The 2025 Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of New York City campaign demonstrated the success of social change work oriented toward mobilizing people as tenants, bus riders, parents, teachers, academics, sympathetic professionals, congregants, etc.
Of course, the Spartacists still have 13 members in New York City and, as the working class vanguard, they’ll try to bring a class-struggle “higher consciousness” to the Mamdani movement. I’ll go on record here with a prediction that they won’t succeed.
Here’s why . . .
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During the 19th century industrial capitalism was a new phenomenon. In the absence of a relevant ethos (and then: legislation) the factory owners were able to super-exploit labor. The reaction was the establishment of the modern labor movement.
It was much-needed. It was righteous. Its success culminated in the establishment, country by country, of organizations like our CIO. But it was a defensive movement. The left made the mistake of projecting a “class for itself” agency that would become political-transformational. For a whole (long) period, Marxism was ascendant based on that chimerical vision.
The left has sounded stupid clinging to it when, clearly, workers aren’t passionate about the very vague and esoteric idea of “owning and controlling” society’s productive assets as a whole. Toward fostering “working class revolution” left groups kept sending cadre-members “into the factories.” That happened to me circa 1970. It was a failure because the praxis was based on misguided ideology.
People, including workers, have a sense of identity with and, prospectively, agency for their communities … not their class. That’s why ecosocialism should have a grounding in communitarianism. There are occasionally spasms of class struggle owing to contingent circumstances. They are not the fundament of social transformation.
The “new paradigm” Green worldview, to its credit, has a communitarian sensibility distinctive from all the old ideologies. The timewarn “class struggle” stuff was wrongheaded in myriad ways.
Instead of Monopoly my family plays Bertell Ollman’s board game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_Struggle_(board_game). We play it ironically and for laughs. This suggests why the left needs to let go of the operationally incoherent “class-for-itself working class” conception. After so many years of delusion it’s becoming risible. Post-Marxist leftism should (paraphrasing a quote from old Karl in his 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) pluck the imaginary notions off the ideological chain so that we can throw off the chain and cultivate the living flower of actual social change agency. Being: people from all walks of life clamoring for, demonstrating for, voting for, and working toward change in the form of enlightened legislation, countercultural expression, alternative institutions, and revitalized communities. People from all walks of life day-to-day enacting social change, personally and collectively.
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The plucking of imaginary notions needs to extend beyond agency to the question of the process of change. The objective is to avoid disappointment and frustration. In Vincent Bevins’ Guardian article about the period 2010-2020, “The mass protest decade: why did the street movements of the 2010s fail?,” he notes “the horrible comedown, the plunge into depression that came after things did not work out.” He says: “You can get yourself all messed up on revolutionary elan, just like you can drink to excess or lose yourself in drugs.”
And he asks: “What went wrong?” re: some reforms were won but nothing close to the kind of social transformation activists were striving for. Bevins: “Many of these individuals have suffered for years trying to understand [why].” This all paints a picture of a movement in distress, a movement seemingly replete with disappointment, frustration, burn-out, suffering — and bafflement. “What went wrong?” … after 1789 (France), after 1848 (Europe-wide), after 1917 (Russia), after 1968 (worldwide), after 1999 (Seattle), after 2011 (Occupy). After all the uprisings Bevins mentions in his article.
Transformation? It’s time to transform the movement. A “new paradigm” realistic perspective would argue for thinking more in terms of a “turning” than a “revolution.” While people — from all walks of life — can and will be clamoring for enlightened legislation, building alternative institutions, and working to revitalize communities, it must be understood that a fateful descent from a point of civilizational overshoot will be the defining social reality of the coming period.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Korten#The_Great_Turning: “David Korten’s 2006 book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community argues that the development of empires about 5,000 years ago initiated unequal distribution of power and social benefits to the small portion of the population that controlled them. He also argues that [mega-states and mega-corporations] are modern versions of empire, both being social organizations based on hierarchies, chauvinism, and domination through violence. The rise of powerful advanced technology, combined with the control of corporate as well as nation-based empires is described as being increasingly destructive to communities and the environment. Korten postulates that the world is on the verge of a perfect storm of converging crises, including anthropogenic adverse climate change, oil production decline, and a financial crisis caused by an unbalanced global economy.”
The point is to appreciate how deep-seated and long-standing are the problematic trajectories we need to counter. The radically unsustainable, extreme overshoot condition of hypermodernity means that the Great Turning is, at first, primarily going to be a period of descent and devolution. Social breakdown will creep from the periphery to the center. We see its beginnings in our time with the increasing number of failed states. Greens should work to mitigate collapse and model sustainable praxis. A realistic perspective about the process, its challenges and extended duration, will be key for minimizing frustration and despair. A positive and constructive “greening of society” vision can embody the hope humanity will need to get through its Long Emergency crucible.
