You can't "reverse engineer" working-class power.

The spectacular rise and fall of the Bernie Sanders/Jeremy Corbyn era (2015-2020) riveted the anglosphere left. And while they both ultimately failed in their electoral goals, part of what made the era so captivating was how utterly implausible it was for the two candidates to get as close to winning as they actually did.

Even among the most electorally enthustiastic socialists in groups like the DSA and outlets like Jacobin and Novara Media, there were occasional nods to the fact that the leftism of Sanders and Corbyn had vanishingly little movement infrastructure within the working class upon which they could rely. Unionization rates have been at historic lows. Explosions of movement energy, like in 2011, 2014, and 2020, did not have serious staying power. An organized working class, the backbone of 20th century social democracy, was just as distant a memory in the 2010s as it had been in the 2000s or 1990s.

Nor was there a slow and steady accumulation of left electoral power to pave the way. Sanders’ presidential runs weren’t the culmination of a large and growing socialist bloc in Congress. Corbyn got sufficient Labour MPs to put him on the ballot for party leader not because of a huge and influential Socialist Campaign Group, but because he was seen as such a long shot, as a friendly if eccentric backbencher who would add some variety to the debate but who had no chance to wield real power. And even after his landslide election, the vast majority of Corbyn’s fellow MPs still tried to boot him out the next year.

What propelled them as far as they did was primarily a combination of three factors:

• The candidates and political machines they faced down were sclerotic, exhausted, and scandal-ridden, speaking a political language that to many voters was at once boring and insulting. People were deeply unenthused by the status quo, and Corbyn and Sanders, among others, offered a clear break from it.

• The left flanks of the Democratic and Labour parties were so long out of power — for generations by that point — that the vast institutional, economic, and media apparatuses that were used to suppress left challengers decades ago were unprepared (at least at first) for this new contagion.

• After years of bipartisan austerity mixed with an intentional narrowing of the realm of political possibility, their modest social democratic platforms were seen by many as fresh and exciting, mobilizing new waves of young and downwardly mobile white collar workers.

These external factors made their insurgent candidacies both surprising and (relatively) successful, but offered nothing to suggest that the campaigns were either sustainable or replicable.

I’m not sure who deployed it first, but a term gained popularity among the left commentariat when describing this dilemma: “reverse engineering.” Some examples (emphasis mine):

“The paradox of Corbynism is that the left finally won power in the Labour Party at precisely the point when it appeared at its weakest historically. We are thus having to do a lot of things back to front—like using the leadership to reverse engineer a movement, or the adoption of a radical policy agenda to drive popular education at the grassroots and community levels.” — Christine Berry and Joe Guinan, 2019

“The new formations are, in effect, attempting to reverse engineer this process by racing into government office as fast as possible (i.e., the Podemos “electoral war machine”) and then using it to consolidate their base of support outside the state.” — Chris Maisano, February 2019

“Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016… helped reverse-engineer working-class aspirations from within a howling vacuum of union disorganization and movement setbacks.” — DSA NPC member Ella Mahony, March 2019

“There was this moment to… reverse engineer the kind of movement that we would’ve hoped had already existed by the time we got to the point where we were running somebody for president.” — Meagan Day, April 2020

“Bernie and many who supported him talked about a movement, but I think it mostly didn’t exist despite his best efforts to reverse engineer it.” — DSA NPC member Justin Charles, September 2020

Reverse engineering is something companies do to each other’s products, or what hackers do to defeat copyright protection. It’s not something that is generally done in regard to class politics.

It is worth noting that in the Sanders and Corbyn post-mortems in particular, the term was often used sardonically, to underline the impracticality of the notion: neither politician, nor the organizations around them, could manage to conjure, in the space of a few brief election cycles, the massive social movements and working-class institutions that should have been built up for decades beforehand.

Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara in 2019 offered a concise description of the current dilemma for socialists who seek state power: “in the United States today, we lack the three ingredients necessary for almost every socialist advance of the past hundred and fifty years: mass parties, an activist base, and a mobilized working class.”

Seven years later, Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York City. A big part of the thrill of Mamdani’s victory was, like Sanders and Corbyn before him, how unlikely it was. Mamdani, in less than a year, went from polling near zero to soundly defeating perhaps the most famous man in New York politics. And, like the other two, Mamdani faced off against a divided, compromised, and incompetent political machine.

NYC boasts DSA’s biggest local chapter and its most experienced and effective electoral operation, but that’s not saying much, especially compared to socialists elsewhere in the world. While some DSA-sponsored electoral victories have been notched in the city, like Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mayor Mamdani and his allies remain a distinct minority. He faces a 51-member City Council that includes only a small handful of DSA members, and a New York State Governor whose only saving grace is that her opportunism is very occasionally greater than her allegiance to the low-tax dogma of her state’s business elites.

Unlike Sanders and Corbyn, at least Mamdani got over the finish line. But does that make possible the task of organizing the working class after the fact? Sunkara and Eric Blanc wrote last month that in the case of New York City, such reverse engineering is not only doable, but essential:

“The task ahead is to make use of the momentum of the mayoral victory, plus the levers of city hall and the reach of Zohran’s massive platform, to reverse engineer a working-class movement powerful enough to transform New York City.”

How would such a historically unprecedented event be achieved? Blanc and Sunkara primarily point to vehicles to pressure politicians:

Many will do this by joining DSA, others by unionizing their workplaces — some by doing both. Most urgent of all, huge numbers of New Yorkers will need to plug into efforts like NYC DSA’s Tax the Rich and Our Time, a new campaign meant to sustain and deepen Zohran’s canvassing operation to win free childcare, affordable housing, and better transit by taxing the rich. Workplace and neighborhood Our Time hubs could coordinate petitioning efforts, hold potluck socials, develop creative ways to reach peers, and escalate campaigns to pressure the governor and state legislators to back an affordability agenda.

What they describe here is a sad caricature of the actual, organic movements they aim to “reverse engineer.” They can’t help but depict an organized working class as little more than a permanent electoral campaign, focused more on petitioning and leafleting elected officials than developing the self-directed institutions and culture that could move workers from, as Marx put it, being a “class in itself” to a “class for itself.”

Indeed, Marx and Engels stated plainly that the formation and success of worker’s parties were downstream from the meaningful (if not fully complete) organization of the proletariat as a class, rooted in its immediate struggles. For example, from chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto:

[T]he collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. […] The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. […] This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party…

In chapter 2 of the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes:

If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. […] In this struggle – a veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.

Karl Kautsky makes similar comments in his Erfurt Program, when he traces the lineage of all worker’s parties to the organized and militant sections of the proletariat.

A strong and growing working-class movement is a prerequisite for socialist political success not just because such an organized movement would provide the resources, personnel, and voting bloc for electoral campaigns, but because the existence of a social power that threatens the capitalist order is needed to provide room for socialist politicians to enact reforms harmful to the capitalist class and to at least attempt to ensure the discipline and loyalty of those politicians in the face of opportunism and co-option.

Even in the technocratic cosmology of social democracy, there is an understanding that their politicians ought to be accountable to the movements that propel them to office. Movements that emerge from politicians are fundamentally dependent upon those politicians. They cannot effectively hold their elected figureheads to account. When the capitalist class comes knocking, when demands of governance within a capitalist framework push a socialist politician to abandon their pledges or pass a regressive policy, it is far more difficult to mobilize the left against such a move than if the same act had been done by a liberal or conservative politician.

Socialist politicians who govern while being unmoored from and unaccountable to an independent and organized working class have a disorganizing and demobilizing effect on the very movements that today’s electoral socialists are trying to build.

However, movements that grow and blossom from the day-to-day struggle of the dominated classes against their class enemies can retain their own power and independence, and they hold at least the potential of pressing for meaningful concessions from capital and state, regardless of who holds office.

Socialist electoral campaigns can boost membership in left organizations like DSA, sure, but building a movement of and by the working class is something else entirely. For electorally-minded socialists, their focus on quantitative outcomes — election results and legislative majorities — can steer them away from the organic, messy, and often uncontrollable nature of vibrant working-class movements. For many of them, the best they can imagine is the same set of activities they’re already comfortable with, just with more people and a fresh coat of proletarian paint on top.

A movement that keeps its focus on City Hall and Albany wouldn’t be a movement of workers but of constituents, rooted not in workplaces and housing but in legislative districts and electoral calendars. It would be necessarily built and managed from the top-down, managed and deployed by policy experts and paid campaign staff. As a result, such a movement, if one could call it that, would still lack the source of class power that Sunkara and Blanc realize their project desperately needs. If you want to build real working-class power to complement your electoral work, you cannot simply add more electoral work and label it “working-class power.”

For the rest of us, the task of building militant social movements that can wrest concessions from our rulers and ultimately replace capitalism remains largely the same as ever. There are no shortcuts that charismatic candidates can provide us. We must work alongside our coworkers and neighbors to build combative, mass organizations at the sites of exploitation and extraction where we have the most leverage and where our exploiters are weakest.