us. Nixon won twice and we were still sure that revolution was coming.
I can’t imagine now how much more all those years would have mattered if I’d spent them in one place, for one cause, alongside one community; if I’d understood organizing work as building something to last.
Eight years after my dad died, we’re in our in between days. The Left politics of the Long 2010s—roughly from the Lehman Brothers collapse of 2008 to the unraveling of BLM—is extinguished. The related dalliance between establishment liberalism and the social justice left—which ran from, say, mid-Obama to the crushing of the Palestine protests, and which was never more real than in the realm of language and symbol—is irrevocably broken. Yes, Zohran Mamdani, a darling democratic socialist, has won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, but in the US, this is our 1953, our 1982: a generational peak (so far) of domestic repression.
So what’s next? Another thing my dad mourned as he was dying was living through not one but two generations of mutual incomprehension in grassroots American Left organizing. In his first organizing meetings, 1965-66-67, it was his fellow hippie, New Left, and Third World Marxist organizers on one side of the room, with Depression-era Communists and labor organizers, and Lincoln Brigade-era anarchists, on the other. I sat through a lot of meetings that went completely off the rails: tactics, vision, community education strategy, distribution of labor… it was like us young kids and the old timers couldn’t talk to each other about anything. McCarthyism, and the long assent of anti-Communist US liberals to domestic repression, meant that the 50s were a decade of lost memory and broken throughlines on the Left. Organizers were forced into silence or turned on each other; forums for conversation and debate went dark.
And then it happened again: back in organizing spaces in the late 90s and early oughts around resistance to corporate globalization, he said, we were the old guys, and on the other side of the room were Earth Firsters and Nader voters and Black Bloc kids, and we had no way to talk to each other. Like McCarthyism, the repression of Nixon and Reagan—COINTELPRO, the unwinding of the Great Society, the War on Drugs and the cementing of neoliberalism—was in part an intellectual-familial repression, a severing of lineage.
So, in this moment of reactionary authoritarian vigor and norm collapse and pervasive dread and hurtling limits on the planetary energy supply, what? We’re being told to shut up or be punished. I’m asking my friends, age 28 to 45 maybe, who came up in this left moment and who’ll be the old guys alongside me soon: How do we stay rooted? And what do we want to remember?
I’m thinking of Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn: the Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. The book is considered in the New Statesman by the fabulous Brit William Davies and Bevins is interviewed in Jewish Currents by Alex Press. Bevins—an American journalist now living in Brazil—gives the clearest account I’ve seen of the limitations of the international Left’s organizing vision and tactics of the last fifteen or twenty years of protest. Assessing Bevins’s history, Davies argues that it was the connectivity and energy of social media that made this politics—leaderless, dynamic, coalescing around refusal—possible. Social media, Davies says, gave voice to a widespread feeling that the liberal state was broken; it made sharing our discontents feel immediate and potent; it made direct action into an thrilling spectacle. It was prefigurative, believing it was already enacting the better world it demanded. Through its horizontal branching, it offered the thrill of inviting bodies into public spaces and into confrontation: a “giddying, immersive experience of saying ‘no’ to formal mechanisms of representation.” In some cases, these confrontations paralyzed, or at least temporarily pushed back, the state.
And then what? “In cases from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen to Bahrain to Turkey to Brazil to Ukraine to Hong Kong to South Korea to Chile,” Bevins tells Press, “mass protests ended up creating a power vacuum that they could not exploit, at least not as protests.” There were no revolutionary governments proclaimed, nor even elaborated concessions (as, Bevins notes, a union might articulate) that would end the protests or occupations. Instead, under attacks from old elites or new right-wing fanatics, vulnerable to oligarchic media co-optation or attack, these leaderless left revolutions enabled breakthroughs for reactionaries.
One of the poignant common threads Bevins in these movements is that protestors were often surprised at the intensity and vigor of counterrevolutionary response to their protests. “People assumed that being right, or raising awareness, was enough. But what they learned”—as Gulf tanks rolled into Bahrain; as Egypt’s democratic movement, rooted in opposition to Saudi, US, and Israeli hegemony, instead empowered a new pro-US military dictatorship; as the right-wing Movimento Brazil Livre led a bogus “anti-corruption” investigation that imprisoned Brazil’s managerial-centrist leadership, crushed protests, and welcomed in the fascist Bolsonaro presidency—“is that their enemies needed to be defeated rather than just embarrassed or proven wrong… [E]lites wouldn’t be elites if they weren’t ready and willing to fight for power.”
For his part, Davies notes that the conflation of the state with the police (a trope of anarchist political thought) felt especially intuitive to those radicalized in this horizontal, spectacle-driven political moment, where it was easy to feel that the street was “the be all and end all for the exercise—and the contestation—of power.” Bevins is quick to point out that many of these movements were horizontal by necessity: in Yemen or Egypt, generations of would-be left leaders had been imprisoned and tortured by dictators; there was no “vertical” to build out from. But it’s also easy, maybe even intuitive, to those of our generation to situate ourselves in a prefigurative and dispersed politics: easy to attach ourselves to a romantic, evangelical kind of hyper-politics (the politicization of, say, wellness, relationships, rest, aesthetic choices) in our own lives and communities than it is to educate and organize our neighbors toward recapture of the state. It’s easier to shut down a neighborhood, or even paralyze a single government, than to break the power of, say, the international bond markets to initiate capital strikes against threats to the free flow of capital.
So what do we learn from this? Davies is pessimistic: “acknowledging and publicising a crisis of representation is only the first step towards resolving it, and possibly the easiest one.” Harder is what comes next: a positive demand for representation, built on the organizing of “new vehicles for the expression of underlying class interests.” Davies doesn’t seem to think this (now-passing) Left, the Left of which we’ll be the grumpy aged representatives in fifteen years, is capable of such organizing. “If mass movements understand themselves as ‘prefigurative’ and ‘performative’ (that is, exemplifying and enacting the society they wish to bring about), the risk is that participation in them becomes an end in itself.” The beautiful world our hearts know is possible may look like the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest; but Davies, like Bevins, doubts that CHOP was any kind of adequate means. Davies’s pessimism springs from an apparent aversion to populism, even in a left framework:
Political scientists agree that a distinguishing feature of all populism is the moralistic distinction it draws between “the elites” (portrayed as corrupt and unrepresentative) and “the people” (portrayed as ordinary and decent). Clearly, the right has an inbuilt advantage when using such rhetoric, as the distinction maps tidily on to a nativist one between footloose globalists, who lack any sense of place or tradition, and the indigenous citizenry.
I basically share this unease about any populism that lacks a class analysis: that it empowers an ugly, reactionary sentimentality; that it displaces outrage at our true overlords onto domestic subaltern communities whose agency, self-organization, and understanding of the political moment is pushed aside or ground into dust. But it’s hard for me to muster enthusiasm at the vague politics Davies articulates as an alternative to either the 2010s’ horizontal mass uprisings or the 2010s’ populist theater: Davies speaks of “the hard work of organisation and constitutional renewal” and an “appeal to nationhood… as an indispensable ingredient of mass democracy.” But one thing shown by international protests in solidarity with Palestine, or coordinated action against climate change, is that Left internationalism remains alive, and that, indeed, it’s people and peoples—not nations and not international political systems—that have a “right to exist.”
Bevins, reflecting in the wake of international actions for Gaza, is more concrete in his own learnings: successful left organizers recognize how and when to court positive media coverage through legible political action (in conversation with Press, he cites Jewish Voice for Peace’s massive 2024 shutdown of Grand Central Station, thousands of Jewish allies for Palestinian lives in a clear message and matching T-shirts) and when instead to recognize media coverage as a tool of oligarchic and imperial interests.
Bevins also notes that strong, indepedent labor unions—means of working-class self-knowledge and political coherence—helped mass protest movements hold on and seize state power, for a while, in Chile, Tunisia, and Hong Kong. But to what end? What would have happened if the left had, in fact, held on? The old tensions in left organizing—say, in recognizing both the revolutionary effectiveness of organizations of organizers (the visioners and planners of the mass protest) and the repressive dangers of any permanent vanguardist bureaucracy (the architects of a Soviet-style nightmare after revolution is won)—remain knotted in his analysis.
But how will we tell this story to those who come next? And what will they have to tell us? Are the leftists of, say, the 2040s, in the US or elsewhere, going to be products of an energized left electoralism, fought out city by city toward (as elaborated and contextualized here by organizer Waleed Shahid) limited but real successes for working people?
Or is our current energized fascistic lunge going to be a generational force in American political life, and will the most vital political spaces of that decade be (as documented here by tireless anarchist intellectual Peter Gelderloos) out in edges, in the shipwreck of failed states around the world, in confederated autonomous zones where armies have withdrawn, in the weedy lots of mutual aid sites?
Or maybe some new yet-undreamt-of synthesis—a reaction to Long 2010s politics, just as that politics was a reaction to vanguardist Third World and Marxist-Leninist politics—is splicing and recombining somewhere in a notebook, in a meeting room, over tea or beers or spirulina smoothies, in a backyard somewhere.
It feels hilarious to remind any of us on the left about “pessimism of the intellect” in this tattered moment: like, what other perspective could we possibly have? But the lesson feels more potent to me now than in 2017. Pessimism of the intellect means asking, Where am I already rooted? What renewing folly of resistance can I hold fast to? What am I building—in relationships, in organizations—that can endure? What traditions and commons am I already part of that I can shelter and tend? Someday, bizarre as it may seem, someone may ask us what we’ve learned, or we may even be challenged again to learn something anew.
Substack recommendation: Hilary Plum’s Working Knowledge.
Also, Seattle loved ones: come see me read memoir and poetry at Common Area Maintenance, Sunday July 27, 7 pm. I’ll be part of an incredible bill including Quenton Baker, Danica Bito, K Van Petten, Eric Acosta, Cass Donish, Crayons, and Jody Galadriel Friend.