The Left Must Pursue Patient Reinstitutionalization to Escape the Hyperpolitical Trap
Source: Anton Jäger. "What Comes After Hyperpolitics?." October 7, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author argues that even though there's been a huge wave of political activity and protest since the 2008 financial crash, this hasn't actually given ordinary people more power—because all that energy hasn't been channeled into lasting organizations like unions or parties. He says the political right has structural advantages that make this easier for them, and that the left faces a real trade-off: getting people politically fired up can undermine institution-building, and building institutions can kill political energy. His conclusion is that the left needs to patiently work on building durable organizations, even though it's hard and may not pay off quickly in material terms.
Conclusion
The Left's strategic task is to convert the energy of the post-2008 'hyperpolitical' surge in political activity into durable institutions, even though this reinstitutionalization process is slow, materially difficult, and involves real trade-offs with revolutionary dynamism.
Premises
- Since the 2008-9 crash, society has undergone widespread repoliticization without corresponding reinstitutionalization, meaning increased political activity has not translated into durable organizational power for the masses.
- The Right enjoys structural advantages over the Left in this hyperpolitical era: it only needs to defend the status quo (a lower bar than the Left's project of transformation), it has access to greater private funding and elite resources, and ruling classes generally have superior capacity for collective action due to concentrated wealth and communication networks.
- The Right has also gained a contingent advantage by engaging in a bolder, more unified ideological break from liberalism, while the Left remains sociologically and intellectually tied to liberalism, blunting its critique of the system.
- Historical and theoretical analysis (via Bernes) shows that institutionalization and politicization exist in tension: institutionalizing tends to depoliticize movements over time, while intense politicization tends to erode institutional structures, creating a recurring dilemma for left strategy.
- Historical case studies (Mao's anti-bureaucratic campaigns, the French/Italian Communist parties' response to 1968, and the 1970s labor movement's over-reliance on institutions) demonstrate that an imbalance in either direction—too much deinstitutionalized politicization or too much depoliticized institutionalization—leaves movements vulnerable to collapse or co-optation.
- Despite the structural difficulty of offering material gains in an era of economic stagnation ('the long downturn'), building institutions—even without guaranteed material payoffs—is necessary because a Left without organized, durable structures like unions can gain visibility but lacks real levers to force policy change.
Assumptions
- Political power ultimately depends on durable organizational infrastructure, not just episodic mobilization or protest activity.
- The historical experience of 20th-century socialist/communist parties offers transferable lessons for today's qualitatively different political-economic context.
- The Left's current sociological composition and ties to liberalism are changeable rather than fixed features of its base.
- Reinstitutionalization is possible even without the labor movement's traditional material bargaining power.
- The Right's current ideological and material advantages are structural/contingent rather than permanent, leaving room for the Left to close the gap.