Since the early days of parliamentary democracy, political movements have tried to cometo terms with the conflict between the struggle for radical political change and the need tobe accepted as a respectable alternative within parliamentary politics. This paper analyzeshow this conflict has played out in the Pirate Party: a political party focusing on issues ofcopyright, surveillance, access to information, and right to privacy in a digital age. Sincethe first Pirate Party was formed in Sweden in 2006, national pirate parties haveemerged across Europe, North America and Australia, and they have occasionally wonrepresentation in different parliaments.This article looks at how the Pirate Party has handled the tensions between radical andreformist fractions, contextualized within contemporary social movement theories. Theconflicts have largely dealt with colliding principles for political organization whereconventional party structures are challenged by new, and assumingly less hierarchic,forms of interaction and decision making inspired by radical, digital protests movements.This study rests on a series of interviews with Pirate Party members in Sweden, the USAand Germany. It analyses the interviews in relation to Ulrich Beck’s and MariaBakardjieva’s theories on subpolitics and subactivism, asking why a movement thatcomes across as the prototype for a decentered, networked, subpolitical movementdecides to organize as a parliamentary political party and what consequences that has hadfor the Pirate Party.