“Sewer Socialism” is Making a Comeback. But Will it Save Us?

Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral race, and those who still believe in the electoral system have been patting themselves on the back. There’s a lot to be impressed by from the campaign; NYC’s voter turnout was the highest it's been in over 50 years, and 104k volunteers were mobilized to support it. So far, he’s made moves to try and build housing while protecting tenants, attacked junk fees, and introduced state-funded free childcare.

Mamdani’s grassroots force was able to defeat the Cuomo dynasty; the progressive platform Mamdani ran on represents an alternate path for politics in the swirl of Trump 2.0’s vortex. Trump and Mamdani actually met in the White House recently, and it was very cordial; this adds an extra wrinkle to our understanding of the moment. Given previous choice words they had for each other, this was a bit of a surprise. The fact that they were able to avoid blows led many folks to take another victory lap.

This win feels counterinsurgent when you add everything together. This is not because I imagine it as literally welded to some specific CIA program that would be uncovered from a declassified document in 50 years, nor does it feel this way because of it impeding some capital-I insurgency that is taking place or could take place in NYC (paranoid claims of Mamdani establishing “Communist Sharia Law” be damned). It's the amount of energy put into it, from the actual effort of the organizers, to the emotional allegiance (”hearts and minds”) that people have to Mamdani. It serves the function, even while having a different form.  

This level of faith in electeds, even though they’ve proven themselves to be ineffectual, traitorous, or both, is concerning. The idea of doing “real politics” in these instances means getting “radical” people in office (which we are unable to do more often than not), and… hoping that they stick to their ethics. What sense does that make when the system itself and the concessionary nature of realpolitik means betraying that?

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We cannot, in this settler colonial context, hope that getting people elected will free us (especially for those of us that aren’t settlers). Not only will it not work, but the sentiment of “every vote [as] a yes for capitalism” is exacerbated on stolen land controlled by slaveholders, where their government has opted for reparations and land for settlers, rather than anything of the sort for the whole of Black and Native populations.^[1]

Even with that in mind, given the high emotions of the moment, there are things I can find appreciation in, in spite of my distaste for the theater of elections. There has been an increasing shift in recent times towards local politics, to the extent of questioning the health of the nation-state.^[2] The focus on the local is critical, especially given the more widespread unreliability of national-level programming, with a notable exception being anything coming from militaristic bodies like the Department of Homeland Security.

However, by seeing the local through the lens of electoralism, parochialism can easily take root. “Common denominator” politics—whether we’re talking about Mamdani’s campaign planks of “fast and free buses, universal child care and freezing the rent” or the Milwaukee “sewer socialists” of the 20th century—fighting for the immediate benefit of the working class can keep people from dreaming bigger. These are reasonable things to focus on,^[3] but we have to be careful about how we get them. Reforms can be won, but it generally comes at the expense of revolution.

This is due to a myriad of factors, but the main one ties into the “incidental counterinsurgency” point from earlier. The level of emotional investment that electoralism-as-strategy engenders makes it difficult to imagine other pathways. Any divergences from or challenges to electoral work tend to be taken as personal attacks. If I were to tell a canvasser who truly believes in revolution that the approach they took wasn’t the most consistent way for our communities and society to move towards communism, they might reflect on all of their experience of doing the work and the affect it gives them, rather than analyze their conditions and do a comparative analysis.^[4] They could just as easily understand their work in a more analytical way, but the very fact of doing the work, especially in this way, points towards a gap in the understanding.

Even with the dangers and pitfalls, we should fight for the kind of things that provide immediate relief to folks. The devil is in the details, though.^[5] A good way to break it down is this: Mamdani’s campaign represents a progressive push. I advocate for a radical one.

Political conversations tend to see progressive movements and ideas as related to if not interchangeable with radical ones. I don’t. While progressivism is about expanding the bounds of liberalism so as to be more “inclusive” through intent or through results, radicalism is about uprooting liberalism, capitalism, and all the other forms of domination that are keeping our society rooted in misery.

Radicalism sees the systems of domination being fought against as a hydra; sometimes we have to cut off the heads to avoid being bitten, but by doing that alone, we just create a space out of which one or more heads emerge. We have to cauterize the wounds if we want the heads to stop growing.

That doesn’t even get to actually taking down the hydra. Radicalism is about more than responding to crises and trying to handle them. It can be doing that, but, for radicals, the intent is broader. Crises are addressed in a way that works to respond to their animating logics, systems, institutions, and (by)products.

The hard part about doing truly radical things is that the logic behind it is necessarily abductive. Radicals can only rely on our interpretation of the past and our understandings of how the world works in order to change it; we can’t make some of the guarantees that progressives can, pointing to specific instances of policy changes bringing about the incremental improvements that they do.^[6] Our movements have to sustain us in ways that themselves challenge the social relations of the present.

This leaves us with a classic question: the fuck do we do? Well, the answers are manifold, but we’ve established some guidelines. If our answers don’t have a radical bent to them, we risk allowing the problems of society to continue to entrench or even exacerbate through resignation, or make things incrementally better for some people at the expense of others through reform.

In a general sense, my ideas for radical change revolve around building a decolonial, egoistic, popular power on one hand and a deep-seated negation on the other, where they are composed and braided together through (eco)(trans)feminist communization.

Given that these borrow from anarchism and more insurrectionary communisms, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for statecraft and electoral stuff. That’s how it should be, in my estimation; folks working to figure out how to build stateless and “democratic”^[7] communities that point us towards a world beyond patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism.

However, I’m fully willing to admit that my idea of radical change is pretty bespoke. I’m not going out of my way to proselytize and look for converts. More importantly for this conversation, the pull of electoralism is strong. Given that people will probably continue to engage with it until the wheels fall off, I think that it’s worthwhile to sketch out a way to relate to it. What follows is a kind of “anti-electoral” electoralism, where it is seen as a (dangerous) tool out of many, and should be engaged with accordingly.^[8]

Starting from a steely-eyed acceptance that participating in the voting machine is supporting, through legitimation, capitalism (colonialism, and all of its interconnected forms of domination),^[9] this is a potential pathway for voting to do what those who genuinely believe in it and what they say can be explored in a way that is accountable to its so-called constituency.

Firstly, let’s talk about politics. A good way to understand political discourse is that it generally revolves around who has power, conceived in a specific way: it’s getting people to do something that you want them to do, regardless of what they want.

This is how you get conversations around purity politics and its response, an acquiescence to realpolitik, which colors the discourse around basically every left politician.

That is a kind of power, (or, said otherwise, a way that power can manifest) but it’s not the only way to conceive of power.^[10]

A more useful way that I’ve found to look at power comprehends it in multiple ways (including those that can point to more egalitarian ends than the kind of Machiavellian orientation of politics) around relationships to capacities. That is to say, power is not only what you can do, but it’s what you can do in view of how you can do it. This indicates a possibility of domineering power, but it can also be the non-hierarchical power of relationality and collectivity.

With this more expansive understanding of power in tow, we have something that can help us judge what we describe moving forward, with some inspiration from an excellent Strange Matters article: Contra Contra.

The core insight there is that power flows from having money. This is why 100,000 Democratic Michiganders were able to vote Uncommitted but not make any waves from a policy or even symbolic perspective with the Democrats. They continued to fund Israel and not put in work towards a ceasefire. On the other hand, Joe Biden had to drop out of the race once some donors made a fuss.

So, Contra Contra proposes establishing federations of cooperatives, funded from a seed money pool of well-to-do DSA members, starting from the end of the supply chain with businesses in retail, app dev, and service, and working up the chain to manufacturing and agricultural capacity, supported by interlinking them with financial institutions at the core. This group could then focus on putting their power behind desirable local candidates and electeds before scaling to state, regional, and even (inter)national levels, creating a more accountable pole of power than the capitalists or NGOs.

An extra lever of power comes from the ways this federation could influence political staffers (i.e., the folks who work for politicians), as their career prospects incentivize them to go into lobbying if they want to make good money. There could be something more mission aligned in the federation that also gives them materially better career options.

The federation could even be a source of workers for the administrative wing of the government, entering into it to effectively administer programs in a way that’s more aligned with social movement goals. This allows for there to be yet another layer of influence from the social movement in government.

Paired with this, a good general orientation would be to stop cooperative members from becoming elected officials, or allowing elected officials to come into the cooperatives, as the incentives there are a bit too perverse.

A key intent of this is accounting for the balance of forces, making sure that dealings between the government and social movements are either directly in favor of social movements, or at least moving things in that direction. This helps stem some of the issues of unaccountability and co-optation that we see so often in “representative” systems.

However, I see this federation of coops as only one piece of the puzzle. It hints at funding candidates, maybe even running them, but where do they come from?

To further increase the accountability, and put our thumb on the scales, we can have the electeds be delegates from community assemblies. This would mean building spaces of deliberation that are separate from and parallel to the state, where multiple people can come together on non-hierarchical terms and chart out what they want to see in the world.

This space could be a kind of interface for multiple organizations and even movements (and cooperatives) to come together to help coordinate the execution of critical tasks. This could make sure that the federation doesn’t stray from the needs of the communities that it is a part of, in the same way that the federation can keep electeds accountable through having a big say in their funding.

The importance of delegates coming from assemblies is that they would be trusted members of the community who are instantly recallable by the assemblies, and it allows people to have more of a say than they’d get through the official ballot process. So, the federation can put weight behind people in office who are amenable to a (libertarian) socialist agenda, propping up folks from the community who also fit that bill.

However, we can’t get it twisted: the government is the enemy. We should basically see all of this engagement as a kind of spycraft, even to the extent of treating electeds we fund and/or run as agents. This is critical, as it will enable the assembly to not fall into just being a candidate generator (in the best case). It should maintain its multipurpose nature, dealing with a myriad of issues, many of them doing the work of building dual power. Election stuff should be considered a very minimal part of an assembly’s docket, if at all.

So: our delegates are “agents”. It makes sense that they would have a “handler”, which is someone (another delegate or delegated working group) who they work with to make sure that they are actually acting as an extension of the people’s desires. They would be the main point of contact in between meetings and be there for them through this job, as it would probably be pretty hard to stray from the path once you’re actually within (h)arms reach of the people who rely on you.

The handler can also bring in more people to support the unit built around the official, and help them shape their tactics for the strategy and program that they’ve been given.

There should be open lines of communication between this team of people and the rest of the assembly, with the ability to instantly recall anyone who does something harmful or is just generally not able to function in the role, if the issues can’t be rectified.

The delegate that moves into an elected seat would be able to be called on at any time to attend an assembly meeting, and to prioritize that space over any “official” space.

The hardest part might be getting people into the assembly space, but that could be where some of the more “immediate needs” strategies come in. Providing and/or opening access to food and other necessities will be key in making it a space people want to be in. That, alongside tapping the federation resources to supercharge cultural and fun gatherings and experiences will be huge.

A couple of things the sewer socialists got right were their “bundle brigades” of delivering language-appropriate newspapers to keep their communities informed, and “socialist carnivals”. Having events like that, alongside doing deep canvassing^[11] efforts would allow the assemblies to become threads that meaningfully weave together the social fabric.

That’s the basic idea. To tie it all together:

1. People would create assemblies in their locales that would federate and act as multipurpose interfaces to share information and resources across a community. They’d confederate with other non-hierarchical formations and do the same over wider geographical spaces;
2. these assemblies would be federated with various kinds of cooperatives that are working to build out their own socialized access to the means of production and money, so that they can finance elected officials, shifting the balance of forces so as to hold them accountable (while retooling what "accountability" means as to be more just);
3. elected officials not already in office (and a maximal amount of officials moving forward) would first be elected as delegates from the assemblies, subject to instant recall and obligated to prioritize the assembly as their strategic, tactical, and programmatic base, and;
4. these elected officials will be supported and held accountable by “handlers” who would act as a confidant and accountability partner, being the point of contact between meetings with the assembly.

As this is a sketch, big questions remain for this strategy. Beyond questions of amenability with anarchism,^[12] it remains to be seen how to fight against things like (the ideological if not material power of) PACs and not get stuck in the weeds there. The delegation process will also need to be fleshed out. Instant recallability has been pointed out, but how will that function? What might it look like to do the act of recalling someone? How is the delegate picked? I’d suggest people to collate nominations and select someone using systemic consensing or STAR voting,^[13] but it could be sortition or some other method of selection that isn’t even voting.

Another big question is how to justify using movement money for electoral pursuits, rather than focusing on building autonomous care programs for people (especially those on the margins who can’t reach or have unreliable access to the mainstream/public/private ones).

There also needs to be some thinking on how different rank-and-file organizations like unions, existing town halls, community organizations, and other formations that might be part of an asset based community development program could contribute to this, if at all.

Finally, as the seed funding is coming from well-off people in the professional-managerial class, rather than the kinds of people that would be populating those startup businesses, how do we make sure that this is a good way to go, and doesn’t maintain bloc divides within the wider working class? This is a sizable hurdle, especially as the vast majority of DSA is white. Would it be a kind of “non-dilutive funding” situation, where those with outsized monetary power forfeit governing power?

Regardless, those PMC folks should be deprioritized in favor of lower class folks, so that whatever is built is sure to benefit them, while creating a vehicle that can weather the storms of insurrection and revolution (or at least be sturdy enough to hop off and get on something better if necessary).

I don’t necessarily have a great answer to these questions, beyond the one that I presented earlier: people are going to engage with electoral stuff, and the electoral system is not disappearing any time soon. The hope that people feel from recent electoral wins is real and understandable. I just want us to make sure that we don’t let our emotions get hijacked, costing us emancipation.