Some thoughts on the #ForceTheVote discourse which is, to me, showing some interesting fault lines around different organizational projects that the “left” has erected in the post-2016 era.
Started by YouTube/radio guy Jimmy Dore, #ForceTheVote is a campaign to convince progressive Congresspeople to withhold their Speaker vote for Nancy Pelosi (D, CA-12) until a House floor vote is held on Medicare for All. The idea is that a floor vote would force congressional members to demonstrate their allegiance to either the people (Yes on Medicare for All) or their corporate overloads (No on Medicare for All).
On one hand you have a variety of independent media personalities, led largely by Dore and former Bernie 2020 staffer Briahna Joy Gray. And on the “other” side you have the various obstacles they see as standing in the way of the campaign, most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY-14), and as the campaign has continued, the Democratic Socialists of America for not taking a position on #ForceTheVote.
Rather than litigating the “correctness” of any position here, I think it’s most useful to look at the situation as the natural outcome of a contradiction between unrooted apparatuses: a media ecosystem (Dore and friends) and a political apparatus (progressive/socialist Congressional Representatives) both unaccountable to any formal organizational project — with a formal organizational project (DSA) that has failed to bring either apparatus under its direct marshalling. So with that I’d like to advance three arguments about the contradictions that this whole dumb thing is exposing.
Independent media and unrooted ideology
What’s common between most of those who are advancing the #ForceTheVote effort are their status as “independent” media figures. Dore left the Young Turks network in 2019 in order to operate his show as an independent business, and Briahna Joy Gray is, with Chapo Trap House’s Virgil Texas, the host of the podcast Bad Faith. Along with other media figures in their orbit, including LA Chargers running back Joshua Jackson, and YouTuber Kyle Kulinski, they make up the primary drivers of the campaign.
What we can see through this situation is the ultimate vacuousness of any claims toward dictating movement strategy of “left” ideological apparatuses unconnected to real organizational structures. Repeatedly Kulinski, Gray, and others have made arguments about DSA and other movements that are simply ignorant of the material realities of organizing on the ground, arguing over and over again about what “the left” should be doing. For example, Gray has made statements about Shahid Buttar’s campaign against Nancy Pelosi that are revealing of a clear ignorance of the flaws in Shahid’s campaign and what made it never realistic from the start:
When making decisions about positions separate from any real organizing base, Shahid’s campaign was a “no-brainer. Pelosi is bad, and this force was coming to oppose Pelosi, therefore should be supported. But as anyone who organizes in San Francisco can tell you, that ignores the very real history of Shahid’s only loose connection to the socialist project or the absolute monster of a task that opposing Pelosi in San Francisco represents.
The #ForceTheVote is a classic example of a moralized campaign without an organizational basis; a group of independent “leaders” develop a position and wield media power in order to push it with claims about what “the left” should do and painting those who don’t support the campaign as enemies of that “left.”
But I think it’s important to state: there is no “left!” There is no abstract collection of people who we could call “the left” that we can pull from or not pull from or dictate membership within! What is real are concrete forms of organization. Groups like the DSA, PSL, unions, community organizations, nonprofits, congressional caucuses, businesses. Even podcasts and YouTube channels are concrete forms of organization - they have lists that are written in binary code somewhere in a server in Kansas. But “the left” is a project that does not exist separate from any concrete organizational form. What Dore and those from podcast socialism ignore is the need to make determinations not on some abstract, unrooted ideological project, but on the real organizational forms that exist out there.
The importance of the critique of “left” congressionalism
What drives me most crazy about this situation is the fact that a core critique of Dore and others in the Independent Media Apparatus speaks to a tension that is very real with Congresspeople like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib, etc. The project which brought them into power ultimately does not function to adequately wage struggle within the American political system. But where Dore sees this as an individual failure of these politicians to be “left” enough, I think it’s much better to understand this failure in structural terms.
Where AOC, Tlaib, and others are able to engage in the political process, they do so ultimately as solo actors. They are “free” in a dual sense; they are able to make choices on their own about the orientation they will choose, but they are also “free” from operating within an organizational structure that is able to tie their work into a larger project. As a result, they are required to negotiate positions that will keep them able to continue wielding their position. In a system where it is “left” congresspeople who dictate policy goals rather than a larger organization that they are subordinate to, the only outcome can be disappointments similar to that of #ForceTheVote. Jimmy points out the failure of AOC and others to live up to their ideals, but his alternative is simply a world in which it is those with media platforms who are able to determine the litmus tests used to measure those ideals.
You can see the way in which the #ForceTheVote situation is then best understood as two unrooted apparatuses contradicting with each other. Both are making claims to being the true project of “the left” but neither operate subordinate to any form of mass organization or democratic will, so can only act as the inversions of each other in an Ouroboros of mean tweets and reaction videos.
The failure of DSA to wield power
The third lesson I’d argue we should learn from this situation is its demonstration of the failure of DSA to build either media or electoral apparatuses that can effectively wield power.
If not an unrooted media apparatus or an unrooted political apparatus, who should be dictating movement strategy then? If our goal is to build independent working class power to bring about a socialist future, I think it should be pretty obvious that it must be an independent working class organization able to make those decisions and act on them with unity.
This requires two things:
The ability to actually make decisions
The ability to execute on those decisions at scale
Jimmy Dore made a video critiquing DSA for failing to “jump in” to the #ForceTheVote movement, and many DSA members have either directly or implicitly laughed off this implication. But I think it’s worth asking: does DSA have the ability to really do either of these things?
As the #ForceTheVote eye of Sauron was trained on DSA it has become clear how strange and diffuse our decision-making framework really is. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a majority of members thought that every Congressperson who DSA got elected should withhold their speaker vote for Nancy Pelosi in order to force a vote for Medicare for All. Let’s say that the NPC voted tomorrow to make that the official position of DSA. What, realistically, would that do? No member of Congress operates under the discipline of DSA or is in any way beholden to DSA goals.
When “our” elected candidates, no matter how “progressive” they may be ideologically, don’t operate under the discipline of DSA, the answer will always be: basically nothing! Thus DSA’s failure to establish a framework for elected representatives who operate at the pleasure of DSA’s elected leadership and towards DSA-chosen goals mean that its influence can only ever be diffuse. So when the time comes for the organization to really have strategy to dictate, it won’t be able to effectively wage that struggle.
DSA has for too long taken a diffuse “Central Intelligence Agency” style to our organizing: put the right people in the right places and they’ll know what to do when the time comes. DSA cannot lay claim to have “built” an apparatus for collective struggle when there is no way for it to be used for any concerted purpose!
Many laugh off the idea of DSA backing #ForceTheVote because even if the majority of members wanted to, which they probably don’t, they know it wouldn’t mean anything. But it’s time for us to acknowledge that “us taking a position doesn’t really mean anything” is a deathly serious problem for a socialist organization to have! Until DSA can form a process for real unity in action and a level of discipline over the political and media apparatus it establishes, the struggle will continue to be waged by unrooted media personalities, with the only question left for us: Which side of the spectacle are you on?