Being Radical is Practical

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

One hurricane on top of another. Communities battered from Florida to North Carolina to Alabama. Billions in damages, and even that is only able to capture a fraction of the devastation. Well over 200 lives have been lost, and people are still missing. In the middle of it all, neighbors are helping one another, donations are flowing in from around the country, and people are practicing mutual aid on a scale that emerges in the wake of disaster. But still we sit with the fact that much bigger solutions are needed; we know both intuitively and analytically that systems must change. Neighbors reaching out and rebuilding with one another is beautiful, heartwarming, and necessary, but we can’t wait to deal with the damage when it arrives. We have to go much further upriver and get to the root of the crises that are now upon us.

The climate crisis, and the organizing being done around and against it, leads us into a classic paradox. More radical climate groups are more disruptive, aim for a more complete transformation of society, and are more militant. In response to their efforts people with more moderate politics often look at these organizations and say, “Of course climate change is real, but I don’t support going about things like THAT.” And the status quo persists.

Detractors from radical movements and organizations often say that their more militant counterparts behave in a way that is inherently antithetical to mass movement, and thus contrary to their own aims. That is not only untrue; it obscures a more important lesson. We live in a society where the status quo itself is extreme, whether it be the normalization of police killing over 1,000 people per year, corporations running so rampant that we all have microplastics inside our bodies, our government fueling genocide, or any number of other examples. The status quo is often remarkable violence rendered normal or mundane.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

People feel it, people across the U.S. and the world feel an immense frustration, anger, and fear at the way things are. So mild critiques and mild actions in response to mass societal discontent are actually not a recipe for a mass movement. Endless marching, for example, is not an effective way to stop police from killing without consequence. A million people might sign a petition, but are they really members of an organization or movement who can be activated? No. Mild and minimal actions don’t build investment, and don’t build a mass of people capable of doing much at all.

If you look at the union movement, you can get concrete examples of what an alternative might look like. For decades organized labor has been in slow decline, largely because of a sustained and coordinated attack conducted by right-wing politicians and big business. But the response to that attack has been weak and ineffective as well. It’s largely been a circling of the wagons, a series of efforts to compromise with capital and protect gains won long ago (see The Hammer by Hamilton Nolan). It turns out that the best defense really is a good offense, and that defense on top of defense has meant the slow and steady decline of unions.

In comes the new and improved United Auto Workers, whose members fought to have union leadership determined by a simple one-member, one-vote democratic process. Right after making that change, they narrowly voted in more militant, reform leadership. And, when these new leaders came in, they almost instantaneously started preparing for the most important strike in recent American history. In launching the first simultaneous strike against the Big 3 U.S. automakers they won record contracts and improved the lives of 150,000 workers. Then, not long after the strike concluded, the UAW proceeded to help workers in Tennessee win the first union at any auto plant in the South.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The United Auto Workers aren’t perfect, and internal struggles continue. But they continue in large part because the more radical contingent of the union refuses to settle, and insists on continuing to push and improve their union. And the result of this militancy hasn’t been the marginalization of the union, it’s been a resurgence and even a catapulting of the UAW into the national spotlight, with both presidential candidates talking about auto workers and courting union workers more than we’ve seen in decades. Perhaps even more importantly, workers around the country now look to the UAW as an example, both for how to reform their unions and for how to fight big and win. Now the union is leading the national movement to hold a general strike beginning 5/1/2028, and other unions are aligning their contract expirations to that same date to lay the groundwork for a mass strike.

So why is radicality inherently opposed to mass movement? It isn’t. That line works to dismiss radicalism, when in reality people are tired of losing, tired of the slow descent of stagnation, tired of being overlooked, and in search of real change. People want to win. In the union movement folks often say, “When we fight, we win.” And of course not every worker struggle is won, but if we don’t fight we always lose. When we do fight, strike, or take action we empower people, and we can often win much greater material victories as well, a truth so often seen when workers go on strike. So let’s dispense with the idea that moderation inspires people and inherently brings more folks along.

Moderation and conservatism have dug the hole we currently find ourselves in, have brought us to a place where most people don’t like either of the two dominant U.S. political parties, and have most people agonizing over our future. We don’t just have an opportunity to present a bold, radical vision to the people we interact with right now, we have a responsibility to do so. That doesn’t always mean using the most intense or dramatic language in our political vocabularies, but it does mean laying out an alternative vision and a pathway to get there. There’s a reason unions are more popular than they’ve been in decades, a reason tenant organizing is increasing, a reason people are willing to put their bodies on the line to block the gates of weapons factories and the doors of big banks.

People are hungry for something more, for something beyond business as usual. And presenting that alternative isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s good politics. If what you’re interested in is building and winning a better world, a bold vision presented in a way folks can hear is vital to victory. It takes work, a lot of work and a lot of conversations, but the left has answers that a whole lot of people are looking for, so don’t shy away from offering transformative solutions to the problems we face. Lean into it and bring folks along with you. The radical is, ultimately, the practical response to a world on fire.