Meet an Activist: Revolution from within the system

Leftist Jesse Steele on the possibilities of building power within, outside, and against the government all at once.

This is “Revolution” month on Better Strangers, but it occurred to me as I was writing articles on the topic that nearly everyone I know with leftist/progressive views works within the current political system rather than outside of it. I know that the ideal society that these people envision is fundamentally different to the one we currently live in, so I decided to ask a few of them: how do you square what are effectively revolutionary beliefs with working within a deeply conservative system?

As it turns out, I got a lot of wildly interesting answers, so I’m going to make this into a bit of a series, and instead of giving you a bunch of people’s different takes, I’m going to give you one at a time.

Today, we’re talking to Jesse Steele. I’ve known Jesse since second grade: we’ve lived together, worked awful jobs together, and have spent a lot of time talking about radical politics. Jesse politics are more traditionally Marxist, and I am more of an anarchist, so while our conversations are always incredibly stimulating, I suspect that in the coming revolution, the Leninist Brigade he leads will be tasked with purging my petit-bourgeois ass. My only hope is that he puts our mutual love of the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club above such ideological partisanship.

Professionally, Jesse is a senior staff member with a multi-state grassroots organization that helps to organize poor and working class people. His work also brings him into electoral politics at all levels.

Q: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've gotten the sense that it would be fair to call your politics "revolutionary." How do you square that with working within traditional American politics?

JS: Going straight for the sensitive bits, huh? Yeah, it isn't an easy circle to square. So the work I do exists in this weird sector — this “movement” space — that lives somewhere between traditional American electoral politics and radical grassroots organizing work. I think the primary difference between the work I do now and the broader non-profit industrial complex is the work is 1.) explicitly political — both publicly and amongst ourselves, we talk about our work in terms of building power, solidarity, and fighting for liberation. And 2.) the orgs in this space are membership organizations, modeled after labor unions, with internal democracy structures governed explicitly by and for the communities we organize. 

I could talk all day about funding infrastructure, the strictures of processing all of this through the lens of a 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 nonprofit organization, and what those things mean for the potential of the work, but I think a ton has been written about that elsewhere. What I'll say about my experience of the sector are these three things:

1. There's enough wiggle room within the corners of available funding to support truly radical work to some extent. To the extent we believe in political revolution, there's enough daylight there to believe that with enough scale, courage, and coordination, this space can be a site of revolutionary potential. That said — potential deserves a lot of emphasis there. We can't kid ourselves — most of our aims are reformist. If they weren't, the money wouldn't be there.

2. While organizations that might consider themselves more truly revolutionary do have far greater degrees of freedom, in terms of their specific ability to build power at scale, and challenge power within the context of the state, they simply cannot begin to compare to the capacity of well-funded movement organizations. There are certainly very real tradeoffs to taking the money, don't get me wrong, but if you're clever enough about it, both in the work you do and which (read: "whose") money you take, there are greater degrees of freedom to pursue a radical agenda than you might think.

3. The thing I think about the most is that what's most real in terms of building revolutionary power are the organizing structures we're helping to build among the people. I always think of it like this — either when a real moment of revolutionary struggle happens in the United States, or else when we as organizations grow too radical for liberal tastes, the money will go away almost entirely. So, what, if anything will be left when the money goes? When all the buildings and tech and resources and, most importantly, all the paid professional staff, fall away, to me, the thing that will be left is the relationships people have with one another - relationships that are based in community, trust, love, and mutual struggle. Relationships that are oriented toward fundamentally political aims. As we do our work, even when that work is necessarily "inside the box" and sort of definitionally reformist and non-revolutionary, the power we're building both in order to accomplish those aims and that we grow through pursuing those aims (e.g. through our campaigns) is something that has genuine staying power.

Q: Do you think there's a chance of making the changes we need to the American government within the system? Or are we mostly looking at harm reduction?

JS: Fundamentally, I'm a Leninist. I define myself as a communist because I'm a socialist but I also believe that all of our work drives towards ultimate confrontation with capital, and that the state only exists to resolve the conflict between capital and labor in favor of capital. But, we must capture the levers of the state in the short term if we're going to defend any revolution we're able to mount. That's all pie in the sky though. We can't even get healthcare or get our government to stop funding genocide right now so who knows? 

Most hopeful take on this, which on optimistic days I believe, is that the only reason the successful socialist revolutions we've actually seen in the world have only failed or been quickly overturned because we — the American empire — made concerted efforts to be the bigger bully and to reverse those gains. Examples are myriad: see the entire 20th century. Political revolutions like Chile prove especially vulnerable to overwhelming and well-funded violence. But given the odd position of the American empire now — a vastly diminished force with nonetheless unquestioned and more or less unchallenged global military dominance — I sometimes believe that if we managed political revolution here, it might actually stick because there's no bigger brother to come and smack our hand out of the cookie jar. With a violent revolution, all such bets are off as we'd be fractured and vulnerable and who knows what would happen, but I do think if there was a world in which we dared to imagine a socialist regime taking peaceful transfer of power over the extant American state — if we're willing to imagine that thing — it's hard to imagine then that some other external force would be powerful enough to disrupt that meaningfully.

On my less optimistic days, I really don't believe anything other than full on revolution will save us. I think as revolutionaries, we have to be ambitious, visionary, and bold, but we have to be really careful not to romanticize revolution itself. Revolution is only glorious once you've won, or when you're looking back. Almost everyone who lives through violent revolution wishes they had been alive during different, more peaceful days. The final fight, when it comes, will bring unimaginable horror before it brings light. The old maxim that always used to give us comfort on the left was always that in the end, over a long enough time period, communism will win. But the climate crisis in particular means that we cannot sit back and allow these processes to run their course. 

A framework I like for thinking about what this all means is one that comes from the Chilean MPL party and articulated in this video from an organization I know really well, Mijente.

I recommend you watch the video, but the basic gist is this: we must build power everywhere, and that there's utility in building that power simultaneously within the state (read: power to move institutions and government), outside the state (read: dual power and mutual aid models that prefigure a better world), and against the state (read: seeding revolutionary energy, building the social and political connections that will ultimately be necessary for revolution, while opposing and rejecting the moral legitimacy of the state as it exists). I think this is useful for understanding the role "movement" organizations can play. 

Q: What's your hope for the future?

This isn't a great time to ask me this question — not feeling super optimistic at this moment. But on a simple level, I think my biggest hope is seeing people do the work. Seeing the resurgence of labor power in this country (the cause of labor is the hope of the world, duh). Seeing poor, near-desperate people with the big boot of this whole fucking system directly on their throats every day decide not to give in to despair. Recognizing that they too have power, that their community has power, that they can fight if they come together, and that sometimes (and just sometimes) they can actually win. The recognition that we are agents of history, not witnesses to it. Our function in this life goes beyond bearing witness to suffering and clinging desperately to those sparks of love and life and light that we do happen to find in our lives. We can build. We can fight. We really can find everything we need in one another. 

On a more zoomed out level, what I hope that can mean is that the rolling crises of capitalism (financial, climate, political, etc...) produce opportunities for reimagining our relationships to one another, to the state, to the earth, and to capital. I think the horrors we experience or bear witness to can be radicalizing moments, and that each successive one seems to reveal more and more how morally bankrupt, functionally inept, and hostile to humanity our current regime is. That even at the bottom, we can imagine — we must imagine, the possibility of a better world. I have to believe that we are capable of finding that in ourselves, and that we're capable of finding it in others, and then between one another. We have to do the work though — we have to remember that the safety net that catches all who fall out of political engagement isn't apathy, but fascism. If we don't do the work to reach out, to build, to organize, we will see those radicalizing moments move people more deeply into fascism rather than into imagining a new socialist world.