By Steven Johnson
Let’s get down to brass tacks.
Why, instead of letting Trump win the White House by not voting for Harris in the swing states, don’t we do the following?
A tactical vote. As an immediate necessary step, vote for Harris, at least in the swing states, as our best chance of maintaining our relative degree of civil freedoms, here in the US, and averting movement-crushing levels of state repression as were experienced in previous Red Scares.
Systematic personal outreach. Use that relative degree of organizing freedom, for as long as it lasts, to conduct efforts to reach out to every person in the US, especially those who are not already aware and convinced, with pro-Palestinian perspectives, systematically tackling the emotional, social, generational, relational, media/information flow, and other bottlenecks that currently prevent more people from knowing and caring, until the level of public consciousness reaches or exceeds that which was achieved during the struggles against the Vietnam War, for Civil Rights, against apartheid in South Africa, etc.
A lot of low-hanging fruit is already in the movements’ baskets. The young people on social media, and others, who are aware and care, whose numbers have grown by leaps and bounds over the past year. But there is vastly more fruit that can be brought in, if we take the necessary measures to reach the higher branches. And we will need to do so to stop this genocide.
We must not make the fatal mistake of assuming that, given all of the information that is “known” or “out there”, all of the people who are ever going to learn the facts and start caring and taking action have already done so, while the rest are just constitutionally incapable and unwilling. It is true that many will never join us. But we are nowhere near exhausting this harvest. We must understand that we who came to understand and care earlier than others were lower-hanging fruit. It was somehow easier for us to come into the awareness that we have and to know and feel what we need to in order for us to take action. We must grasp and work strategically to overcome the “bottlenecks” referred to above, which we experienced less of, not because we were better people, but because of a variety of circumstances that we are hardly consciously aware of.
Train every person who comes on board to effectively reach out, directly and personally, to other new people and invite them into winsome alternative social spaces where we build relationships and discuss and act on personal and political issues, and thus achieve exponential growth of the movement.
Invite people who are not already doing so to regularly view, listen to, or read high-quality, independent, noncorporate media, and to discuss news reports and analyses, together, in our collective spaces. Make this a very large part of what we do. (Eventually build this aspect of the movement so large that our own small donations, and not capitalist investors or large private foundations or state entities, are the principal funders of the media we most regularly consume.)
Persuade people to take up the cause within their labor unions, religious organizations, and other “whole-life” alternative anti-hegemonic social spaces, and systematically invite more and more people into those spaces.
Guide and encourage people in regularly undertaking concrete actions, inside and outside of electoral politics, to oppose the genocide.
Ask ourselves every day, as an acid test of our effectiveness, “How many new people have we effectively helped in some way to undertake the necessary transformative journey? How many people who are on that journey have we helped to take a further step in it? And how many people did we help to take another concrete action against the genocide?”
(Oh wait, let’s be honest: We don’t WANT to reach out to new people, because we don’t LIKE them. Because they’re not like us. They don’t like our music. We don’t like how they dress and talk. They’re behind the curve on so many issues, i.e., they don’t obediently recite the accepted mantras of our movements without requiring us to thoroughly explain and defend our positions in a clear, jargon-free manner. They ask irritating questions, etc. So let’s just march and hang out with our own. WE MUST NAME THIS MOVEMENT PATHOLOGY, AND TAKE CONCRETE STEPS TO BREAK OUT OF COMFORT ZONES, ASAP, IN ORDER TO STOP SPINNING OUR WHEELS, AS MANY OF OUR MOVEMENTS HAVE BEEN DOING FOR DECADES, AND TO MAKE REAL ADVANCES IN SOCIAL POWER! Or do we care more about our social comfort, and the illusion that we promote among ourselves, inside our insular circles, that we are doing something meaningful, than we care about the dead bodies that are piling up in Gaza and Lebanon? And are we really more afraid of trying to winsomely reach out to a neighbor who does not already agree with us than we are of getting beaten and arrested by the police during marches which, while they are important, communicate primarily to ourselves and are spun by the media however the corporate owners want?)
We don’t have to wait for a movement to reach a certain scale to begin doing this. We create and build the movement BY doing this, in any way and at any scale that we can. Can you think of one step that you can take TODAY, no matter how big or small, to reach out to somebody and increase their (and our own) awareness and concern and action for Gaza? Given the circumstances, it’s a question worth trying to answer every day.
Issue- and movement-building-focused electoral campaigns. As a byproduct of, or complement to, the above effort, organize a nationwide campaign calling upon each and every Democratic politician who has received money from AIPAC or similar Zionist sources, and failed to oppose US funding and arming of Israel, to resign. Begin campaigning ASAP (it would begin as early as, or even before, Nov. 5, 2024, if that were possible) for insurgent, overtly hostile candidates who will challenge these establishment Democrats in the 2026 primary elections.
Use these campaigns primarily as a means to carry out the above program of building public awareness about the genocide and building our “whole-life” movements. Use the campaigns to simultaneously educate people about Medicare for All, labor rights, justice for migrants, environmental justice, and other concerns that are directly felt by people in the US, and thus promote awareness of how the same forces of capital and empire that are displacing and murdering the Palestinians are behind the injustices that are experienced by people here in the US as well.
Fund these campaigns with only small donations, refusing large donations, and rely on the power of mutually transformed and organized people in whole-life movements to defeat the power of big money.
Keep the issues in the forefront, and the candidates’ names and personalities in the background.
Run the campaigns from movement organizations that are independent of and not controlled or funded by institutions and operatives within the current architecture of the donor-class-controlled Democratic Party.
Conduct the campaigns in such a way that every dollar spent is a dollar that contributes primarily to building awareness of the issues and building the numbers and depth of commitment of our whole-life movements, and secondarily to building electoral support for the candidate.
Win primary, and then general, elections, wherever we can.
If our electeds prove unfaithful to the movement, primary them. In our issue-focused campaigns, the candidates’ names didn’t matter so much anyway. Understand from the outset that growing the movement into a hegemonic electoral and social force is the only means of holding our candidates accountable.
Build an independent working-class party. This, contrary to what many advocates of an independent working-class party assume, actually begins in the step above, when we are running candidates in primaries against establishment Democrats. Because at that stage our campaigns are ALREADY conducted by an independent organization, and we do not take our cues from the Democratic Party machine, but are overtly hostile to, and are actively seeking to unseat, any Democrat that aids the genocide, opposes Medicare for All, etc. But when our movements have grown large enough to make the Democrats, rather than ourselves, the spoiler vote, in a given race, we can run a candidate on a new working class party’s ballot line, and win. A new party name is nothing magic. Not that, but steadily building political and social power behind a system-challenging agenda to a critical mass, is what marks the crucial watershed historical break that we are looking for.
Physical defense. Continue growing the size and depth of commitment of the movements, to such a point that we can physically defend against the capitalists’ anti-democratic coup attempts and state repression, bring agricultural and industrial productive assets under democratic worker control, prevent the manufacture and shipment of arms to Israel and other oppressive powers, etc.
Comparing the plans
Now, to compare the “vote for Jill Stein” plan with the very different plan outlined above…
To repeat the question that Mehdi Hasan put to Jill Stein, how does voting for Stein stop the genocide? How does her running, without having built up a large enough base to make her able to win and defend the results of the election, contribute to that goal?
And how does the above alternative plan NOT help stop the genocide? Is there any way in which it is practically inferior to the “vote for Jill Stein” plan?
Which plan can make the most substantive and material and enduring, as opposed to merely symbolic, difference, and tip the scales of real power?
You know my answers to these questions. And, hopefully, from the above, and from other essays in this series, you will have an idea of my reasons. What are yours?
The Practical Challenge, In Brief
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part I
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part II
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties: The Really, Really Short Version