Book review: No Harmless Power

Nov

01

2024

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From Freedom News by bob ness ~

This warts-and-all bio of Nestor Makhno is folksy and refreshing

I’m an old-fashioned guy, a romantic, even. In my heart of hearts what I really, really want to do is to ride down capitalism with cavalry and lop off its head with our sabres. We tried that already, but it didn’t work. When something doesn’t work, we try something else. We’re still trying.

Over the years, there has been a lot of talk among anarchists about why cavalry didn’t work against capitalism. Failure often illuminates more than success. The anarchists’ historic retreat across Ukraine in the summer of 1919 was a thing of grief and glory. Some things that happened there had effects that never went away. Consider tachankas. These highly mobile weapons transformed cavalry warfare. This played a dramatic role in the Russian Civil War. Their evolution forked. One fork evolved into the sound truck, which strikes fear in the hearts of riot cops. The other fork evolved into the technical, a (usually light) pickup truck with a heavy machine gun in the back. They cast Makhno’s shadow far and wide. There’s even a war named after them. They called it the “Toyota War”. Look it up.

Many reliable sources trace the invention of this vital piece of improvised military hardware to Makhno himself. This alone is enough to cement his name in the annals of military history. Then there was his renowned tactical prowess. But he was more than an inventor who knew how to fight. What anarchists like best about him were his politics. They are legendary.

We all know at least the legend of the Makhnovists. It’s anarchist canon. At least we think know it. Even less do we know what really happened. For decades it was a major effort to find a book about him or even a book he was mentioned in. What could be found ranged from slander to hagiography. What we really need is a warts-and-all bio that includes an account of the people around him. To that end I recommend No Harmless Power.

Allison really did his homework. He devotes a long chapter to very brief bios of anarchists that even I had never heard of but who all had Makhno-era links to Ukraine. Some were born in Ukraine and grew into anarchists there. Others came from as far as Japan, like Ōsugi Sakae. There is lots of fascinating trivia in this story. One anarchist cavalry commander had had both feet amputated in WWI. A cavalryman with no feet! Sometimes his battalion dismounted and fought as dragoons. His men wheeled him into battle in a wheelbarrow. That’s a story you don’t hear every day, not in the works of ableist historians anyway.

Then there’s the gossip. Makhno really did drink too much sometimes (it’s not what killed him though; that’s a lie). Ida Mett thought his partner Galina was a gold digger… stuff like that. Who slept with who last and who owes who money have plagued our praxis forever. Somehow, we manage to work around it.

Allison explains Makhno’s predilection for drag as having grown out of his school drama program. At first glance it does seem out of character. He was a pretty butch guy. Some of his feats smack of classical machismo. But he wasn’t afraid to be thought of as a harmless old woman sitting on a tree stump, munching on sunflower seeds within earshot of some enemy brass who were discussing strategy. To them, (s)he was as invisible as the stump (s)he sat on. That’s how disguises are supposed to work. That’s also how patriarchy works. Patriarchy is a scourge upon humanity, but on occasion it can be turned against its practitioners.

Makhno wore other disguises, too. Sometimes he would dress as an enemy soldier of one sort or another. He had many enemies, and they wore different uniforms, which made them easy to deceive. It was in a Cheka uniform that he escaped into exile. This had been the idea of his righthand man, Lev Zinkovsky, the head of the anarchist intelligence service. I would have liked this book more if Allison had devoted more time to this part in the struggle. After all, a war without spies never happens. Anywhere. Ever. Fortunately, we have “Kontrrazvedka: The Story of the Makhnovist Intelligence Service”, by V. Azarov to flesh out this part of our story.

There could have been a chapter devoted to another fascinating character, Maria Nikiforova. She played a much bigger role in the story of the Makhnovshchina than Sakae, which is not to denigrate Sakae in any way. Sakae was a shining example of anarchists in action, but he managed to get deported before he could even meet Makhno. Nikiforova, on the other hand, fought in the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (on horseback with a sabre, and with a squadron of cavalry at her back and under her command). Fortunately, we have “Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc”, by Malcolm Archibald to fill us in.

When Allison gets to the Platform, he goes deep into the machinations and personal interactions involved in the debate surrounding this document, but on the Platform itself he’s pretty neutral, at least in print. That’s wrong of him. The Platform was a colossal mistake; its adoption would have been an even bigger one. It needs to be condemned in no uncertain terms, and this needs repeating, even today. Emma Goldman herself spoke out against Platformism. Bolshevism without Bolsheviks?! Preposterous. They’d just become Bolsheviks, and we’d be back to square one. Besides, all states excel at decapitating frontal attacks. Only a decentralised movement is immune. It has no capit to decate. Why give it one?

Despite these flaws, No Harmless Power is an excellent book. Its folksy style provides a refreshing counterpoint, for example, to Skirda’s more pedantic “Anarchy’s Cossack”, which is also an excellent book.

Allison’s judicious use of snark and vernacular does much to make it accessible to modern sensibilities. It gives us moderns a look inside the anarchist movement as it used to be and to a certain extent still is today. It’s more about the people than it is about the ideology. Anarchism itself should be more about the people than the ideology. All anarchists would do well to read this book. We’d all do well to read all of anarchist history. Without history the wisdom of our ancestors eludes us. So does their folly. We need for that not to happen. So read history. Start today.

No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno, by Charlie Allison; Illustrated by Kevin Matthews and N.O. Bonzo. PM Press, 2023. 256 pages

 

Malcolm Archibald: 50 years of Black Cat PresS  

EDMONTON, ALBERTA

Nov

01

2024

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FELLOW ANARHIST COMRADE

I WAS HIS PRINTERS DEVIL 

From Freedom News by Sean Patterson

In this interview, the founder of Edmonton’s anarchist publishing house looks back on its legacy

For the past five decades, Black Cat Press (BCP) in Edmonton, Canada, has served as a local hub for the city’s radical community and as an important publisher of anarchist material. Over the years, BCP has produced many notable titles, including the first English translations of the collected works of the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno in five volumes. Other stand-out works from BCP include The Dossier of Subject No. 1218, the translated memoirs of Bulgarian anarchist Alexander Nakov; Lazar Lipotkin’s The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America, a previously unpublished manuscript held at Amsterdam’s International Institute of Social History; and Kronstadt Diary, a selection of Alexander Berkman’s original diary entries from 1921.

Amongst reprints of classic works by the likes of Kropotkin, Bakunin, and William Morris, BCP has also highlighted the work of anarchist researchers from around the globe, including Alexey Ivanov’s Kropotkin and Canada, Vadim Damier’s Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century, Ronald Tabor’s The Tyranny of Theory, and Archibald’s own work Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc.  

Sadly, Black Cat Press closed its doors in 2022, an economic victim of the Covid pandemic. Any future hopes to revive the press were subsequently shattered in the wake of a second tragedy. On June 26, 2024, an early morning house fire started by arsonists destroyed BCP’s remaining equipment and inventory. The loss of BCP is painful not only locally for Edmonton but nationally as one of Canada’s few anarchist publishers. Sharing BCP’s five-decade-long story will hopefully inspire others to follow in the steps of BCP’s legacy and the broader tradition of small anarchist publishing houses.

This month, BCP founder Malcolm Archibald sat down with Freedom News to reflect on a lifetime of publishing and his personal journey through anarchism over the years.

—

You have been involved with the anarchist community for many years. Can you tell us a little about your background and how you first became interested in anarchism?

Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the Cold War, I certainly had no exposure to anarchism. Nor did my family have any predilection for left-wing politics. The only book on socialism in the public library was G. D. H. Cole’s History of Socialist Thought, which I devoured. In 1958, at age 15, I attended a provincial convention of the CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation) as a youth delegate. The CCF in Nova Scotia was a proletarian party with a strong base in the coal mining districts. After that, I was hooked on left-wing politics.

I became interested in anarchism by reading books about the Spanish Civil War. The first real anarchist I met was Murray Bookchin at a conference in Ann Arbor in 1969. Bookchin understood that many student radicals were anarchists in practice, even if they called themselves Marxists, so he emphasised the libertarian elements of Marx in his propaganda.

What anarchist organisations/groups have you been involved with over the years?

As a graduate student at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, I was on the staff of underground newspapers, including an anarchist tabloid, The Walrus. Later, I helped start an anarchist magazine in Edmonton called News from Nowhere (printed by Black Cat Press). In Edmonton in the 1970s we had a branch of the Social-Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (SRAF), but most anarchist activity was centred around the IWW, Black Cat Press, and Erewhon Books. Anarchists were also involved in the newspapers Poundmaker (circulation 19,000!) and Prairie Star. In 1979, the North American Anarchist Communist Federation (NAACF, later simplified to ACF) started up, and I was active in two of their branches for a number of years but was unable to get much traction for the organisation in Edmonton.

When did you start Black Cat Press, and how did it evolve over time? What are some key moments in its history you’d like to share with our readers?

Black Cat Press started when I purchased an offset press and copy camera in 1972. The previous owner had tried to earn a living with this equipment and ended up in a mental institution, which was not auspicious. BCP became a “printer to the movement” in Edmonton, used by almost all the left groups and causes. In 1979 BCP became the unofficial printer of the ACF and printed a number of pamphlets for that organisation.

From 1989 to 2001, BCP shared space with the Boyle McCauley News, the monthly newspaper of Edmonton’s inner city, with an all-volunteer staff. The newspaper generally tried to print positive news about the community, but an exception was the issue of juvenile prostitution, a terrible blight until we started printing stories about it and the authorities finally took action.

In 1994, the government printing plant where I worked was shut down, and BCP began to operate full-time with three partners who had been laid off at the same time. Our customer base included social agencies close to our shop in Edmonton’s inner city plus various unions. In 2003, I purchased a perfect binding machine and was able to start printing books. Our first book was Kropotkin’s Anarchist Morality, a perennial favourite. Eventually, about 30 titles were printed, which were distributed by AK Press, independent bookstores, and literature tables at anarchist book fairs.

How did you come to translate Russian-language radical and anarchist texts?

I studied Russian at university and later took night courses in German, French, Ukrainian, and Polish. I first became aware of Nestor Makhno in the 1960s from a book by the British historian David Footman. Ending up in Edmonton, it turned out that the University of Alberta Library held four books by Nestor Makhno, bibliographical rarities.

I’m constantly amazed at the richness of the anarchist tradition in the Russian Empire and the USSR. For many years, The Russian Anarchists by Paul Avrich was the only survey work on the subject, but recently, two histories have appeared in Russia and one in Ukraine. It is a measure of the depth of the movement that these histories are practically independent of one another and pay hardly any attention to Avrich.

My first works of translation from Russian were physics articles, which don’t give much scope for originality. In translating historical texts, most of the effort goes not into the actual translation, but research on the names of places, persons, etc. and preparing annotations. I try to provide the reader with maps, graphics, and indexes, which make it easier to understand the text.

Although I generally do not work with literary texts, I did translate some poems by Nestor Makhno. He wrote a poem called “The Summons” while in prison in 1912. A search of his cell in 1914 discovered this poem, for which he was given one week in a punishment cell. While in this cell, he composed another poem, which he wrote down as soon as he was allowed back to his regular cell. But another search discovered the second poem (more bloodthirsty than the first one), and he ended up in the punishment cell again. So, it wasn’t easy being an anarchist poet!

Some of your major contributions to anarchist studies are the translations of Russian and Ukrainian primary sources. In particular, you translated and published the first English edition of Nestor Makhno’s three-volume memoirs. Can you describe this translation project?

The University of Alberta library holds copies of Makhno’s memoirs, including both the French and Russian versions of the first volume. I started translating these memoirs as early as 1979 when BCP published a pamphlet entitled My Visit to the Kremlin, a translation of two chapters in the second volume. This pamphlet was eventually published in many other languages.

Most of the work involved in preparing translations of Makhno’s works went into research about the people and places he mentions. An effort was made to provide enough material in the form of notes and maps to make the narrative intelligible to the reader.

Black Cat Press recently closed its doors after fifty years in business. The economic environment for publishing is increasingly difficult in general, and especially so for small anarchist presses. What are your thoughts on the current prospects for anarchist publishing, and what changes might have to be made to maintain its long-term viability?

Most anarchist publishers have to order a substantial press run up front and then hope to sell the books over a (hopefully) not-too-long period. BCP was ahead of its time in using a print-on-demand model where inventories were kept low so that capital wouldn’t be tied up in stock that wasn’t moving. The publishing arm of BCP was not much affected by the pandemic; rather, it was the job printing that suffered, forcing the business to close.

How have you seen anarchism (particularly in Canada) change over the decades? Canada has rarely seen an organized anarchist movement in the same way as some groups in Europe or the United States. Why do you think this is so, and do you see any hope for an organized Canadian movement in the future?

When I became active in the anarchist movement in Canada in the 1970s, the anarchists were all poverty-stricken, trying to survive in minimum-wage jobs. The next generation was much better off and had a lot of money to throw around. Now, the current generation is back to being dirt poor again, lacking the resources to make an impact. But I think the prospects for the future are good because (a) the old left (communists, Trotskyists, i.e., the alphabet soup brigade) are intellectually and morally bankrupt, and (b) the New Democratic Party (in Alberta, at least) is environmentally irresponsible. This leaves a lot of room on the left for anarchists to stake out their territory and attract young people into the movement.

Malcolm Archibald at the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair, 2013.

Thanks to Kandis Friesen for sharing previously collected interview material.

 

International exchange against military service and all militarism, Nov 15-16

Nov

02

2024

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From squat.net

In Germany and many other countries, militarism is gaining strength in the face of the new and old wars and genocides of recent years, and the structures and ideas associated with it are taking space at various levels.

At the same time, the military industry is flourishing. In addition to immense subsidies for the Bundeswehr (German army), one of the concrete initiatives is the implementation of a new mandatory military service in Germany. After this was practically discontinued in 2011, the initiators‘ plan is to introduce a new service with examinations and sanctions against those who do not take part in this procedure. Even if this proposal initially revolves around a fairly limited number of recruits and attempts to paint a moderate picture, it is to be seen as a door opener and an important tool of militarism and Germany’s NATO policy. The numbers of recruits are initially low because the infrastructure required for military service, such as places for physical examinations with the purpose of recruitment, accommodation and training, was dismantled after 2011. The model will probably also initially be a trial that will be optimized.

Whatever model they introduce, as anarchists we reject service in the name of the military and the state and will organize resistance against it.

In the spirit of anti-authoritarian internationalism, we want to exchange ideas with comrades from different contexts about military service in the states in which they live, but also about practices of refusal and resistance.

You and your context are invited to participate in this exchange.

The prerequisites are the principles of solidarity and an anti-authoritarian anti-militarism, an analysis that opposes the justification of war, collateral damage and the recognition of states and any other authority.

In the days leading up to the exchange, there are as yet unconfirmed reports of possible celebrations to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Bundeswehr, which could well take place in Hamburg. We remain open to expressing our joint rejection of such an event – stay tuned!

 

Portugal: Disgraça - help us buy our anarchist social centre

Nov

02

2024

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From gofundme

Disgraça – a story about an anarchist social centre

9 years ago, we decided to break the boredom that haunted our routines and get together to open an anti-authoritarian space. A space where we could discuss and create collective solutions to problems that we had been individualising. Today, in a city devastated by real estate speculation, the housing crisis and the elitisation of culture, we have come together in resistance, this time to put an end to the monthly extortion we are subjected to and collectively acquire the space of Disgraça. A space where we and so many others have been organising, conspiring, dreaming and having fun for the last decade – for a future based on solidarity and mutual support, as opposed to one based on the property market and private property, hostage to landlords.

It all started on 11 September 2015. Atop one of Lisbon's hills, the doors of Disgraça opened. From the vapid white walls, from the empty, echoing rooms, from the multitude of wills that converged in that place, this restless project blossomed. Walls fell, walls rose, walls were scribbled on. And as if it were a spring of insubordination from the depths of the city's subsoil, we materialised, room by room, each one's community potential. Moved by common dreams, desires and needs, we built a canteen and community space, a library, a DIY concert hall, a workshop where chaos reigns, a rehearsal room and a screen printing room, a gym (the tidiest place in the building), the free shop Desumana, and, from the memory of an empty shop front, a cosy anarchist bookshop – Tortuga.

Since then, we have devoted endless hours, individually and collectively, to the almost daily demands of the project. Demands haunted by needs for conflict management, waves of exhaustion, the thankless metronome of rent, high expenses, and life in a city that is emptying of life with each passing day. While self-management is our bulwark, we are yet to arrive at a place where we can do so sustainably. By collectively acquiring the Disgraça space, all the resistance collectives and social movements that depend on this social centre will gain greater sustainability and autonomy. Without a rent and a landlord, we can focus on continuing to create the future we envision together.

An informal laboratory of anti-authoritarian practices

The city of Lisbon, like all big cities, is increasingly hostile to ways of life that go against the mercantile logic. Many of us have been expelled from the centre to the margins by tycoons, entrepreneurs and digital nomads. And, even though their uselessness translates into a dependence on our work and the daily movement of our bodies to that same centre, they don't tolerate our involvement in the political, social and cultural dynamics of the luxury amusement park they call a city. Every month, many of us lose our homes or are at risk of losing the associative spaces where we weave affinities (let's remember our fellow resistants in Sirigaita and Zona Franca, for example). In the face of the violence of the forced displacement of people and spaces, we have organised ourselves into anti-displacement collectives, in the occupation of vacant buildings that come to life with our entry, with the collective mobilisation of the occupation of "public space" in squares, alleys and gardens.

Disgraça, this informal, often clumsy but always obstinate, laboratory of anti-authoritarian practices and ways of thinking, is organised horizontally, by volunteers who, among themselves and with those who go there, experiment, care, think, decide, make mistakes, antagonise, transform, catalyse, shelter and come together in getting closer to trying out a world shaped neither by capital nor by the exhausting rhythm of the drum of the empire, but by self-organisation, self-determination and expression, mutual aid, (de)construction of community and subversion of that which constrains us.

Over time, Disgraça has become a place of convergence and organisation of struggles in the city of Lisbon and beyond, providing space for meetings, preparation of materials, events and fundraising. Among the intricacies of maintaining and organising the space, there have been conversations and reading groups on anarchism, anti-racism, anti-colonialisms and the most diverse indigenous, queer and feminist struggles. Bridging the gap between theory on Tortuga's shelves and practice – in our lives, there have been roundtable discussions on prison abolition and prisoner support, on housing struggle and squatting, as well as strategies for resisting green capitalism, climate collapse and extractivism.

Hundreds of bands have played in the space's abysses, mirrored by the countless evenings of cinema cycles and donation-based vegan canteens. Here, DIY learning spaces based on mutual aid grow alongside workshops on anti-authoritarian health practices, food sovereignty, self-defence, free software and hardware, DIY art, recycling materials and zine production.

Now what?

In order to continue these desires and struggles, we have drawn up a one-and-a-half-year plan to secure, once and for all, this space that is so important to all of us. We've already done the first steps – on 19th of September, we signed an agreement for the space to not be sold to anyone else and put down 10% of the total amount. Now, it is time to raise up our sleeves and get down to work: we've got until the end of summer 2025 to raise the remaining 247,500 euros to secure the space for the immediate long-term sustainability of Disgraça and all the collectives that use the space.

The plan includes securing interest-free loans, fundraising events, a caravan tour all over Europe, non-state-affiliated grants and, of course, this crowdfunding. The more we can raise here, the quicker we can be rid of financial obligations and dedicate our time to supporting resistance struggles, learning from one another and organising together.

If you can't support by donation, there are of course also other things you can do:

- We're looking for comrades willing to give us medium/long-term, interest-free loans. These loans will be essential for securing the space and will be repaid upon request with a 6-month notice period.
- We're asking collectives (and folks who are both part of and not part of collectives!) who have been sharing space with us for the last decade to help us publicise this through your networks and affinity groups. We want to do this together!
- We're going to organise various benefits inside and outside the space in the coming year. We invite people around us to come and help us organise the events and/or providing support during them (like helping with groceries, cooking and cleaning). We challenge other groups in solidarity with Disgraça to do the same in their geographies.
- We want to make a caravan that passes through various anti-authoritarian spaces and festivals throughout Europe, to organise events and talks to spread the word and raise funds.

If you'd like to join this effort with any of the above ideas or others, send us an email.

See you soon :)
Love & Rage.

 

I Became an Anarchist While Working for the Democratic Party

Nov

03

2024

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From It's Going Down

A critical and personal account of working inside of and attempting to organize within the Democratic Party in Nevada.

by Jesse M.

There are three places in Las Vegas I truly liked: two of them were bars, and the third was Writer’s Block, a wonderful bookstore shaped like a literal block. It was here, a couple days into a job with the Nevada State Democratic Party, that I picked up Chomsky’s “On Anarchism” to get an introduction to the ideology.

It’s a terrible introduction to the ideology. Great bookstore, best ideology, not a very good book.

I start with this because I don’t want to mislead you. If I was a pure propagandist, I would say that this experience of working for the state Dems made me into an anarchist, when the truth is that I was thinking about it almost from the very start. Becoming an anarchist, however, helped me interpret what I was experiencing while I had the job.

I had worked in electoral politics before: fresh out of high school, age 18, I got a job on the Obama campaign, mostly because I wasn’t finding other jobs, and showing up to the Obama office to volunteer seemed a better use of time than trying in vain to get a job at Best Buy. So, I wasn’t a complete novice… but in 2008, I was mostly working with the IT department. Organizing was all new to me.

Backstory

Nevada’s caucus in 2016 went poorly. More accurately, the state convention went poorly, which you can go down a whole rabbit hole reading about, if you want. What’s important to establish is that the Hillary and Bernie sides absolutely hated each other. The Hillary side thought the Bernie Bros were violent, rampaging sexists who had threatened to kill the state party chairwoman; the Bernie side thought the whole process had been rigged against them in 2016. Because of all that, the most important thing was for 2020’s caucus to go smoothly: no one threatening to throw any chairs (if you mention “chair throwing” to anyone involved with Nevada electoral politics, you will get a long explanation of how this did or did not really happen), no one accusing anyone of fraud, just a simple, transparent process with a clear winner.

The Job

It was both a campaign job and it wasn’t: it was for a political party, and we were doing the same work (phonebanking, planning events, managing volunteers) that any political campaign would do. The difference was that this organizing for the 2020 Nevada Democratic Caucus wasn’t for any of the candidates, it was the neutral, referee-like logistical work to set up the volunteers running the caucus.

The most important thing to know about caucuses is that they suck and everyone hates them. Seriously, everyone. The progressive wing of the Democrats hate them because they’re undemocratic, forcing people to show up in person to a specific place at a specific time to participate, thus suppressing turnout (especially among the working class); the establishment wing of the party hate them because candidates like Bernie, with an extremely enthusiastic base who will do real voter-to-voter organizing, have a huge advantage.

The main difference between a caucus and a primary is that primaries are Official Elections: you go and vote in an election run by the government. A caucus is entirely party-run, and election rules (to my non-lawyer knowledge) essentially don’t apply to it, because it’s not technically an election. You can make them as accessible or inaccessible as you want, they’re events run by a political party to the rules of that political party. So, that means that the entirety of planning two of the first three elections in the primary cycle (up through 2020) was done on a shoestring by the state political parties. And that means they were organized by first-time political workers working way too many hours for not very much money, in way over our heads.

That’s me! I worked for the Nevada Dems from August 2019 through March 2020, making $3,250 a month. I had to find over a hundred people to volunteer to chair their precincts, spread across more than 20 locations across Nevada (my turf was basically everything south and east of Vegas).

Because paying people enough that they’d be able to afford housing would cost campaigns a lot more money, they instead rely on “supporter housing.” That means instead of your own place to live, some nice person or family lets you sleep in their guest bedroom for a while. On the one hand, it’s a great way for scrappy campaigns to get organizers on the ground with little cost, but even bigger campaigns have come to rely on it. It puts added pressure on the organizer to not act up and jeopardize your job: it’s one thing to not have paychecks in and risk getting evicted, but this isn’t even a formal living arrangement with a lease, it’s just some guy letting you sleep there because he wants to help the Democrats. And if you’re not with the Democrats any more, what then?

The hours for the job started off bad and got worse. At the beginning of the job, we worked five and a half days a week. With seven weeks until the election, our schedule changed: ten hour days, seven days a week.

There’s a certain amount of hours one can devote to something in a week before it takes over every other part of the brain. If you’ve ever played a video game so much that you can still see it when you’re trying to go to sleep, you’ve probably felt this; it’s called the “Tetris effect” in that sense. But it’s even worse when it happens with a job; in our case as electoral organizers, a job involving politics. Even when we would go out to the bar to drink after working 70 hours, there’s no way we could talk about anything else, because we hadn’t done anything else to think about. (I had a Tinder date with a gorgeous Bernie organizer, and I asked “can we talk about something else” at one point. I don’t think we did.)

So what did we spend those endless hours doing? A lot of phone calls. Early on, it was basically taking a shotgun approach and calling through our lists (at least 200 dials a day) of previous volunteers for the party or people our data had otherwise tagged as being potential volunteers (based on voting patterns, etc). Later on, once we had a good network of volunteers to rely on, we could set up phonebanks with them and otherwise outsource the work of recruiting more precinct chairs to those volunteers.

Especially early, calling people to get them to volunteer really sucked. Because of all the 2016 drama, the former Hillary supporters didn’t want anything to do with it because they thought a gang of Bernard Brothers would tear them limb from limb, and the Bernie supporters thought it would be rigged from the start. I was calling through a list of people to try to get them to run the caucus, and people were telling me they didn’t even want to participate.

In addition to our volunteer recruitment, we were required to get a certain number of new Democrats registered to vote per week; something about this got us money from the national DNC. My true “welcome to Vegas” moment was standing on the asphalt outside a Wal-Mart when it was close to 100 degrees registering people to vote. Being a Seattleite, I didn’t put on any sunscreen, and got a glorious sunburn followed by a farmers’ tan in about two days. (Wal-Mart kicked us out of their parking lot. I found that the two best spots were at UNLV and outside a 99-cent store. UNLV was great because it had plenty of shade; the 99-cent store’s security not only didn’t kick me out, I registered one of them to vote.)

Our job was mostly self-directed, with metrics we had to hit that were based around results: this many precinct chairs, etc. We had trackers upon trackers in Google docs. Because I had pretty easy turf, I was hitting all my numbers without making their recommended/required phone calls per day, but since I was getting results, hey, no one cared.

This was interrupted by what I started calling “HQ Freakout Days,” when HQ staff went nuts over organizers not making enough phone calls, and we needed to stop all other work and just make X number of dials. Not any tangible result from them, just make that many phone calls. Basically, stop the actual work you’re doing and hit our made-up metrics instead, because we’re your boss. For those days, I made what I euphemistically called my “youth vote outreach” list, which was people 29 and under who we’d never contacted before. Because I knew none of them would ever pick up, and we only had to let it ring four times and hang up without leaving a message, I could get through over 100 of those in an hour, easily. That’s what they get for valuing input metrics over output ones.

I Hate our Electoral System

If you’re like most people, when you think of people who work in politics other than politicians, you think of morons like David Axelrod or James Carville who at one time had real jobs on campaigns, and now collect paychecks going on TV while a title like “Democratic strategist” appears under them. This infuriates me, firstly because that’s not a job. Watching them has made every media consumer think they, too, could be a “strategist” for their political party, like video game fans think they can be in charge of a video game developer as an “ideas guy” without being able to make anything.

Part of what makes our electoral system so terrible is its system of what jobs do exist. Most people who work in politics do so for very short stretches of time, like I did. If you make it through one campaign cycle and work into the next one, you’re an aged, rugged veteran. The person who hired me, two levels of experience above me, was 21 years old at the time.

When I say “our electoral system,” I don’t just mean the laws around how elections work. I mean the broader system of our two parties, the massive industry of consultants and pollsters either supporting or grifting them, and our news media treating the election like a two-year leadup to its Super Bowl.

When a campaign cycle starts up, like for the 2020 cycle, all the campaigns hire at once. There’s not nearly enough locals to hire to staff up every campaign’s offices across the state, so campaigns hire from wherever. It ends up being a lot of recent political science graduates who just want to Work In Politics for a bit. So, these 21 year-olds are airdropped in from New York, California, and Massachusetts to organize in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina for six months. Then their job ends and they go back home. (Talking to one Buttigieg organizer, she sent resumes to every Democratic candidate and took the job with Buttigieg because that’s who got back to her first. We’re supposed to take seriously these people saying that democracy is at risk if we don’t vote, but they’re so apathetic about who wins that they’ll help any Democrat become president who pays them? Mind-boggling. “Blue no matter who,” truly.)

The electoral system is so focused on the specific immediate task at hand, the election these people were hired to win (and working people to the bone doing it), that there’s never any room to step back and build something long-term. No one is planning for the Democratic party five or ten years from now (at least, not in a way that affects local organizing) because that’s ten or twenty times as long as the average staffer is expected to last. The feeling seems to be that every minute spent planning for something further out than the next election is a minute not spent working on winning the next election.

So, when I get on my anarchist high horse now and talk about how we need to spend our time, energy, and money on something other than electoral politics, it’s not the voting part that upsets me. It’s all this bullshit. Every election, we have to burn out all our most promising organizers in six months because there was no infrastructure for them to build on, and they have to make it all from scratch every time. It’s like we’re working extra hard to pay off our last payday loan, then taking out a new payday loan at the end, ensuring we’ll have to do the same thing over again next time.

Classism in the Democratic Party

The “HQ staff,” the higher-paid people with the campaign, worked out of a building in a little office that housed some other campaigns. The field staff, such as myself, got to work there for maybe a few days of training, and then off to our new office: Panera Bread.

For about a month, despite constant promises that it was just around the corner, we didn’t have a field office. In the pre-COVID times when “work from home” was an alien concept, that meant that instead of doing our work from wherever, we all had to meet up at a local Panera Bread together at 9am six days a week and make calls there together. Five years later, I still can’t walk by a Panera Bread without shuddering.

When we did get our own field office, it wasn’t in the nice upscale office park that HQ was. I don’t mind that they found something outside of a white neighborhood–I’ll organize anywhere, and if it was my money, I’d certainly save money on rent that way–but it’s worth noting that the HQ staff didn’t choose to put themselves there. It was in what seemed to be an abandoned doctor’s or dentist’s office, and it didn’t have modern conveniences like “drinkable running water.” We had to carry jugs of water over from the gas station every day just to have something to drink, and if you’ve lived in Vegas without dying, you know you have to drink a lot of water.

Having a physical separation, by around a 15-minute drive, is a perfect metaphor for how the professional class of the Democratic Party sees themselves compared to the ordinary people of the field staff. We weren’t let in on any strategy discussions, we weren’t told any inside information (because they were certain we’d leak it), we weren’t even allowed to physically be around them.

Trying to Unionize

From the start, I was far more interested in trying to unionize the job than the job itself. I had developed a big interest in unions since I had gotten a union job at an AT&T store, gone on strike with CWA, joined DSA, gotten fired from AT&T, gotten my job reinstated through a grievance, and became a union steward. I had sent off a couple resumes to become an organizer at SEIU, to no success.

There was no shortage of issues to organize around: our pay sucked, with the next-lowest pay from a campaign being Bernie’s at $3,500 a month (they may have, ironically, suffered from unionizing first). Our mileage reimbursement was awful, which was a big deal for people like me who had to drive to rural areas of the state. Above all that, there was an overall feeling that the HQ staff just didn’t care about us at all.

I got my first organizing lesson when I reached out to a couple of the more senior field organizers on the campaign: what someone says their political beliefs are doesn’t mean shit when it comes to workplace organizing.

These two people were who, when I was first thinking of the idea of organizing, I assumed would be onboard. They were both Bernie-supporting DSA members. I called them up, and the response I got was some variation of, “I really need to maintain a good relationship with management because I need a promotion/letter of recommendation.” (They both left the campaign fairly quickly anyway.)

This would have been a small unit, around a dozen people, so every card signed mattered a lot. (In organizing electoral campaigns, unlike most others, voluntary recognition is assumed; forcing the workers to go through an NLRB process would be political suicide when your bosses are trying to keep leadership of various unions happy.) I reached out to Campaign Workers Guild, a scrappy independent union that represents some political campaign workers, including, most relevantly, some state parties. (Checking their website, Biden for President Harris for President organized with CWG! Great job, y’all.)

Because we were split between Vegas and Reno staff, the hardest part was getting anyone in Reno onboard. If it had just been a vote in Vegas, we would’ve won handily, but the only person to ever join up from Reno flamed out from the job within a week or two. (You should be getting the idea by now that people come and go from these organizing jobs very quickly.)

I thought we had a majority at one point: another organizer in Vegas, a local, someone I thought I was developing a good relationship with, a self-described anarchist, told me that they wouldn’t sign up first for fear of retaliation, but that they’d be the final card we needed. Okay, fine. So we got the other six cards, and I came to them to get the seventh card needed. Instead, they gave me a lot of objections that made it clear they never intended on signing in the first place. I went to my car and cried.

Our union attempt stalled, but with real pressing issues, the card-signing and non-card-signing people came to a separate course of action: we would draft a letter to management of things we wanted to change. Not a list of demands, but of requests. Things like more car mileage reimbursement, cell phone reimbursement, more pay, drinkable water, and even basic things like a weekly meeting with HQ staff so we could check in.

I took the letter to the HQ office and sat down the the Caucus Director and Executive Director of the party. First, they wanted to let me know how much they appreciated that it was requests and not demands. Then, we went down the list of everything: no, no, no, no, no. The only thing they agreed to was the weekly meeting, and I think we ended up having that all of once.

Knowing what I know now about organizing, this would have been a key step in an escalation plan: I could have gotten the non-card-signers to buy into a plan of, “okay, if this letter doesn’t get a serious response, what do we do next?”, but instead, it didn’t go anywhere. It was too close to the caucus to leave us time to make any change by that point.

Talking with a staffer who was there after I left, I heard they did end up unionizing with IBEW 2320.

The App

Like the essay equivalent of a Godard film, seven pages in I’ll start telling something resembling a story.

Part of the way the 2020 caucuses would be better than 2016, we were told, was that instead of an old-fashioned hotline to call in the results from each precinct, we would be using The App. Not just to report the results, but to run the caucus itself. Everything that happened in the caucus would be put into The App, which would guide you the whole way.

The problem we had was that this app didn’t exist. In our training presentation for how to be a precinct chair, only a few months before the caucus, we had essentially placeholder slides for “this is what you will be doing with the app, when we have it. Which we will. Just not now.”

Then, closer to the election, The App materialized. First, you had to download some extremely sketchy-seeming other app that seemed like a dev tool for testing apps that aren’t finished yet. Then, through that system, you had to download this caucus app.

As I had mentioned, I worked retail selling cell phones for about four years total, including a lot of senior citizens. Getting them onto their Facebook was hard enough. But for The App, we had to have a guide telling Android owners how to enable developer options so that they could download this app-before-you-download-The App. And then, one day in February, they’d have to use this app all on their own in a room full of potentially angry people, and this would have an impact on who would be the next president.

Why did they have to download some other app as a platform to download The App? Because it wasn’t finished yet. Not just in a way that it had a couple kinks to work out, it was blatantly, comically unfinished using it. Pressing the wrong button on nearly any screen would crash it. We weren’t just buying some off-the-shelf app to use, or maybe tweak a little bit; this company was making The App at the exact same time as we were training people how they’d be using it.

We had an event for all our precinct chairs where we were supposed to debut The App for the first time, and get them all to download it, and then run mock caucuses using it. This was, without exaggeration, the worst day I’ve ever had at a job in my life. No one could figure out how to get it on their phones, let alone run a caucus with it. There was too little support for too many people who needed help, and the help they needed, none of the staff knew how to help with. This had been the event we’d been building for, that we recruited all our best volunteers to all come to, and instead of teaching them how they’d run the caucus, we looked incompetent, understaffed, and scared.

It was at this point that the HQ staff could have seen that result, heard the feedback, and made the reasonable decision that The App was clearly not going to work. Instead, they just shrugged it off as something that would get better. The App is a work-in-progress, after all. (And we were just field organizers, what did we know?)

Then, February 3rd, 2020, the best possible thing for Nevada happened: Iowa stepped on the rake before we could. Maybe HQ staff could ignore their precinct chairs and the field organizers, but they couldn’t ignore that.

Overnight, everything changed. The state party that had no money to pay us for cell phone reimbursements had someone who was clearly a crisis communications consultant telling us extremely obvious shit in a conference call the next morning. Our digital media person told us very specifically not only were we not to talk about anything related to The App on social media, we couldn’t even “like” anything related to it, and they would be checking. (To see if they really would, I went and made my Twitter likes all dril tweets to see if anyone would notice. No one said anything.) While publicly, we were insisting that we had extremely real backup plans we were happy to use, in every video call with HQ it was obvious from the bags under their eyes that they had been working on coming up with a new plan instead of sleeping. The class separation of HQ from everyone else didn’t just hurt us in the lower class, it put way too much of a burden on the class exclusively allowed to make decisions.

A whole new group of people arrived: in the same office park as the HQ, a dozen or so people from the DNC came to… I don’t know what they did, exactly, but they were at their laptops and seemed very serious about it. All their food was catered for them.

Soon, we had a new plan: instead of The App, we now had a digital tool WHICH IS NOT AN APP on iPads to help precinct chairs report their results. The “tool” was a Google Form. We were told specifically not to tell anyone that it was a Google Form, but when one of my precinct chairs asked me straight up, “is this a Google Form?” I said… yeah. He responded, “oh, great! That’s just how I would have set it up. Thanks!” It was honestly pretty easy to use. Even the smartphone-averse could fill out a form on one of the iPads we provided.

Early Vote and the Caucus

Our job so far had focused not on the four-day early vote window, where people could “caucus” by filling out a form, but on the day-of caucus itself. When early vote came around, though, it was clear that everyone wanted to vote early instead of participate in another shitshow like 2016.

The field staff spent the day filling in at early vote sites that needed extra hands. At one library, I helped people cast their early vote ballots who had waited in line for five and a half hours.

The enormous volume of people who voted early meant that all the weight was taken off the day-of caucus, in terms of managing huge crowds of people. While we were working sixteen hours days during early vote, to get people through the lines, open and close sites, and then drive the ballots around, the caucus itself was smooth. I went to a small site with three precincts that only had one person there who wanted to be a precinct captain, so I ran one precinct as another one waited a bit over an hour for me to be done. They didn’t seem upset at all; if anything, they were grateful that it was just a little waiting around, and that someone who knew the process was running it.

After driving the final caucus boxes back to HQ, I spent time with the caucus director doing my favorite task of the entire six months: puzzling through the “problem precincts,” the ones with results that didn’t make any sense or that the precinct chair had clearly messed up. It was a fun bit of problem-solving, working through what it seemed like the precinct captain was trying to do, and essentially re-doing their work for them.

One thing I can say confidently is that I didn’t see any anti-Bernie foul play from anyone on the campaign. Everyone at HQ was firmly in the establishment Democratic camp, to be sure (as will come up soon), but they were first and foremost about covering their own asses and not having another 2016-like disaster on their hands. They just wanted a caucus where the story about it afterword would be about who finished in what place, not what a mess it was.

Fortunately for everyone’s asses being covered, the bottom-line result from the caucus was clear: Bernie won in a landslide, more than twice as many votes and delegates as runner-up Biden. Because it was such a blowout, none of the candidates were going to sue the party over this or that delegate being wrong.

For people following Bernie, you might remember this moment: probably the high point of morale for any reformist socialist or social democrat in the United States in many years. It’s hard not to connect Bernie’s impending doom with that other impending doom hanging over us at the end of February 2020.

The Stench

After all the votes were cast, it was time to clean up. The email-sending squad from the DNC had all left, and no one had been in their office for a couple days. They had left all their trash, including uneaten food, such as an entire chicken carcass from one of their catered meals. The field staff wasn’t allowed to be in the office nearby HQ, but we were required to go there to clean up after the more important people who were using it.

I was probably 20 feet from the door when our supervisor opened it and I got hit with a physical wave of stench. A childhood full of sinus infections leave me with a weakened sense of smell, but this wasn’t so much an odor as a steamroller, or a targeted command telling my body to retch.

Leaving

It was early March 2020, and I was convinced I never wanted to work in electoral politics again. I wanted to be a union organizer. With plenty of postings at union-jobs.com, I thought it would be pretty easy to find a position, so I declined the bosses’ invitations to stay on.

I ended up staying with my parents and collecting unemployment until I moved back to Seattle in 2021 instead.

After I Left

You might have heard about the entire staff of the party quitting, giving themselves a severance payment for doing so. If not, you should have, because I think it’s rather instructive.

Basically, someone from DSA (and it’s important to emphasize it was just “someone,” not a democratically-decided-upon DSA project) won the leadership of the party, so the Dems, instead of handing over the infrastructure, torched it instead. The same party that didn’t have the money to pay us handed over $450k that they just had sitting around to Cortez Masto’s fund.

State parties often run something called a “coordinated campaign:” basically, it doesn’t make sense to have entirely separate campaign structures for all these different Democrats in a state, so you’d have one campaign that would turn people out for all your candidates, whether they’re Governor, Senator, Representative, etc. Makes sense. The NV Dems always ran this in off-cycle elections. In 2022, though, that power was taken away from the state party, and given to Washoe County (where Reno is, about seven hours north of Vegas). But, with no staff, how was Washoe County, of all places, going to run this? By hiring a company of all the former NV Dems staff to do it, of course. (And I’d be surprised if they were unionized this time around, like they were before.)

Which leads me to some conclusions.

Conclusion I: Taking over the Infrastructure of the Democratic Party will not Work

Don’t try to take over the Democratic party like that, they’ll never just hand it over to you. Some people might protest that Trump’s bootlickers have successfully taken over local Republican parties from more establishment Republicans, but it’s a totally different scenario: none of the Republican officials want to piss off Trump, whereas Democratic ones would gladly piss off Bernie just because they hate him. The Republican party basically gets taken over by a new upstart wing every decade, from Nixon to Reagan’s hard-right to the neo-conservatives to Trump, but there’s no similar history for the Democrats.

Establishment Democrats will not weigh the pros and cons of socialist organizers and reasonably conclude that while they disagree on some economic issues, at least they’re on the same page about things like abortion rights and protecting LGBT people. They hate socialists with nearly the same passion that they hate Trump, and probably more than they hate pre-Trump conservatives. They will salt the earth and burn the infrastructure rather than hand it over to socialists.

Conclusion II: Electoral-Campaign-by-Electoral-Campaign Union Organizing isn’t a Long-Term Strategy

For those non-union-nerds out there, you might not realize how different the structure of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA are from other unions. I’m not an expert on them, but my basic understanding is that you don’t show up to a movie set non-union, and then organize it, go through the NLRB, and hope you get a contract before the movie finishes; people join the unions, which already have contracts with the studios covering the entire industry, and each production signs onto the existing union contracts. Then, those union members go to work for those productions that have agreed to the unions’ rules. Movies don’t use non-union labor because they’d get boycotted by all the other workers.

Campaign workers desperately need a similar system. Under the current (non-)system, only a minority of political campaigns are going to be unionized, and it’ll be a hodgepodge of wildly different contracts and pay rates, each negotiated individually. No one is covered on day one of a new campaign; you have to spend half your time fighting for the union while trying to do your actual job simultaneously.

How I’d imagine it working is that CWG forms an alliance with traditional large unions, and makes a demand of the DNC and other big organizations that every Democratic or “progressive” political campaign in the country needs to only use union labor, or else [insert thing the unions could threaten the DNC with here, use your imagination]. They negotiate a sector-wide contract. Then, anyone who gets a job on a campaign has to join the union and is covered under the contract from day one.

It’s not a perfect solution (and any anarchist reading this will certainly have reasonable objections about how top-down and not bottom-up it is), but as long as we’re running electoral campaigns, I can’t think of a better way to protect the workers.

Conclusion III: Electoral Politics is a Massive Sink of Resources and is Rewiring our Brains

Just like as workers, we worked such long hours that we lost the ability to talk or think about anything other than our jobs in electoral politics, as a country, we’ve focused so much on electoral campaigns that we’ve lost the ability to do or even think about non-electoral ways to make political change.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with voting, or registering other people to vote, but the all-encompassing focus on it means that everything else gets filtered through a vision where the only pathway is electoral changes. Imagine a conservative and a liberal see a news story about a strike on the docks by longshoremen. Conservatives are going to filter it through their Fox News propaganda and somehow link it to, “this must be because of DEI programs somehow.” Liberals are going to wonder how the strike impacts the election, and maybe whether it’s a ploy by a pro-Trump union to support him by tanking the economy. Neither is analyzing it as a political action on its own terms, without some external filter applied to it.

It’s not even that people are burning themselves out on electoral organizing (though some are); it’s just their focus, their news consumption. Liberals are reading the news and scrolling through five hours of takes on the election and the latest polls every day and feel exhausted from all the energy they’ve just put into politics, despite not doing anything productive.

It doesn’t even get better once the election ends: those people burned themselves out on electoral politics, and get hit with a wave of post-election exhaustion, like D&D characters after a Haste spell. Even if they were successful, once they’re done celebrating a win, they don’t put that same time into non-electoral work. They just go do something other than politics, and save up their time and attention for the next election cycle.

Conclusion IV: Anarchism!

We have to break the loop of stumbling in an exhausted haze from one election to another, over and over. We have to get people organizing, not for or against one candidate or party, but in ways unrelated to elections. Some people might argue that we need to devote some energy toward electoral politics, that we can’t just abandon it entirely. Maybe that’s true. But it feels like about 99% of our political energy is spent on electoralism. We have to move that balance toward everything else: organizing our workplaces into labor unions, our buildings into tenants’ unions, our neighborhoods into communities that will fight for each other when we have to. We have to do organizing that I, a straight white guy focused on workplace organizing, can’t even conceive of, because it’s outside of my personal experiences.

What ended up making me an anarchist was not just realizing that I didn’t think electoral politics was going to win us socialism, but seeing how it sapped resources that could be going into things that, just maybe, could. It was seeing not just that the Democrats are bad, but that the entire hierarchical structure that mandates some people make all the decisions and some people blindly follow orders is ineffective.

Control what you can control. You can’t decide the next president by yourself, so start small and build from there: talk to your immediate neighbors, your coworkers. We’re at a time uniquely deprived of community. We have to build community ourselves.