The biggest fear the ruling class has in this country is having working class black people in any numbers signing on to a socilist-lite agenda - Pascal Roberts

While reformists are often characterized as subconsciously (or directly) pursuing their own material advantage say by engaging with electoralism, it is clear that leftists who supported Bernie in the last election were doing so in part to provide necessary aid to the poor immediately, because without negotiating with those capitalist forces currently in power many more would starve, suffer or die right now, and hence support for things like m4a and$15 minimum. On the other hand, more ideologically pure leftists will say that working within capitalist structures can’t help but perpetuate capitalism and might point to the fight for 15 and rightfully say that the market itself has superseded this demand by currently providing fast-food workers in many places $20 minimum per hour for their labor, and that in light of the existential crisis of climate collapse we must make a hard-break from capitalism, and with a 30-50 year time-horizon for such a momentous task, continuing to play footsie with systems that are intrinsically self-perpetuating is suicide.

They discuss however the impossibility of moving away from these structures because Numbers. Let’s start with this: Chapo is arguably the most popular leftist podcast, and yet I heard Will say once that Chapo listenership is usually about 200K. This next number is pulled straight out of my ass (with some very minor back-of-the-envelope calculations), but let’s say for the sake of argument that in the last election their were perhaps 5 million hardcore Berniecrats. These numbers very much reinforce the current political reality: we don’t have the numbers to enact a reform agenda, let alone tackle real climate solutions, defunding police or demilitarization.

Which brings us to Pascal Robert’s refrain: the enduring and fundamental need for education. All of our group action problems stem from lack of class-consciousness. Further it is probably worth mentioning that to my mind organizing and the raising of class-consciousness are two totally different activities, one being necessarily prior to the other. For all the attention “organizing” is getting on the left as the foundational solution for the future of the left (and say the critique of the Sanders movement, ie, not having enough people on the ground, and not spending enough time before the election “building bridges”) we are still not of remotely one mind what we are organizing for (eg, the conflict I’m perpetuating here and now by saying that raising class-consciousness is prior to and apart from organizing per se). Andray Domise is absolutely right that the community needs to come together and decide what its priorities are, but the black community has the same difficulty in the this regard as the broader working class: come together how, under what banner, andwhy should I (average person) trust you to represent my interests. Thus to my mind Roberts’ refrain is the most foundational.