“It forces you to think about winning.”
Excerpt from my interview with Max Elbaum
Hello Dear Reader,
Given the moment we’re in, entering a portal to an unknown future that is this election, I’ve been thinking about what to share with you. If you’re like me, your attention is limited, to say the least.
For today, I’m posting an excerpt from an interview I did last December with Max Elbaum. This part of the conversation feels particularly relevant as he’s reflecting on the left’s relationship to electoral politics.
Max is a longtime left movement leader and writer. He was a member of Students for a Democratic Society in the 60’s and a group called Line of March in the 70’s-90’s. He wrote a book on the new communist movement, Revolution in the Air, co-edited an anthology Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, and currently writes for and is on the editorial board of Convergence Magazine.
When we first got talking at my kitchen table on a sunny December day, he told me he didn’t have much to say about organizing the rich. An hour and a half later, he had shared all sorts of important reflections on left movement building, cross-class organizing, the economics of activism and some of the key roles wealthy people played in liberation movements of the 20th century.
I hope you find this preview engaging. I’m excited to share more stories from movement elders like Max in the coming months. These conversations have been helpful reminders of the immense collective effort we are each a part of, stretching both behind us and before us. It is both reassuring and humbling.
Sincerely,
Michael
From my interview with Max Elbaum, December, 2023
“One of the good things about electoral politics is it forces you to think about winning, which means you've got to get a majority. If you're not doing elections and you're just doing demonstrations, well, you can have 1100 people. That's great. But you don't have a measuring stick of where you are in relation to power in the country.
Between the demise of the Rainbow Coalition [a major container for progressive and left activism from 1983 to 1988-1990] and 2015-2016, the left was a protest movement. That's what we were doing.
There were a few groups that had some kind of power building strategy, but basically there wasn't much of an opening. There was no practical way for political power to be at the center of the agenda. I mean, you could vote for Obama, which was good. I voted for Obama. I was in Times Square in 2008 when they called the election for Obama. It was totally emotional. We [the left] could, and did, make contributions to important movements - for global justice, for lesbian/gay rights, against the so-called “War on Terror” and so on. But important as this activity was, it was protest, not politics.
But in 2015-2016, with Trump and Bernie and Hillary, all of a sudden everybody wakes up to the fact that it actually matters who's in office. All of the questions of political power come flooding onto the agenda. And the whole conversation on the left shifts. So now everybody's talking about power building strategy, coordinating electoral and non-electoral work, obtaining governing power. Those conversations did not exist in that way before 2015.
Old communists like me basically got trained on the idea that politics is the fight for state power. That's number one. That's what being a revolutionary means. Many of us passed through a stage of thinking that only storming barricades, only some form of insurrectionary action, was truly revolutionary. But somewhere in the 70s or 80s, pretty much most of the people who believe in the importance of state power figured out that in an advanced industrial country, a country with an established electoral system, you can't circumvent that system if you want to take a path to power. You have to go through it. You have to get a share of governing power through the system.
Like Maurice Mitchell, Executive Director of Working Families Party, says, you have to get enough power within a rigged system to unrig it. I think for most of the revolutionaries of my generation who are still active in left politics, that kind of perspective has become integral to our strategic thinking. It resonates with our training and what we’ve learned about political change in this country in the decades we’ve traversed. That's become our lodestar.
I think this brings back into focus one of the positive components of the Communist tradition. Of course we need to critique and shed the more negative features of the outlook many of us were trained in - ultra leftism, anti-democratic practices, and what I’ve termed a “quest for orthodoxy” dogmatism.
But bringing back the idea that we need to be on a path to political power for workers and the oppressed, and recognizing that winning elections to get governing power within the existing system is a necessary step on that path…I think that is a step forward. It is valuable for my generation and for the generation of radicals who have come up in a protest movement era. It provides more guidance about where to go than just [uses air quotes] “movement building.” You know, everybody talks about movement building and movement building is certainly part of what we need to do. But movement building toward what?”
It’s less than two weeks until election day!
There is still time to make a difference.
Want to help get out the vote? Sign up with Seed the Vote for door knocking or with one of their recommended partner organizations for phone banking.
Want to donate? There are still many groups that need support. Send money to Movement Voter Project, Way to Win, or pick a group from my longer list of recommendations here.
And to send you off on a high note, here’s one of my recent favorite pump up jams to blast in the car while driving back from the grocery store, or if you’re like me, while driving to Reno to door knock this weekend.