Anti-capitalist movements inherited a party and union legacy they must reproduce to endure

Evidence

The question is, can Occupy provide the basis for a sustainable antagonism? The broad problem we’re facing here is, how can this antagonism be sustained now that the Communist Party has disappeared and trade unions have for the most part become quiescent? The party and the union structure provided sustainability, continuity and institutional memory. Now, it’s not that these are the only institutions that could provide such things, or that those older institutions would be fit for purpose, even if they had survived into the twenty-first century. But a genuinely new force that is capable of struggling against twenty-first-century capitalism must be able to fulfil those functions. … I think we also need to recognise the importance of building hegemony — and this means stepping outside the activist universe. There’s a danger of the activist’s world become very self-contained. We need to reach beyond those intensely engaged with politics to those who don’t look to politics at all to explain the misery of their lives. It’s those people who have been most affected by capitalist realism, and who could be mobilised against it, if they could be reached. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2207

Categorization

• QUESTION: Fisher gestures at the functions a successor force must fulfill — sustainability, continuity, institutional memory — without specifying concrete alternatives; worth chasing how post-2011 movements (or others) attempted these.
• SEED: An essay angle: the activist universe as a self-contained subculture that mirrors the very disconnection it claims to solve — a pathology of political insularity.
• XREF: connects to: Protest movements must become robust institutions to have lasting impact; Durable antiracism requires seizing and holding institutional power, not merely protesting — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 1260; Liberation movements inherit the deformity of what they oppose — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 196

Broader Connections

• Protest movements must become robust institutions to have lasting impact #corroborates (0.82)
• Liberation movements inherit the deformity of what they oppose #complicates (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 196
• Durable antiracism requires seizing and holding institutional power, not merely protesting #expands (0.75) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1260