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Monbiot: we face systems collapse

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brendan
11th January 2022

Teaser Media

Democratic socialists are slowly becoming a force in New York state politics. But as the movement grows, it faces backlash and new obstacles.

State Senator Julia Salazar speaking to the press about efforts to decriminalize sex work in New York. (Erik McGregor / LightRocket via Getty Images)

It’s a familiar story by now. In 2018, a bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, mobilizing volunteers through Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Justice Democrats, defeated the head of the Queens Democratic Party, becoming a Congresswoman and international phenomenon. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign had inspired a spike in DSA membership and activism, and with AOC’s victory, the group enjoyed yet another surge, politicizing many young people who had never considered socialism before.

The same year, in North Brooklyn, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) threw down for an activist named Julia Salazar, who won her race for state senate, becoming the only DSA-endorsed politician in Albany. In the next election cycle, NYC-DSA endorsed more candidates for state senate and assembly races. Four of them won — in the assembly, Zohran Mamdani of Queens, and Brooklyn’s Marcela Mitaynes and Phara Souffrant Forrest; and in the state senate, Brooklyn’s Jabari Brisport — making, with Salazar’s reelection the same year, a slate of five (a sixth socialist, Emily Gallagher, who also won a seat in the assembly that year, has since joined the group). In 2020, as well, Jamaal Bowman, a Bronx school principal and longtime education activist endorsed by NYC-DSA, joined Ocasio-Cortez in Congress.

This is more state power than New York City socialists have enjoyed since the 1920s. To figure out how to use it, those politicians, and NYC-DSA, have had to work quickly. As Salazar told Jacobin about her socialist slate, “We’ve spent the last year learning how to exist.”

Taxing the Rich

Despite the excitement around these recent victories, NYC-DSA has not been content to simply elect socialists, and rightly so, as that would simply result in adding more socialists to the Democratic Party machinery, without building the movement or advancing any of its specific goals. Although the work of electioneering has continued — with two DSA candidates winning seats on the New York City Council this year — the chapter has also been finding new ways to use electoral politics to advance its own policy agenda and build the socialist movement.

Measures have been taken to support the group’s elected politicians while also keeping them focused on socialist goals and principles, as well. A NYC-DSA committee called Socialists in Office ensures that on the state level DSA’s elected officials act in significant coordination with DSA, holding meetings between the slate and NYC-DSA members. Its aim is to ensure that the organization’s issue campaigns are in sync with the elected officials’ legislative work, and discuss new issues or bills they should take on, a union organizing drive or other campaign to which an elected official could lend visibility. These meetings take place weekly.

“In the world of an elected official,” Salazar emphasizes, “that’s very frequent. I’m not necessarily proud of this but, I love my mom very much, and text her every day but I don’t know that I even call her weekly.”

Socialists in office in New York State (L-R): Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, Zohran Mamdani, Jabari Brisport, Emily Gallagher, and Julia Salazar. (Courtesy NYC-DSA)

The state senator also emphasized the duration of the call, adding, “There’s hardly anyone in my life that I spend an hour and a half on a call with every single week.” On top of that, the slate spends significant time meeting with one another, texting, supporting each other through frustrations and strategizing on their legislative agenda.

The offices of NYC-DSA’s elected officials are also becoming hubs for organizing in their districts, as well as for providing constituent services to working-class people coping with everything from food insecurity to potholes and school bus delays. NYC-DSA has been working to combine these two functions, on the insight that many constituents who call the office may be open to organizing politically to change the institutional structures at the root of their complaint.

The offices of NYC-DSA’s elected officials are also becoming hubs for organizing in their districts.

For example, when tenants call DSA-backed Assemblywoman Phara Souffrant Forrest’s office about a problem with their landlord, her staff or volunteers might help them organize a tenants’ union in their building. DSA members provide extensive volunteer labor for these efforts, which go beyond answering the phone calls and emails that come into the elected official’s office with problems; volunteers even knock on constituents’ doors to seek out such problems and let them know how Forrest’s office can help.

Considering that as a group, they’ve only been in office for a year, the accomplishments of all this work on NYC-DSA’s part have been significant, swelling the group’s membership, yielding several legislative victories, and helping many workers’ and tenants’ struggles.

Each of the elected officials work on their own to advance legislation, or take action that helps their working-class communities. One example is Forrest’s “Less is More” bill — cosponsored by State Senator Brian Benjamin — which reforms the parole system so that people are far less likely to spend time in jail on technical parole violations. They’ve also used their high profile as elected officials to work with DSA in solidarity with local labor struggles.

Along with one of his progressive Assembly colleagues, Yuh-Line Niou, Zohran Mamdani joined taxi drivers in a fifteen-day hunger strike to demand relief for drivers facing crippling debt, a rampant problem given the predatory structure of New York City’s cab industry, one that has even led to several suicides among drivers. In early November, they won many of their demands and ended their fast. Mamdani is now pursuing several legislative strategies to ease the economic pain of cab drivers.

By far the biggest legislative achievement — for the slate and for NYC-DSA — was the 2021 state budget. NYC-DSA ran a grassroots “Tax the Rich” campaign, in which a thousand volunteers made phone calls and hung flyers on New Yorkers’ doors, asking them to call their legislators and demand that the budget address critical social needs — funding food pantries, schools, public transit, hospitals, emergency unemployment — by taxing the state’s wealthiest residents. Within the first week alone, more than nine hundred people reached by NYC-DSA’s volunteers called their legislators. “Tax the Rich” was the most successful launch of any single-issue campaign in the chapter’s history.

Members of the DSA slate also engaged in extensive activism and lobbying on the specifics of the budget. Assemblywoman Marcela Mitaynes joined other activists on a hunger strike demanding that the budget include an “excluded workers fund” for immigrants not included in the federal COVID relief programs.

“Tax the Rich” was in many ways a successful campaign: the legislature ended up passing the biggest increase in tax revenue in almost a century, and says Salazar, “arguably the most progressive state budget that New York has ever seen.” The budget included a long-overdue commitment to fully fund public schools, which education justice activists had been fighting for, in the courts and in Albany, for decades. It also included housing assistance and an excluded workers’ fund.

DSA was, at the time, muted in its declarations of victory. After all, the budget fight had showed the limitations of the socialists’ power — they only won a tenth of the new revenues they demanded.

‘Tax the Rich’ was the most successful launch of any single-issue campaign in the chapter’s history.

They also lost on some key issues, including vouchers for the homeless, full funding for CUNY, and the size of the excluded workers’ fund. As DSA activist Fainan Lakha, Phara Souffrant Forrest’s chief of staff, said, addressing the volunteers on a Zoom call at the time, the legislature proved willing to save existing programs but not to “build anything new.”

To overcome the moneyed resistance to building anything new — single-payer health care in the state, for example – DSA needs more power. That means, more members, more elected officials, bigger and more active chapters all over the state. Still, speaking of the 2021 budget, “I count that as a victory and it’s arguably the thing we have done together this year that has had the most significant impact on people’s lives,” says Salazar.

The Backlash

It’s perhaps not a surprise that the conservative side of the Democratic party, the faction tied to ruling class interests, especially the real estate industry, responded to the budget victories with rage and revenge. In Buffalo, DSA-endorsed mayoral candidate India Walton beat longtime incumbent Byron Brown in a Democratic primary this year, the fallout become clear. Jay Jacobs, chair of the New York State Democratic Party, enraged that the socialists in Albany had successfully raised taxes on the rich, parried the argument that the party should support the winner of the mayoral primary in Buffalo with an outlandish hypothetical: What if the primary voters had endorsed David Duke?

The real estate–funded wing of the Democrats was willing to work with Republicans to beat Walton, even though the Republican turnout predictably cost the Democrats other races, especially a sheriff’s seat, as Raina Lipsitz reported for the New Republic. Despite winning the primary fair and square and facing no official Republican candidate, then, Walton lost the general election. Brown called his victory “a rebuke of socialism.”

India Walton walks to a polling place with supporters in Buffalo, New York, on October 28, 2021. (Matt Burkhartt for the Washington Post via Getty Images)

The centrist Democrats — and given the outcome of the sheriff’s race, even more so the Republicans — won that round, but the Democratic Party is far less unitary and disciplined in its relationships to socialists than this episode, taken on its own, might suggests. Salazar says Jacobs is trying to divide the left of the party by vilifying the socialists, and especially by stigmatizing popular policies as socialist when they risk offending big real estate and finance industry donors.

But, despite the result in Buffalo, Salazar says of the New York Party chair’s rhetoric, “I haven’t seen the response that Jay Jacobs would want.” Many active in the Democratic Party, including many of her Albany colleagues, she says, “recognize that it’s absurd. And I think people aren’t afraid of the word socialist anymore.”

Fellow Travelers?

Illustrating Salazar’s point, Democrats in Albany work with the socialists on issues of common ground, cosponsoring bills and even joining protests together. In a more direct rebuke to the Jacobs side of the party, both New York senators, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, who are centrist Democrats, endorsed India Walton after she won her primary. Schumer has embraced some of the socialists’ top priorities, even showing up for the taxi workers’ protest. Salazar explains, “Senator Schumer is a shrewd politician who has his ear to the ground, and sees that politics are changing and that communities are electing democratic socialists because these are the policies they support.”

In New York, Democratic Socialists of America–endorsed Julia Salazar was reelected to State Senate. (Photo courtesy Julia Salazar)

She points out that outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio, too, has been friendly when asked publicly about socialists and socialism, refusing to red-bait when asked directly about DSA: “To see that positive response from someone with a lot of power in an executive position,” she says, “tells me that they understand they have to work with us. That our movement is growing and it’s better to embrace it than pretend we’re powerless.”

Much more surprisingly, the moderate Democratic governor Kathy Hochul — former lieutenant governor who stepped into office after Andrew Cuomo unexpectedly had to resign his post amidst multiple sexual harassment allegations — has been somewhat responsive to socialist demands. Just after taking office, she called the legislature back into session to extend a moratorium on evictions, something many progressives support but that has been very publicly associated with socialists. Hochul also added significantly to the rental assistance program — another persistent demand from the DSA slate — and is now asking federal government to continue funding it.

Hochul not only signed a bill that Julia Salazar sponsored — giving tenants in loft buildings the same rights that other New York tenants enjoy, including to sue landlord who don’t provide heat and other basics; legislation that Salazar is not sure Cuomo would have signed — but initiated a press event in Salazar’s district to announce that she signed it, attracting press attention and allowing Salazar’s constituents to see her work supported by the governor.

Hochul and Schumer are no leftists, but they understand that NYC-DSA is here to stay. Their friendly gestures to the socialists illustrate one way that DSA’s presence in New York is reordering politics in the state.

Another sign is that the socialist victories are inspiring more democratic socialists to run campaigns for office that are not endorsed by NYC-DSA. Some are DSA members who unsuccessfully seek DSA’s endorsement and win anyway. Others are progressive politicians who might not have admitted their socialist sympathies and now feel emboldened to do so more openly. Julia Salazar uses the charmingly old-fashioned term “fellow travelers” to describe the whole spectrum of such politicians, while left journalist Ross Barkan calls them “DSA-lite.”

In Albany, that group includes Jessica González-Rojas, a Queens reproductive justice activist who won her assembly seat in the 2020 election, at the same time as the five new members of the DSA slate. The incoming City Council, in addition to two new DSA-endorsed members (Tiffany Cabán and Alexis Avilès), also includes several open socialists who are not part of the DSA slate, like Kristin Richardson Jordan and Shahana Hanif.

An outreach event cohosted by Jessica González-Rojas and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Other incoming “DSA lite” new members include Sandy Nurse, Lincoln Restler, Chi Ossé, and others. In some cases, DSA might want to organize them into joining its slate. Emily Gallagher, for example, was not endorsed by DSA when she ran for Assembly but has enthusiastically joined the DSA slate in Albany. Says Salazar, “I think we could be better or at least more intentional about bringing more of our colleagues into identifying as democratic socialists and caucusing with us.”

But others might remain fellow travelers and questions of how the organization should relate to them goes back to the 1920s (and later, the mid-century Mike Quill, who often supported the Communists but broke with them when he had to choose between their agenda and the interests of his fellow transit workers, specifically on a proposed fare hike). NYC-DSA has already made a few missteps in this area – sometimes splitting the socialist vote in races where more than one socialist is running – but as the group becomes more accustomed to operating in a political environment with more socialists, the art of working with fellow travelers should evolve.

Party Discipline

NYC-DSA works so closely with state senators and assembly members — an approach that will be replicated on the City Council level — that the concept of “accountability” almost doesn’t apply; the elected officials are part of the organization and integral to its work, and in this way there’s little room for them to stray from DSA’s principles or agenda. But the same can’t be said of congresspeople like Ocasio-Cortez, or Bowman, who are under very different pressures, especially on foreign policy issues, and are in any case still a minority within the Progressive Congress, which is itself a minority within the larger body. Recently Bowman fell afoul of DSA’s principle of boycotting travel to Israel; some members called for his expulsion from the organization, and a divisive fight within DSA ensued, much of it waged on the very public terrain of Twitter.

As unfortunate as it was, the fight may have led to some clearer thinking on how DSA should relate to its Congressional elected officials, and DSA’s National Political Committee has announced an effort to form a Socialists in Office structure to work more effectively with its Congressional members as well. With Congresspeople, DSA may not have the power, either to effectively execute what NYC-DSA electoral veteran Michael Kinnucan has called “the mean model of accountability,” in which the elected official does something members don’t like and, as he puts it, “we yell at her on Twitter” and possibly withhold endorsement next cycle, nor to work in coordination with them in a way that would necessarily benefit either side.

This new year should be a good one to build on the victories in the state legislature, and for the first time since the 1950s, create and fight for a socialist municipal agenda in the City Council.

The scale of Congress and the everyday pressures on Congresspeople are so much greater than state government or city council, such that it’s extremely difficult for a grassroots group to make itself essential enough to these politicians. Still, it’s clearly essential that democratic socialists serve in Congress, and the new effort to bring structures that have worked locally into the national sphere is intriguing.

This new year should be a good one to build on — and expand — the victories in the state legislature, and for the first time since the 1950s, create and fight for a socialist municipal agenda in the City Council. In Albany, short-term goals include expanding tenants’ rights, taxing the rich more, a return to free tuition at the City University of New York, and, perhaps most ambitiously and urgently given the federal government’s paralysis on climate, publicly owned power. In City Council, much can be accomplished on the budget, and although the incoming mayor is a conservative Democrat who has declared his antagonism to the socialists, DSA’s agenda on most issues will find many allies.

It’s not clear where all this is going in the long run. Long-term strategies are hard to come by in most local DSA milieus and we’re entering a period of extreme political uncertainty. It’s hard, for example, to predict how the politics of inflation will play out. Gun violence in cities also has political implications, but is beyond our control and difficult to anticipate. We don’t know if the far right will succeed in recapturing Congress or the presidency, eviscerating prospects for progressive politics at the national level.

Those are familiar problems but then there is some additional, uncharted terrain: How long will this pandemic persist? As for climate disasters, it’s probably a matter of when, how many, and how bad. Socialist legislators and mass movements have existed in the United States before, and have helped win reforms, but have never yet brought us close to a social democratic, much less a socialist, society. Then again — for better and for worse — they may never before have existed in the context of so many other multiple crises. In these ways, the moment challenges both prognostication and analogy.

The Long March

Within five years, it feels as if just about anything could happen. Yet at present it’s clear that DSA, even in New York, is nowhere near executive power. The organization did not engage in the recent mayoral race, for sound reasons: as Ross Barkan has pointed out, DSA still lacks the power to have an effect in a race that large. The outcome of that race showed the limits of NYC-DSA’s reach thus far. The new mayor, Eric Adams, a centrist former cop, has positioned himself as the voice of working-class Brooklyn, yet he is openly contemptuous of NYC-DSA and its goals. Given his close relationship to big real estate and finance, Adams and DSA could never be true allies, but most of the public disagreement has been on policing.

Tiffany Cabán, who narrowly lost her run for Queens district attorney in 2019, was elected to New York City Council District 22 in 2021. (cabanforqueens.com)

During a spike in homicides, and in the wake of a massive cultural reckoning on police violence, Adams presented himself as the candidate who, given his history as a law enforcement officer and as a black man who had experienced police brutality, would crack down on both the criminals and the cops. It’s not surprising that this message was popular with working-class New Yorkers concerned about public safety, especially in black neighborhoods.

By contrast, NYC-DSA’s City Council candidates pushed to defund the police, a harder sell especially in a year of horrifying news stories about violent crime: a “Subway Slasher” terrorizing riders on the A train and a child killed in a drive-by shooting. There is significant disagreement within working-class black communities about whether crime is best addressed by moving resources from police to other services, or by putting more cops on the streets.

NYC-DSA has chosen the “defund” side in that argument. It’s clearly not always a recipe for defeat: some of the NYC-DSA candidates touting “Defund the Police” most prominently, Tiffany Cabán, for example, did win. Volunteers on her campaign often found that voters resisted the idea of defunding the police but were amenable to persuasion. The call to “defund” has helped NYC-DSA to form relationships with the nationwide movement against racist police brutality.

On the other hand, in a climate of fear over crime, NYC-DSA’s embrace of the “defund” idea also allowed centrists like Eric Adams and Byron Brown to paint socialists as a menace to black working class safety. There is no one “working-class” view on policing, but so far, the “defund the police” message could complicate NYC-DSA’s efforts to build a mass electoral base. It’s a risky message both because it can seem out of touch with well-founded fears of crime, but also because to succeed as a policy, defunding the police will only work in tandem with many other social democratic reforms.

Democratic socialism was hardly expected to come overnight in a country like the US. There are, as organizer and author Jane McAlevey says, ‘no shortcuts.’

Defeating India Walton, Byron Brown declared victory over the notion of defunding police, despite her actually-nuanced approach to that issue. But in going after executive power, having the right message isn’t really the major challenge. NYC-DSA needs to continue to build power. While Walton’s primary victory in Buffalo was a good start, Buffalo is a much smaller city — the entire population is about a third of New York City’s electorate. It’s not clear that there is enough organizing capacity on the Left to win a mayoral or gubernatorial race.

This shouldn’t necessarily demoralize anyone. NYC-DSA’s successes so far are encouraging. While Bernie Sanders’ defeats were painful, democratic socialism was hardly expected to come overnight in a country like the United States. There are, as organizer and author Jane McAlevey often says, “no shortcuts.”

Bank forecasts slowdown in growth as world copes with Covid, inflation and higher interest rates

The risk of a hard landing for large parts of the global economy is rising as countries struggle to cope with the triple threat of Covid-19, inflation and higher interest rates, the World fBank has said.

In its half-yearly forecasts, the Washington DC-based Bank said it expected a “pronounced slowdown” in growth in the next two years, with the less well-off parts of the world especially hard hit.

Year was third-costliest extreme weather year on record with affected communities spread from coast to coast

The US was battered by 20 separate billion-dollar climate and weather disasters in 2021, one of the most catastrophic climate years on record which led to at least 688 deaths, according to the annual report of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Damage from the year’s 20 most costly disasters, which included thousands of wildfires burning across western states, frigid temperatures and hail storms in Texas, tornadoes in the south-east, and tropical storms saturating the east coast, totaled around $145bn.

Despite the pandemic’s impact, China has a long road to travel before it can surpass US economic power. Inter-capitalist rivalry is driving tensions between Washington and Beijing, not the personalities of Xi Jinping or Donald Trump.

The China Central Television (CCTV) Tower in Beijing, China, on December 13, 2021. (Andrea Verdelli / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

China was the first country to have borne the brunt of COVID-19 at the start of 2020. Western news reports from late January of that year described the scenes in Wuhan with a sense of disbelief.

Those emergency measures would soon become familiar throughout the world. Meanwhile, the Chinese government appears to have done a better job of containing the pandemic than the authorities in the United States.

The experience of COVID-19 has fed into perceptions that China will dominate this century in the way America dominated the last one. Joe Biden has made it a priority to head off that danger before it becomes a reality.

Ho-fung Hung is a leading expert on China’s political economy. He’s a professor in the sociology department at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World.

This is an edited transcript from an episode of Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.

Daniel Finn

What was the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Chinese economy in 2020? How far has it managed to recover since then?

Ho-fung Hung

The immediate economic impact, of course, was great, as it was in many other places. China was among the first economies to be hit by COVID-19. The Chinese government managed to contain the spread of the virus with some extreme lockdown measures, isolating whole regions of the country. During that time, production and consumption seized up, and many activities stopped.

However, coming into the summer of 2020, the virus was pretty much contained. The Chinese economy rebounded, with the help of a huge financial stimulus. It was just like the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The Chinese government told the state banks to open the floodgates of lending. If you look at the data for loan creation in the middle of 2020, it paid off with a strong economic rebound.

Coming into the summer of 2020, the virus was pretty much contained. The Chinese economy rebounded, with the help of a huge financial stimulus.

But this lending or financial stimulus increased the indebtedness that had already been haunting the economy since 2009. Coming into the middle of 2021, we already saw the Chinese economy slowing again, weighed down by the heavy indebtedness of many corporations. The pattern just recurred: like the situation after the financial crisis, the economy rebounded quickly with this stimulus, but in the long run, it also created a drag on the economy’s long-term performance.

Daniel Finn

Looking back over the past few years, how would you say the Trump administration affected political and economic relations between China and the United States?

Ho-fung Hung

It has definitely had an impact, but not on the long-term direction of US-China relations. As I have often argued, US-China relations have shifted from a kind of honeymoon situation to a more rivalrous relationship, starting with the Obama administration. It was after the global financial crisis that the Chinese state became more aggressive in securing a domestic market share for particular state-owned enterprises in China itself, later even expanding overseas to compete with foreign corporations — including, of course, US ones.

This intensifying inter-capitalist competition between Chinese and US corporations, as well as other corporations from Europe and Japan, was the underlying force behind the souring of relations between the United States and China. It all started in the second term of the Obama administration, which did a lot of things to change the direction of Washington’s China policy.

This included the pivot to Asia, with the deployment of more military aircraft carriers and Navy groups to the South China Sea to counteract China’s claims of sovereignty against its neighbors. At the same time, Barack Obama also sped up the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiation. He had the intention of lining up US allies (and some not-so-allies) in a free-trade package, excluding China, in order to put pressure on the latter.

In other words, they had all the practical measures that signaled this change, but diplomatically, the Obama administration continued to use very polite rhetoric when discussing issues with China. Interestingly, in the early days of his administration, there were signs that Donald Trump might be softer on China than Obama. For example, in the first half year after he was inaugurated in 2017, the Trump administration stopped the freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea. They didn’t send warships there for a few months.

Some of the Republicans, as well as Democrats, worried that this might be a sign of Trump being too soft on China. However, although Trump might have come in as a softer president when it came to China, that underlying inter-capitalist competition between the United States and China didn’t abate. In the end, Trump also had to get tougher on China — on trade and many other issues.

The big difference between Trump and Obama was that his rhetoric was rawer and used a lot of colorful language that made an impression on people and raised their awareness of what he was doing. As a result, there is a popular perception that US-China relations only took a turn for the worse under Trump, when in fact it started under Obama. The Biden administration is basically continuing many Obama-era approaches to China.

Daniel Finn

Following on from that point, how would you assess the policy of the new administration toward China, and how does the Chinese leadership perceive Joe Biden and his team?

Ho-fung Hung

The Chinese didn’t have any fantasies about the Biden administration. They are very much aware that this increasingly hard-line US approach to China started with Obama. During the 2016 election, many official media commentators and scholars in China were hoping out loud that Trump would win, because they thought that Hillary Clinton was likely to continue the policies of the Obama administration. But there was no fantasy about Trump later on, when structural forces pushed him toward a more hard-line approach.

A lot of tough US measures on China didn’t come from the White House but rather from Congress, with bipartisan support.

The same can be said with regard to the Biden administration. During the election in 2020, there was a lot of talk among official scholars and media in China to the effect that the Biden administration would not be very different from Trump. After all, a lot of tough US measures on China didn’t come from the White House but rather from Congress, with bipartisan support.

We can now all see that Joe Biden has been very tough on China. He didn’t revoke Trump’s tariffs. In its first few months, the administration was very active in lining up allies in Europe and Asia to form a united front with which to confront China. Not only in terms of rhetoric but also in terms of policy, it is clear that the new president has not pulled any punches, and indeed has continued with many policies of the Trump era.

Daniel Finn

You argued a number of years ago in your book The China Boom that it was a mistake to imagine China could actually overtake the United States in the global economic hierarchy. What was your reasoning behind that argument at the time? Do you think it still holds true today?

Ho-fung Hung

I think it does still hold true today. When it comes to China, it’s always very important to distinguish the rhetoric from the reality. We know from Chinese official media that there is a lot of talk about how China is going to overtake the United States in many areas. For example, people say that the Chinese currency is going to become a dominant global currency that can topple US dollar hegemony. But it’s questionable how much of this reflects reality.

China is definitely a very successful and important economy. But at the same time, it is still far behind the US in many different areas.

In The China Boom, I argued that we need to look at the data. We shouldn’t be fooled by the propaganda. China is definitely a very successful and important economy. It is one of the most important markets — one that corporations have to try and get into. But at the same time, China is still far behind the United States in many different areas.

In terms of currency, at the time of the 2008 financial crisis, there was a lot of talk about US dollar hegemony being over, with the Chinese currency replacing it as the global reserve currency. But now, more than a decade later, the US dollar is still the standard transaction currency and reserve currency in the world. The Chinese currency hasn’t made a lot of headway: in fact, there’s been some regression in its international usage, because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is jealously guarding its financial system and the currency is not yet freely convertible.

When China lends money to countries in the Belt and Road Initiative, or further afield in Latin America, it lends to them in dollars rather than in its own currency. China has been competing with Japan to become a top lender for many Southeast Asian countries. It has been able to outcompete Japan because the Japanese lend in yen while China offers to lend in dollars. Chinese exports are also mostly invoiced in dollars. This international usage of the Chinese currency lags far behind not only that of the US dollar but also of the British pound sterling.

In another area, the production of microchips, China relied on the United States or its allies. When Trump imposed sanctions on China, as parts of a US policy of cutting China off from high-tech sectors, many Chinese tech enterprises suddenly got into big trouble, because they could not obtain enough supplies of microchips.

Daniel Finn

What do you think has been genuinely distinctive about the leadership of Xi Jinping?

Ho-fung Hung

Many people think that Xi Jinping marks a huge departure from previous leaders. There’s no doubt that the CCP has been more confident and more aggressive in many ways: for example, in terms of unleashing its diplomats to direct insults at US leaders. On the other hand, just as in the case of the United States with Trump, there were already changes going on behind the rhetoric at a more structural level.

Since Xi came to power fully in 2013, his rhetoric and style has definitely been more aggressive. Another big change that he made was to abolish the term limit for a top Chinese leader, meaning that he can be a lifelong dictator, unlike his predecessors, who had a clear term limit of ten years, after which they were expected to leave the scene.

The revival of state capitalism and the squeezing of the private sector in China started in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

However, a lot of the change in China’s policy toward the US state and US corporations has been more structural in its origins. The revival of state capitalism and the squeezing of the private sector in China, as well as foreign companies, started in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The watershed moment in that respect was not really Xi Jinping coming to power, but rather the crash of 2008.

State bank lending kept a lot of well-connected enterprises afloat after 2008: even though they were not profitable, they still got loans and financial resources. There are issues with overcapacity and indebtedness in many state enterprises. The legacy of this stimulus in 2009–10 is that China has been struggling with economic slowdown, indebtedness, and sluggishness. It’s a typical overaccumulation crisis of the kind that Japan experienced in the 1990s.

With a shrinking overall pie, they have been trying to increase the slice of that pie going to the state enterprises by squeezing private enterprise in China and abroad more aggressively. They also began to export capital. Steel is one example: there was huge overcapacity in the Chinese steel industry, so China started to export steel all around the world, which created trade friction with a lot of different countries, including South Korea and some European states.

The watershed moment was the 2008 financial crisis and the Chinese stimulus that followed, which created this overaccumulation crisis in the Chinese economy, in turn prompting China to compete more aggressively with US and other foreign corporations. The coming of Xi Jinping to power overlapped with this structural change. Xi, like Trump, just made a trend that was already in place more apparent with a more aggressive style and rhetoric.

Daniel Finn

What do you think lies behind the crackdown by the Chinese government on some major companies — in particular tech companies?

Ho-fung Hung

It is a very interesting phenomenon that many people are discussing right now. Some will say that the Chinese government is finally paying attention to social justice and cracking down on these monopolies.

First of all, the target was the big tech company Alibaba and its affiliate the Ant Group, which had scheduled an IPO in overseas markets, before the Chinese government stopped it at the last minute. Tencent, another big tech company, has been facing huge criticism and regulatory pressure from the state. However, the attack has since moved on to all kinds of large, privately owned companies in China, including sectors like extracurricular tutoring, education, delivery platform companies, and many other firms.

But I’m skeptical about whether the concern of all this is with promoting social justice and cracking down on monopolies. If you look at the targets of this crackdown, they are all private companies in China, while these well-connected state or parastate companies have still been getting all the support they need to continue to be a monopoly. It is more about the insecurity felt by the state about its control of the economy. It is going after these private companies to ensure that the state companies can remain on top and will not be overshadowed by private enterprise.

There has been a recurrent theme in Chinese history of the state using private entrepreneurs to grow the economy, increase state revenues, and strengthen the empire.

There has been a recurrent theme in Chinese history, ever since the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century, of the state using private entrepreneurs to grow the economy, increase state revenues, and strengthen the empire. At the same time, when those private merchants became too influential and too powerful, then the state began to worry about them and cracked down on them. In some cases, the state confiscated their wealth or put them under arrest.

I think we are seeing a kind of recurrence of this history. In the early stages of economic growth, the Chinese state used private companies — including foreign companies — to grow and assist the projection of Chinese state power abroad. However, when they grew too big, particularly alongside this economic slowdown, the state began to feel the need to crack down on private entrepreneurs. I think this is the main impetus behind the recent crackdown.

Daniel Finn

What are the prospects for a Chinese labor movement, or at any rate for action by Chinese markers that is independent of the state?

Ho-fung Hung

In the last ten years, while there were no independent trade unions, we saw a lot of wildcat strikes and sporadic labor unrest across the country. As many people have pointed out, the new labor law that was instituted in the early 2000s was a response of sorts to these sporadic labor protests: they put pressure on the state to do something to improve the conditions of workers. But of course, there is always a kind of cat-and-mouse game at work: when labor wins something, the state and the capitalists always find a way to get around it. Some manufacturers and employers found a way to get around the new labor law and put workers back in a more precarious situation.

On the surface, we don’t see a so-called typical labor movement. But I’m confident that these forms of unorganized, spontaneous, and sporadic labor unrest and community protest are going to continue. It doesn’t need a formal organization. Sometimes a labor movement can even get better results when it’s less organized and more spontaneous.

For the time being, with the pandemic and a very aggressive crackdown on civil society by the Chinese government, it seems that protest of all kinds has died down. But if we take a longer-term perspective, I am quite confident that these spontaneous manifestations of protest and unrest will continue in different sectors. Sometimes it might not be a protest — it might be an everyday form of resistance, using all kinds of different tactics. I’m sure that this sort of resistance will go on and bring about change in the long run.

Daniel Finn

What environmental policies are being implemented by the Chinese leadership over the coming years? And how would you say the rivalry between China and the United States is likely to affect the handling of the global climate crisis?

Ho-fung Hung

Of course, the United States and China have to cooperate to solve the global climate crisis. In terms of China, there has been some progress with the expanded production of electric vehicles. It has also become the top producer of solar panels, wind turbines, and things like that. But there are also contradictions when it comes to environmental policy.

On the one hand, China sees a future in the market for green technology products and is investing a lot to expand capacity in those sectors. But at the same time, China has all kinds of other sectors, from steel mills to coal plants, that still have overcapacity. There are a lot of vested interests in the state and beyond that are tied to those sectors. China’s coal capacity is still growing, and it is also exporting coal plants to many other developing countries, as a solution to this problem of overcapacity and overaccumulation, instead of letting those sectors go bust and die.

Overall, it is a mixed bag. We see a huge expansion of the green technology sector but also of these old sectors. Of course, if China is going to join the global effort to fight climate change in a serious way, not merely paying lip service, it is going to require more coordinated efforts in terms of energy and new technology sectors. But right now, there is not much coordination. The growth of coal capacity is driven by the logic of economic growth and the overaccumulation crisis rather than by concern for the climate crisis.

Protesters take part in a rally over a hike in energy prices in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on January 5, 2022.

The world is in a period of global unrest. Since the financial crisis of 2008, every region of the globe has experienced levels of mass protest unprecedented in recent history, from the Arab Spring in the Middle East and Black Lives Matter in the U.S., to the farmers’ protests in India and the recent upheaval in Kazakhstan.

Yet decades of social movement struggle haven’t produced a break from capitalist domination, and in most places they have failed to even accomplish the more modest aims of reform. Meanwhile, the global climate crisis has added another layer of urgency to the task of social transformation.

What can past struggles teach us about the possibility of achieving a liberated world? In this interview with Truthout, Gareth Dale, co-editor of Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age, explains how his new volume attempts to this question by examining “revolts in the neoliberal era that … give glimpses of radically transformative potential.”

Anton Woronczuk: Why should the left study unsuccessful attempts to transform society?

Gareth Dale: A question that has exercised parts of the left is how will global capitalism meet its end: by destroying the conditions that enable complex social life or through radical social transformation? The latter is clearly preferable, however unlikely it currently appears. If we’re ever to see socialist revolutions, they will arise from situations of dual power, in which institutions centered among workers and oppressed communities challenge the established structures of domination at every level, from workplaces and neighborhoods up to the nation state and globally.

Such scenarios are rare, but their condition of possibility is the mass uprising. Even the revolts in the neoliberal era that we discuss in this volume give glimpses of radically transformative potential. And when they’re crushed or co-opted and contained, when the rehearsals become reversals, even then, some participants will have gained a concrete vision of revolutionary potential that points beyond the bourgeois framework. The chapters in this volume gather and analyze those visions. They study the detailed movement dynamics and strategies in each case, asking such questions as why the “whip of repression” could spark a rapid radicalization of protest, how reformist elements were able to clip the wings of mass insurgency, or how movements based around labor or around resistance to oppression, or the despoliation of nature, managed — or failed — to link up.

What are some general lessons for social movement organizers in Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age? What was common among the struggles that won enduring reforms or carried the struggle, in a sense, as far as it could go?

The most universal lesson is that mass upheavals are not timetabled; they take even the most starry-eyed activists by surprise. Another is that they’ve been more frequent in the neoliberal era than in any previous period of comparable duration. As recently as 1989, on the bicentennial of the French Revolution, it was fashionable to commit revolution to the Museum of Historical Curiosities — but in that same year the East German masses arose, and many more revolutionary episodes were to follow. Since the volume was completed, mass revolts have occurred in Algeria, Belarus, Hong Kong, Myanmar, and Sudan, to mention only a few, and even as we speak, another is kicking off in Kazakhstan.

And yet, in the neoliberal era no uprisings have seriously fractured the framework of capitalist domination. The reasons for this are many; we discuss them in the volume. One major factor is the capacity of representative democracy to absorb and integrate radical movements. We should recall that the neoliberal age was also one that saw political systems across much of the world shift to liberal democracy.

Of the insurgencies featured in the book, many began in undemocratic conditions and dissipated when democracy was attained. Radical-democratic aspirations found themselves tamed, diverted and confined within the liberal-market transition. East Germany and Czechoslovakia (1989-90) and South Africa (1990-94) fit this pattern. However, as neoliberalism became globally dominant, the tenor of insurgent episodes altered somewhat. The examples from this century discussed in the volume, including Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and Egypt, all evolved in clear opposition to the neoliberal order.

The most universal lesson is that mass upheavals are not timetabled; they take even the most starry-eyed activists by surprise.

The most radical of them occurred in a liberal democracy: Bolivia in 2000-03. There, during the “water war” and “gas war” centered on El Alto, workers and peasants united to wage a formidable struggle. Drawing on longstanding cultures of resistance, notably indigenous radicalism and also revolutionary Marxism, they created a network of insurgent power in the form of peasant assemblies and neighborhood councils. Their strength grew from the connections forged between the spontaneous popular risings and the more durable organizations. That combination is indispensable to any successful mass rising.

A final lesson: Our case studies all warn of the dangers of seeking ruling-class allies. In Egypt, to give a particularly blood-soaked example, the civic movement hooked up with the military in June 2013, in joint opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood government. The result of this error was counter-revolution and the violent repression of all opposition forces — whether secular or Islamic.

You wrote about the 1989 revolts in Central and Eastern Europe for this volume. One of the section’s interesting claims is that the collapse of the Soviet Union wasn’t solely due to economic decline, but also due to internal resistance from workers against the state. What is the importance of putting the working class back into this history?

The 1970s-1980s economic stagnation that resulted from the USSR’s inability to adapt its state-capitalist structures to a globalizing world economy while maintaining its military spending and regional hegemony, was of fundamental importance. But we should note that earlier workers’ revolts had constrained the room for maneuver of Moscow and its allied regimes. One such was the June 1953 uprising in East Germany. It was crushed by Soviet tanks but it also forced the East German regime to divert funds to welfare, slowing the pace of capital accumulation.

When mass insurgency reappeared in 1989, the bulk of the movement was working class, and at key moments industrial action was significant — notably the wildcat strikes of early October that played a key role in toppling the Berlin Wall. That this is ignored in most of the literature reflects a general trend. Mainstream accounts of mass rebellions invariably downplay their working-class constituencies. Whether in Algeria, Belarus, Myanmar, or Sudan, or indeed Kazahktsan right now, street demonstrations took the headlines but strikes were critical to the rebellion’s momentum. With their self-confidence and media contacts, middle-class individuals and organizations “grab the mic” and push their perspective to the fore.

Nevertheless, we must acknowledge a reality: Since the early 1980s we haven’t seen uprisings that center on the militant and independent activity of workers, and, relatedly, few mass movements have aspired to systemic social transformation. An example Sameh Naguib discusses in the volume is Egypt. There, industrial action was central to resistance in the years that preceded the revolution of 2011, and strikes played a critical role in deposing President Mubarak. But the industrial action in workplaces and the political protests in public spaces remained largely separate.

Roughly over the last decade, the United States has seen mass uprisings in the form of Occupy Wall Street, teachers’ strikes, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Repeatedly after these upsurges much of the organized left focused on pushing forward its demands through presidential and midterm elections. What do the “revolutionary rehearsals” in this volume tell us about the fate of movements that made electoral victories their primary strategy?

Needless to say, there are very good reasons to organize and campaign in the electoral arena. But when grassroots mobilization is suppressed on the grounds that it conflicts with electoral interests, this saps the popular energies in which, ultimately, all leftist success is rooted. The volume is littered with examples of electoralist strategies demobilizing radical-democratic movements. Claire Ceruti’s chapter on South Africa shows that mass mobilization was decisive in bringing apartheid to its knees, but as soon as the African National Congress (ANC) scented the whiff of elections it moved to stabilize bourgeois order and reined in the township and workplace agitation. The upshot: The nation’s (overwhelmingly white) ruling class maintained their villas and their other kleptocratic spoils, while the Black masses remained in penury.

When grassroots mobilization is suppressed on the grounds that it conflicts with electoral interests, this saps the popular energies in which, ultimately, all leftist success is rooted.

In Zimbabwe, one of several African revolts discussed by Leo Zeilig, the trade union federation set up a political party that was initially based among the poor, but when electoral objectives came to prevail, its social justice commitments withered and fell away. In Indonesia, the subject of Tom O’Lincoln’s chapter, a spirited left arose within a mass revolt, but its dominant strategy envisaged emancipation as following two separate steps: first, democratization, and only later a struggle for socialism. In practice, this led them to tail behind the established bourgeois political forces.

U.S. politics is different in some respects to Zimbabwe or Indonesia, but the electoralist dynamic is essentially the same. Look for example at the electoralist demobilization of the Black Lives Matter rebellion. As antiracist protesters diverted their energies from public protests to the phone banks, the streets were claimed by Trumpist forces, leading ultimately to their own mini-uprising: the occupation of the Capitol building. If the electoralist left identifies too closely with America’s plutocratically-managed democracy, it’ll risk ceding initiative for future “revolutionary rehearsals” to the far right.

Colin Barker and Neil Davidson, both of your co-editors of this volume, passed away in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Tell us a little bit about who they were and their legacy.

The volume was Colin’s brainchild. In a sense it’s a sequel to his Revolutionary Rehearsals which appeared 35 years ago. He and Neil were inspiring figures on the socialist left in Britain. This was so in their activism — they were both immersed lifelong in campaigns, coalitions and revolutionary organizations, always with humanity and humor — and in their ideas. Each of them focused on central problems in Marxist theory, particularly states and revolution.

Neil’s topics were nations and nationalism, then Scotland’s bourgeois revolution, and “uneven and combined development” and finally bourgeois revolution in general. His major work, How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, revived and clarified the concept of bourgeois revolution, by which he refers to state transformations that establish independent centers of capital accumulation.

Colin, meanwhile, was writing on state theory, and on the workers’ uprising in Poland of 1980-81. Later, he brought social movement theory and Marxist theory into conversation, exploring the relationships between class struggle and social movements. He looked at the role of mass struggles in driving meaningful socialist change, and was very partial to the words of Marx on why revolution is indispensable to a socialist transition: “not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”

Revolution, in the sense of the sort of historical uprising narrated in the case study chapters and also in the deeper sense of fundamental societal transformation, provides the subject for Colin and Neil’s valedictory essays that bookend the volume. In their different ways, both are assessing the long-term possibilities of system-transformative change, and exploring what revolutionary politics can mean in non-revolutionary times.

That global capitalism has entered a turbulent era is a safe bet today, with the probability of future pandemics, the certainty of increasing climate chaos, and the tensions and likely clashes between the declining U.S. imperium and its challenger to the East. Neil’s chapter discusses the relationship between such structural changes and the appearance of “revolutionary conjunctures” (such as arose in the late eighteenth century, the 1840s, 1917-23, 1943-48, and 1968-76), as well as the various senses of “the actuality of revolution.” One of these senses, he writes, concerns revolutionary preparedness: “the understanding that all forms of mass self-activity can be preparations for some greater moment of social transformation, if they are treated as such.” Although we can try to hasten the arrival of the next revolutionary conjuncture, it is not in our gift to initiate it. The key thing is to recognize the conjuncture, if and when it arrives, and to act accordingly.

Note: Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age is published by Haymarket Books. Read an excerpt here.

This week, several high-profile Republicans have suddenly become interested in reforming the infamously incomprehensible Electoral Count Act of 1887, which lays out the process for certifying the results of presidential elections. Most prominent among them is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who, in his typically animated way, said Wednesday that the law “obviously has some flaws. And it is worth, I think, discussing.” His whip, Senator John Thune, also said members of the caucus are open to the idea. Yuval Levin, a very influential policy voice among establishment Republicans, backed the idea in a New York Times column, as have some other conservative outlets.

Democratic leaders’ response has been extremely chilly. “It’s not a solution to the problem at hand, which is that right now in the United States of America, we need federal laws that guarantee the freedom and right of every American to have access to the ballot, to be able to vote,” Vice President Kamala Harris told PBS NewsHour. A White House spokesperson said that two Democratic bills already under consideration, “the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, are essential for protecting the constitutional right to vote, the rule of law, and the integrity of our elections … There is no substitute. Period.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer appears to be one of many Democrats who view the GOP’s openness on ECA reform as a ploy for splitting Democrats.

[Read: Trump’s next coup has already begun]

The Democrats have a point. ECA reform alone is a narrow fix, insufficient for the many problems in the voting system. Republicans’ new rumblings about reform may just be a cynical feint. But Democrats should take the offer to fix the ECA anyway.

“Democrats and Republicans need to come together and pass legislation that targets the risk of election subversion,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at UC Irvine, told me. “It’s even more urgent than voter suppression, which is a real problem. Voter suppression is a problem, but a bigger risk we face is that election losers could be declared winners, and that’s at the top of my list.”

The Electoral Count Act was a subject of concern—and machinations—before January 6, 2021. Enacted largely in response to the contested 1876 presidential election, the law was designed to make sure that a process was in place for certifying winners of presidential races. The law’s ambiguous language was a target of derision almost from the start—a year after its passage, a political scientist called it “very confused, almost unintelligible.” A few lawyers, including John Eastman, a Donald Trump ally who helped design the paperwork coup, believe it is unconstitutional.

In most presidential elections, when the outcome has not been in doubt, the ECA’s flaws have not been an issue. But the 2020 election spotlighted the flaws, including vagueness about what, if any, power the vice president has beyond the ceremonial. At worst, the law could offer an opening for Congress to reject duly chosen electors and ultimately install the election’s loser as president. Prudent reform might clarify exactly the vice president’s role, as well as make explicit—and limited—the ability of Congress to challenge or reject electors except in extreme circumstances.

Democrats widely agree about the dangers lurking in the ECA (though as my colleague Russell Berman reported last year, some liberal scholars are wary of restraining the powers of a vice president, lest Kamala Harris need the chance to block Trumpist chicanery after the 2024 election). But they want to see ECA reform tied up with other changes, including rules against gerrymandering, rules against measures that make voting harder, campaign-finance reforms, election-security tweaks, and an update and revival of key elements of the Voting Rights Act.

[Read: It’s time for Democrats to break the glass ]

The logic behind this coupling is simple—all of these ideas relate to elections, one way or another—and politically clever. By bundling them all together, they want to create a package that offers something for everyone, giving members who might be lukewarm about one provision another one to like. If ECA reform, with its bipartisan support, is handled through a separate process, leaders worry the chances for broader legislation will diminish.

This is a reasonable concern if you believe the broader bills have any chance at all. But the prospects of the Senate passing either the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which the House passed in August, or the Freedom to Vote Act, which sits in the Senate, are extremely dim. The stumbling block, as ever, is the filibuster and the moderates who defend it. Democrats have 50 co-sponsors for the Freedom to Vote Act, including Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which both Sinema and Manchin support. But they don’t have the 60 votes they need for cloture on the bills, and they don’t have any realistic path to getting there.

As 2022 starts, Democrats are newly excited about the prospect of persuading Manchin or Sinema to embrace limited changes to the filibuster purely for voting-rights bills. Moderate Democrats have just launched yet another effort to cajole Manchin. Party leaders think McConnell is dangling ECA reform now just to keep Manchin from getting on board, and maybe he is. But c’mon: We’ve been here before. Manchin has a tendency to speak off the cuff and deliver remarks ambiguous enough to get hopes up, but he never goes further. The West Virginian continues to be skeptical of any changes to the filibuster, bluntly rejecting them in his more emotional moments and never budging in his more laconic ones. Sinema is less talkative but equally immovable. This means the likely choice for Democrats is to get ECA reform and not the other voting bills, or to get neither.

Some ECA-reform advocates worry that even if Schumer was somehow able to get Manchin and Sinema to agree to sweeping reforms, including ECA updates, and pass them through the Senate on a party-line vote (with Harris’s tiebreaker), it would be a Pyrrhic victory. Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who has been one of the leading proponents of ECA reform, told me that the most important characteristic of ECA reform is not any of the details but that it be enacted with buy-in from both parties, so that both parties feel more bound to it come the next presidential certification.

“The method the Democrats are pursuing is this unilateral Democratic modification of the filibuster to then get Democrat-only votes for electoral reform,” he said. “That frankly is the kiss of death for ECA reform for this reason: Whatever else you think about other reforms, ECA reforms cannot be done by either party unilaterally, because the opposite party’s not going to accept that if it happens to be in power on January 6, 2025.”

Perhaps Foley is too optimistic about the prospects for Republicans following even their own ECA reforms, but if the alternative is to leave a menacing law in place, the gamble seems worth taking. And time is of the essence: The sooner the 2022 midterm election gets, and the more confident Republicans get of their chances of victory, the harder it will be to make any changes.

If Schumer accepts ECA reform at the risk of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, many in his party will pillory him for abandoning reforms that would protect the voting rights of Black Americans, Democrats’ most important bloc of voters. The charge is fair, and not passing either of these bills is an awful outcome as a matter of both governance and politics. But that disaster has already happened. The party began unified control of Congress by pushing the For the People Act, a sprawling and flawed messaging bill that leaders had no realistic plan to pass. The Senate then got bogged down for months in infrastructure negotiations that produced one very large package but has failed (so far) to produce a second, huge one. The reason the party finds itself in the current dilemma is that it never bothered to come up with a serious approach to combatting voter suppression.

“However well intended or even needed, clarifying the language of the ECA would not deal with the democracy crisis that our nation is facing,” Fred Wertheimer and Norm Eisen, two reform advocates, wrote in The Washington Post on Thursday. “We need voting rights reforms first and foremost.” They are right that ECA reform would address only some narrow problems, but if Democrats can’t get everything they want, they shouldn’t foreclose the opportunity to get something.

That doesn’t mean they should accept anything. McConnell hasn’t made clear what sorts of ECA reforms he’d be willing to entertain, and a proposal that ties Harris’s hands in 2025 without any kind of restraints on Congress as well might in fact be worse than nothing. House Democrats are working on a proposal of their own, but Republicans have been vague thus far. The only way to know what is possible is to negotiate, and if McConnell offers a flimsy proposal and is shown to be bluffing, it might even help Schumer win Manchin over to some sort of filibuster carve-out. That’s unlikely to get the Freedom to Vote Act across the finish line—but no less likely than any scenario that involves Manchin and Sinema coming around to filibuster reform.