It's The Corruption, Stupid: Reform, Parallel Institutions, and State Building

The idea of a “State” is a funny little idea, in that if you ask 10 historians, political scientists, or sociologists, you’ll get 10 (or in this case, 30) different answers. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow — a good, but imperfect book, as any project taking on “grand” history — explores, in chapter 10, the nebulous concept of the state. Many times, when you deeply explore so-called “stateless” societies, you begin to see the outlines of what we might recognize as a state. And some civilizations, that we impose more modern ideas of a state upon, such as, say, the Republican eras of Rome, the closer you look, the fuzzier it gets. It wasn’t until well into Imperial Rome that a more centralized/bureaucratic state began to emerge.

What we do know is that there have been multiple paths to state emergence, ones that aren’t always rooted in relationships with material resources— that is to say, Marxist Materialism isn’t a scientific law, but just one way in which state structures within a civilization CAN arise.

While multiple theses have been written, and more could be written about states, I’m bringing to the fore something that has been subcurrent throughout this series of pieces so far—state-building and the presentation of a competing idea of how to organize oneself.

The project of the United States has changed quite a bit since its inception, from a loose confederacy during its infancy, to a more centralized entity with the creation of the constitutional republic (which, in a modern conception, is indeed a form of democracy), and the idea of THE United States presented under President Lincoln. Before, this nation was referred to as THESE United States. And iterations through the fall of Reconstruction, the New Deal era, and the fall of Jim Crow.

Each change or evolution of the United States was brought about as one of its forms faced stagnation, collapse, or crisis. And during such a crisis, one can either evolve through transformation, stagnate in slow resilience, or face complete collapse.

That is to say, reform is not enough— even if transformation begins with reforms, simply working to reform our current system won’t lead us to where we need to go. This is not to say all must be tossed away, but we must evolve ourselves, our thinking, and our institutions.

We need to rethink how we view our project, in fact, expand it. We should not try to organize ourselves to fit within the current, faltering political system. But instead invest in a project of state building by organizing ourselves at multiple levels to create a conglomeration of pro-multicultural-democracy state governments, political entities (parties, 501c3s, 501c4s, etc.), city governments, service entities, and community organizations, down to your neighborhood. While we can preserve grafts of current institutions, we must build a new vessel atop this crumbling edifice.

We organize ourselves to present an alternative way to be, by building what we need to accomplish it, one piece at a time—the self-organizing in Minneapolis is a great example of this, but that is just one small piece. This must be a group project, with an increasingly clear vision of where we are going. This means wrestling with big questions, daring to be bold, talking with one another, while also creating parallel entities to step into power vacuums—a "shadow” government, if you will, one that behaves more like a government in exile than anything else.

To note, on wrestling with big questions, Ostia Nwanevu’s “The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding” is a great starting place.

All that said, I also do believe we need to break from the traditional paradigms of “left” and “right,” of capitalism, socialism, Marxism, etc. Ideas born of a different time and place. This is, again, not to say we should throw the past away; instead, we mustn’t cling to our ideologies as if they were religious dogmas. Many of the problems we currently face under capitalism are not inherent to it—wealth disparities, coercive labor, and the extraction of resources are found in capitalism but also throughout human history. And in fact, some of these are found in states some would call socialist or communist. Same with imperialism, authoritarianism, etc. That is to say, our problems are not unique; they are human problems that any system can and has faced. And we must also engage with non-Western ideas of social structure— something I’m only just beginning to do myself.

So how do we start? With basic concepts 1. Everything ends; building the ability to evolve consciously, to embrace collapse as an inevitability 2. Humans and human-built systems, regardless of their ideological underpinnings, are susceptible (to varying degrees) to resource disparities, exploitation, and authoritarianism 3. Institutions and systems are not self-reinforcing; instead, it is the humans within and outside of them that enforce the norms and laws 4. Social consciousness and norms of what is acceptable and what isn’t are just as important as written laws in shaping the evolution of a society 5. Rights to human-wellbeing must be central to it all.

To accomplish this, we must have a clear founding myth, a meta-narrative, that unifies it all. It must have social norms and expectations. It must be engaged with our communities, breaking free from transactional relationships and moving into full institution-building, and our relationships with each other and property.

And while these are big tasks, there are many little steps we can take right now to start our journey. And pro-democracy forces have one key advantage: Blue states are the core of the United States economy, and when you include swing states, large swaths of prime farm-land, too. Intellectual and economic resources are a great advantage we haven’t yet begun to truly leverage. How do we start?

Start to think of your work as state-building. You are one piece; allies, community non-profits, grassroots organizers, and community members are others. This work exists outside of electoral work, while electoral work exists within state-building.

Part of what states do is wage war; yet I will argue that its broader purpose is to serve the needs of a state’s many communities by distributing resources and executing collective projects to invest in human well-being. The New Deal is a great, even if imperfect, example of how a state could operate to meet the needs of its people.

Side note: While many folks on the left are either quesy and/or ignorant of war, and military strategy, it is something we must work to understand. While, ideally, war is a project humanity should abandon, it is a long-term social and international project—other entities and states have agency within it, and only through cooperation can it be abandoned. This is something I’ll dig further into at a later point, hopefully within my next few pieces.

All left- or progressive-policy advocacy ultimately is about meeting communal needs. Expand how you think about meeting those needs. The Black Panthers are a great example of institutional building; they worked to serve their communities, to meet their needs, and provide political education. They were becoming a parallel institution to the US government; this was the root of their danger to the establishment, not the carrying of arms. The creation of the non-profit industrial complex took these institutions away from their original purposes and turned them into service providers through state capture. For example, the Urban League was no longer a parallel institution but a government- and donor-funded service organization that became responsive to its funders rather than to community needs.

What the Black Panthers did went beyond mutual aid, which is triage: a subset of a community pooling resources to help individuals in crisis. Creating parallel institutions helps prevent not just individuals within communities from reaching crisis points, but also ensures that communities can uplift their communal well-being.

Statemaking

Statemaking is as much about bureaucratic institutions and communal needs as it is myth-making (think a national founding myth).

Every state has a founding myth; our ultimate goal should be the creation of a new state. This means a founding myth (meta-narrative), providing a positive, forward-looking goal for people to work towards—an idea larger than themselves. While also creating the parallel institutions to enact that meta-narrative.

Step by step, build parallel or external institutions starting at the local level, focusing on meeting local needs. Low lifts first— community events with food, concentrate on communal literacy. A “read-in” and communal meal. Partner with libraries, local school districts, literacy orgs.

State bureaucracy is about resource distribution and meeting needs. Through local governance and organizing ourselves, starting with loose structures, then to more tightly-knit structures at the local level, we can start to meet people’s needs.

Capturing or filling in missing local state functions builds legitimacy among the populace. This idea of legitimacy is important; it can come from many different corners of society, but one is meeting the needs of the people when another institution or person is failing. A great example of how this works in the negative is the Democratic Party, which is increasingly seen as not a legitimate alternative to the GOP because its actions don't match its rhetoric, or even demonstrate a failure in its rhetoric (i.e., reform ICE). And while there are individuals who run as Democrats with legitimacy, the national party itself is not looked upon favorably.

This work is not easy and requires coordination with multiple types of entities, sometimes explicit, sometimes covert. Some non-profits might be in a better position than others to begin making this shift. The question of funding is huge, but by moving to “member” based funding models, almost viewing becoming a member as paying taxes to an entity meeting specific needs, you can start to make that pivot. And by allying with other entities that meet other needs, you can start to create a cohesive entity to meet communal needs. Such as more community-based housing, education, health-care, and food service organizations, working toward increased cooperation and resource-sharing. Learning from cooperative models and adopting some of those ideas could greatly empower them.

We must also consider creating or strengthening community-based social and cultural practices. Again, looking to the Black Panthers for bringing together political education, community resources, and community social practices, you effectively create smaller, “guerrilla” states. As much as established, increasing coordination and cooperation between them only increases their resource base and effectiveness. And doing so increases their legitimacy in the face of an increasingly illegitimate state entity.

Then there is local electoral state capture, where we shift state resources to our parallel institutions. But first, let me touch upon reforms.

While reforms are not enough, they give us the ability to enact far broader changes to our state. We must make governing structures responsive to the needs of the people, rooting out our cancerous forces and policies.

This means abolishing ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, massive Supreme Court reforms, massive changes in how laws are enforced, community investments, investments in work not jobs (there is a shortage of jobs, but not work to be done), education, health care, stopping the scam-economy, and so on.

We’re also looking at abolishing or massive reforms to the US Senate to make it a functional body coequal with the House, expanding the House of Representatives, DC Statehood, letting Puerto Rico decide its own fate, multi-representative proportional representation, and the list goes on. Mark Copelovitch has some great blue sky threads on reform.

Part of the reforms is holding people in power, and former power holders, like CEO’s, and office-holders— Democrats and Republicans alike — accountable for their corruption, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

While we can’t stop there, there is a Ship of Theseus paradox to reforms— if you make enough reforms, does it start being something else entirely?

The far-right has, over the years, strategically infiltrated local GOP power structures by presenting as less radical than they are. They then went on to hire each other, with further infiltration. In fact, in Texas, the white supremacist organization Patriot Front is creating private entities to serve one another. But you don’t even have to look to the right-wing for this; during Jim Crow, and because of Jim Crow, Black Americans created entire parallel institutions and business communities. While at times people overly romanticize these efforts, they do serve as a model for building parallel institutions— in fact, the great tragedy of the results of ending segregation was the collapse of some of these institutions. That is to say, Black Americans as individuals were “integrated” into white American institutions, still as second-class citizens, while Black American parallel institutions were dismantled/crumbled.

But to the point of institutional capture, this isn’t about an individual working to change from the inside, but coordinated efforts to grab the levers of power to then wield that power to your ends. What this can look like isn’t starting a third political party, but a collective of people working to infiltrate and then take over local and county-level Democratic party structures.

Through coordination and even deception, capture power levers within these local structures. You don’t explicitly state your goals in the open, but you are quietly allied together to take it over. Ideally, this is a coordinated effort across an entire state, targeting key municipalities and counties. From there, you can then use that institution to support candidates of your choosing, to influence staffing decisions in executive and legislative branches, and so on. This effectively becomes institutional and state capture. Now, there are many other entities and institutions than just parties and governments, but I’m just using this as an example of how it could work.

A similar model can work for universities, public education, and even private entities. And to reiterate, once you hold the levers of power, you wield that power to our collective ends. Power isn’t the end, but a means to enact our social and political goals.

In the End, I Have No Real Answers: Just Questions and Ideas

While I write with conviction, I want to be clear: I’m not claiming to have all the answers, but I'm working to ask big questions and to find the big and little answers to get to where we need to go. The exact how is something no one person can give, but we have to start having these conversations among one another.