What Comes After Hyperpolitics?

Before the end of this year, the United States will have broken two political records. According to the organizers’ own estimates, No Kings Day on June 14 was the largest single-day protest in recent American history. At the same time, no US president has so successfully enriched himself in office as Donald Trump has — 2026 is set to be the most lucrative year of his career so far.

The concept of “hyperpolitics” is an attempt to explain these coincident phenomena. It describes a process of repoliticization without reinstitutionalization that has overtaken every layer of society in the wake of the 2008–9 crash. This surge in political activity has been organizationally uneven, difficult to relate to historical precedents, and, more worryingly, has no guaranteed effect on power relations between elites and masses.

In its current iteration, the idea first emerged in this outlet, where it provoked a lively debate. Published in monograph form four years later, Hyperpolitics has also met with varied engagement, both critical and laudatory, from writers across the political spectrum. Even the misreadings have been productive.

Part of the reason for returning to these criticisms is that the conversations the book has spawned are not purely of academic interest. Instead, they carry strategic import for the Left, since the book closed on a fundamental question: What can facilitate the rebuilding of class power in the new century, and what locks the Left in the hyperpolitical morass?

Generality and Abstraction

Hyperpolitics began with an anecdotal observation that then became the basis of a broader theory. The book sought to offer a general description, explanation, and evaluation of a general problem, at an appropriately general level. The danger, of course, is that such generalization can verge on something else: abstractionism, or work that surveys the social terrain at such a distance that it has nothing interesting to say about the meso- or the microlevel.

It is this perceived generalism in Hyperpolitics that has bothered a subgroup of readers. Neither a strict work of social science or pure cultural criticism, the book appears to them as neither fish nor flesh. “If you don’t like my principles, I have others” might be the most convincing Marxian response to this, but I fear the book will have to remain a work of popularization first and foremost. Long-distance lorry drivers do not use the same maps as country hikers. Instead, Hyperpolitics offers a general theory of a general trend — with all the upsides and downsides that generality entails.

In the minds of critics, this complaint is often bound up with another issue: a willingness to rely on the insights of writers on the Right as well as on the Left. A simple response to this accusation might be the one the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss gave, when asked about his reliance on Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “However little I am inclined towards his political thought, the beauty of his prose dazzles me. . . .  He says in five words what would take me fifteen.”

Yet this response is superficial. There is a deeper reason why the Right proves a more able analyst of bourgeois rot than the Left: reactionaries often have a keener sense of the costs of capitalist progress than liberal leftists do. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves preferred the writings of an archreactionary such as Honoré de Balzac for depictions of the nineteenth century over pious tracts of proletarian literature. As Engels himself put it, “that Balzac was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices” and “described the nobles as people deserving no better fate . . . that I consider one of his grandest features.” The Left, dogmatically wedded to liberalism, is often incapable of the kind of curiosity that Marx and Engels saw precisely as an intellectual virtue.

Asymmetric Advantage

A different critique is that the book offers no explanation of why the far right has seemingly done better out of the new hyperpolitical phase than the Left. Whence this asymmetric advantage? Three facts that the book already touches on but doesn’t expand on bear repeating here — two structural, one more contingent.

First, market society gives the Right various basic advantages, as Ralph Miliband observed in his analysis of the “imperfect competition” of liberal democracies. The first of these advantages is ideological. Marx once contrasted the “Party of Progress” to the “Party of Order”: the former tried to modify existing social arrangements, he wrote, while the latter merely wanted to stabilize and consolidate them. Preserving the status quo and securing existing property relations are a much lower benchmark of success.

A second, related factor is the availability of private funding. Whether it’s spent on old-style astroturfing or hiring digital influencers, money remains an effective mobilizational tool for the Right but is in scarce supply for the Left (unless we count certain liberal philanthropists who seek to mold a market-friendly socialism). Lacking natural sponsors in the state or in capitalist circles, left-wing projects have also usually had to raise scattered and more financially modest donations. The availability of private money instead gives the Right an unparalleled capacity for mobilization. To this, we can add the power asymmetry in society as a whole, as Perry Anderson has noted:

Structurally, by reason of their smaller numbers and greater resources, virtually all ruling classes enjoy an advantage over the ruled in their capacity for collective action. Their internal lines of communication are more compact; their wealth offers an all-purpose medium of power, convertible into any number of forms of domination; their intelligence systems scan the political landscape from a greater height. More numerous and more dispersed, less equipped materially, less armed culturally, subordinate classes always tend, in the sociologist Michael Mann’s phrase, to be “organizationally outflanked.”

Yet a third, more contingent factor should also be noted. Within the ranks of the far right, a much bolder debate about the crisis of liberalism has been inaugurated, with some on the Right adopting a consciously “post-liberal” position. Conversely, the current left has a sociological affinity with liberalism — due to the societal groups that comprise it, and due to the Left’s recent academicization — which has slowed an ideological break with it. Otherwise the asymmetry predates the hyperpolitical epoch.

Trade-Offs

A different facet of the thesis that the book does not theorize concerns correlations between its two analytical axes: the political and the institutional. As critics have noted, these can hardly be said to move independently. Jasper Bernes, for instance, has persuasively argued that across the twentieth century institutionalizing often came at the costs of depoliticizing, while repoliticization often eroded existing institutional structures. In essence, he presents a dilemma between a Weberian ethic of conviction and one of responsibility: to institutionalize might make left-wing politics more durable but also potentially less revolutionary, while a politics with little longevity might be libidinally rewarding but proves unable at unseating existing power structures.

These are tricky trade-offs; two case studies may illustrate why. Mao Zedong’s campaign against the party bureaucracy used shock politicization to deinstitutionalize but then ushered in a period of depoliticization later in the century. Inversely, the French and Italian Communist parties’ reaction to the long 1968 in both their countries — a sequence that they saw as an anti-institutional revolt with dangerous political consequences — probably sped up their sclerosis as mass parties in the 1980s. This also made them particularly vulnerable to the neoliberal assault.

As Bernes shows, these undulations can thus be mutually coconstituting. In the 1970s, the labor movement was overwhelmed so easily by the neoliberal counterrevolution precisely because it preferred the institutional over the political and was unable to mount a convincing challenge to capital’s retreat from the post-war compact.

Hence the general challenge that the book poses: to properly reinstitutionalize the energy released by the hyperpolitical moment.

In Bernes’s view, such a reinstitutionalization could be seen from either a communitarian or an interest-based point of view. In the first, the decline of civic life since the 1990s confronts us with a task that is prepolitical rather than political. “What Jäger may be proposing,” he notes, “is a politics of the beer hall without the union shop.” This reading vindicates Bernes’s intuition that “at least in my life, left milieus preserve forms of social life and conviviality fast vanishing elsewhere.” The primary task would then be to rebuild “a sense of belonging, community, and in many cases, satisfaction of real material needs.” In a Tocquevillian vein, this would allow for reinstitutionalization without repoliticization — an antidote to our contemporary loneliness epidemic, for instance, or opportunities for socializing.

Yet even bowling clubs require funds, and it is unlikely that members will stay in a union if the union is unable to offer them any wage rises. “If such institutions fail to improve the material fortunes of the vast majority in any durable way,” Bernes wonders, “what success can they claim?” In the age of the long downturn, it is indeed harder to reinstitutionalize by promising members direct benefits. Yet as Vladimir Lenin said, there is no such thing as an impossible situation: the last ten years have demonstrated that a Left without a muscular labor movement is capable of putting itself on the political map but will usually lack the levers to force clear policy change on society. As Sam Gindin put it, the chances for material gains on behalf of labor today might be slimmer, “but what else are you going to be doing with your life?”

Reinstitutionalization

Hyperpolitics is only a tendency among others, after all, and there are ample signs reinstitutionalization is already underway. The Western left — if the loose collage of organizations and subcultures currently grouped under that rubric can count as a unitary force — finds itself in a contradictory situation in 2026. Many of its causes enjoy growing popular support, but no corresponding institutional strength exists to translate these causes into direct concessions from capital. Since 2008, the policy consensus of the neoliberal era has clearly fractured, but this has done little to increase the power of labor or the Left as such; most of the social movements that emerged in the 2010s have proven incapable of reversing these trends.

Such an uneven revival has encouraged two competing yet not necessarily irreconcilable left-wing tendencies. The first is what we might term “immediatism.” This insists on the notion that the new energies spawned by online platforms can provide the basis for a return of mass politics, organized around a response to various online “viral” phenomena that can repoliticize an atomized mass glued to their screens and direct them for an insurrectionary assault on the capitalist state.

This is a proposition much in favor with some post-Trotskyite grouplets but also left communists and anarchists, whose politics never presupposed a solidly organized labor movement. Many of these proposals are hardly new and are reminiscent of Alexander Herzen’s critique of the Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin, who allegedly had a tendency “to mistake the second month of a pregnancy for the ninth.”

A second tendency at least recognizes the need for reinstitutionalization but seeks to personalize it: the left-populism proposed by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, above all, who sought to offer a left-wing variant of leaderism. The influence of these ideas is visible in the “gaseous party” built by Jean-Luc Mélenchon or the shenanigans surrounding Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party. Unifying both approaches is a wish to magically conjure up a form of politics that took the Left decades to build in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, without the corresponding class power.

What would a slower reinstitutionalization look like in practice? Against the impatience of hyperpolitics, many have advised a return to Karl Kautsky’s original pre–World War I “strategy of patience.” In Kautsky’s original vision, institutionalization and politicization move on two overlapping timelines; one long-, the other short-term. For the first, clear institutional agents — cooperatives, unions, parties — can be activated in times of sharpening class tension but otherwise need to bide their time in the trenches. Such an approach would balance spontaneity and organization. It also seems helpful in our time of mounting politicization without accompanying institutional heft.

A defense of this neo-Kautskyite approach must be strictly conditional, of course. The man himself ended up as an anti-Bolshevik scab, demonstrating that pleas against impatience can easily slide into reformist accommodation. Institutionalization, we see here, is by no means intrinsically revolutionary. As Bernes indicated, it might even be the reason why a revolutionary breakthrough was not achieved in Kautsky’s own country and age: the labor movement’s upper cadres sought to temper the base because they thought institution-building in capitalism was more important than political breaks with it. Fossilization was the most likely consequence.

Genetic Manipulation

Few of those institutional dinosaurs survive today, as Bernes notes too. There are some mass parties that have weathered the postpolitical ice age and the hyperpolitical thaw — one could think of the Communist Party in Greece — yet they mostly retain interest as historical curiosities.

Everyone agrees that you cannot clone a dinosaur. Yet as scientists know, genetic manipulation is not impossible either, even if one needs a sense of the material one is working with. As Dylan Riley has noted, the task of the contemporary left is the “creation of a new modern prince adapted to the age of social media, virality and artificial intelligence, in addition to the ubiquitous culture industry,” which would not immediately succumb to the new liquidity.

Here the recent trajectory of the Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB/PVDA) at least warrants a mention. The PTB is modeled on a Maoist cadre party. It has a predictable “Marxist-Leninist” ban on factions, a multitiered membership model, and record numbers on Belgian social media.

Uniquely among Belgian and European parties, however, the PTB has had measurable success in growing its base in recent years. It has established closer ties with Belgium’s still multitudinous union movement. It sees its parliamentary role as that of a popular tribune rather than a candidate for rule. It has also obstructed several governments’ attempts to complete the neoliberal restructuring of Belgian society, long finished in neighboring countries. For all its pathologies, the party proves that patience pays. (It is historically revealing, of course, that the PTB would be horrified at the idea of being labeled “Kautskyite,” which bears testimony to the century of changes that lies behind us.)

The Kautskyism of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is a wholly different creature. Officially, the latter is not even a party but a “socialist organization,” as members do not cease to point out. As Joe Todd has noted in a comparative study of both, the PTB and DSA evince some radical differences too, even if they are often cited together.

Unlike the PTB’s more centralized power structure, the DSA is informally distributed between chapters and caucuses. Such an absence of strict centralism also means that the organization has greater difficulty drawing a line between internal debate and external messaging. Unlike the PTB, its membership model is flat rather than tiered, allowing for easier entry. Its leadership is relatively flexible in comparison too, while its caucuses share a much greater degree of autonomy than local PTB branches do. Most likely, the historical anti-Stalinism of DSA is responsible for this relative lack of centralism.

Both the PTB and DSA have experienced significant growth in the past decade, in terms of members and wider societal influence. Yet the key question, as usual, is always Lenin’s: who leads whom. This is particularly important for the prospect of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidential run. Will DSA end up as a campaign vehicle for left-leaning members of Congress eyeing careers in the DNC, or will it be a disciplining force for lawmakers who use the Democrats as a mere platform but maintain their political independence? The jury is still out on the question, but it is worth spelling out the risks of both models.

Like any work of social science, Hyperpolitics is neither a self-help handbook nor a horoscope for our political future. All that can be done is to point out tendencies and probabilities; there is no iron law decreeing either the persistence or the instant evanescence of hyperpolitics today. Reinstitutionalization is hard, particularly in today’s economic environment in which growth is concentrated at the top of society, and the competitors for the Left’s pro-social program are well-funded and at ease with power. Yet the race for reinstitutionalization has opened; what Hyperpolitics sought to do, above all, was to make clear the difference between escape routes and dead ends.

This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.