What will it take to build a mass socialist party in the United States? Rosa Janis argues that socialist think-tanks may be a necessary first step, as well as a movement to reform electoral and labor laws through “anti-entryist” candidates.
With the buzz around the new democratic socialist congresswomen elected in the 2018 midterms and the growth of the DSA, there have been a number of different proposals on how socialists should conduct electoral campaigns and general political strategy. These proposals have ranged from the most moderate—those of Nora Belrose and other progressives—who want to work towards Michael Harrington’s vision of realigning the Democratic Party through running in the party’s primaries, to a more radical strategy being put forward by Neal Meyer and Ben B. of The Call who argue for an aggressive ‘Bernie or Bust’ campaign to split the left wing of the Democrats from their neoliberal masters to form a new labor/socialist party. (1) (2) What all of these new strategies have in common is that they accept that in the current moment, third parties are not viable.
Nora Belrose and Berniecrats represent the status quo. This makes sense given that their socialism is nothing more than a watered-down version of Social Democracy which fits within the capitalist framework, even though their ‘socialism’ fell out of fashion with the Democrats in the 90s with the rise of the Clintons. However, if we want to fulfill the underlying promise of socialism, of democratically empowering the lower masses and thus undermining the whole of the capitalist system, we must go well beyond being the left wing of a capitalist party.
While Neal Meyer and Ben B. halfway conceive of a successful electoral strategy based on the correct impulse of working within the system to ultimately undermine it, the strategy laid out in The Case for Bernie 2020 has five major problems with it.
The first concerns the reason why third parties are not viable in the United States. This is not due to a lack of a base of potential voters. Pew Polling on third parties show that most Americans feel there is a need for a major third party or that a vast number of American citizens refuse to vote for either party, as the 2016 election revealed. (3) (4) These potential voters are not given any kind of choice in the matter: third-party candidates have the odds stacked against them with first-past-the-post, or winner takes all, elections being the norm at the state level. Thanks to loose campaign finance laws, corporate capital flows unendingly to the two parties. This makes the “dirty split” pointless.
Second, as Charles Post pointed out in his critique, even if causing a “dirty split” was worthwhile, it probably would not happen: most Berniecrats, like Nora Belrose, are dead set on working within the Democratic Party, and a ‘Bernie or Bust’ campaign lead by socialists would most likely cause a split within the left wing of the Democratic Party rather than separating the left wing of the Democratic Party from the neoliberal center due to fears of Bernie being a “spoiler” candidate who would aid a Republican victory. (5) Third, Meyer & Ben B. do not cover how we would fund such a “campaign within a campaign,” a common problem with most of these democratic socialist political strategies. Socialists need money to compete with corporate Democrats in an election. Fourth, the way politics works in the United States is by discouraging any meaningful mass participation, as both parties are hollow fundraising machines unlike the political parties of the past that had an engaged mass membership. Any kind of socialist effort would have to tackle such a problem directly, and while Meyer & Ben B. briefly bring this up, they do not have a detailed response to it.
The fifth problem is probably the most important: there is not much that separates the Socialists who would get behind a hypothetical Bernie or Bust campaign from Democrat-approved progressives like Elizabeth Warren in terms of policy. This is indicative of a much deeper problem with democratic socialists in general, as they seem to not have their own independent political vision. While these flaws hold back the Bernie or Bust strategy, the impulse of working within the system in order to break it down is a good one, as the alternatives to it have consistently proven to be inadequate. Anti-union legislation has made it harder for socialists to organize a mass movement without dealing with the crooked realm of the American state. Therefore We must lay out a political strategy that will not only organize people directly, overcoming the weakness of the current labor movement but will still create a party with a distinctly socialist vision, completely independent from the two parties and undermining the two-party system from within.
The Merger Formula in America
The need for a socialist think tank and a broader plan for building the mass party must be thought of in the context of what Lenin scholar Lars T. Lih refers to as the Merger Formula. The Merger Formula posits that the success of a socialist revolution is based on the ability of the socialist movement (S) to merge with labor movement (M) to form a mass party (S+M) through which a revolution can be carried out. The concept is implicit in Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, Karl Kautsky’s The Erfurt Programme and Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party (6). The role of the socialist movement, according to the Merger Formula, is to develop the concept of socialism through theory and implant it into the consciousness of the workers’ movement, which acts as the mass base for socialism. In this way, the socialist movement can be thought of as the mind of the revolution and the workers’ movement its body. While some might reject such a formula as it implies that the workers are incapable of imagining socialism for themselves, this would be a simplistic misreading since—much like the literal mind and body—the socialist movement and the workers’ movement are never completely separated: the socialist movement is made up of the most advanced elements of the workers’ movement, and the workers’ movement is made up of the most advanced elements of the socialist movement. On theoretical grounds, the goal of the Merger Formula is to meld these two distinct-yet-connected social forces together to form the party and the revolution. Even during their most deformed state, transforming from revolutionary socialism to tepid social democracy, the mass parties of Europe relied upon the strength of the labor movement to provide them with the base of support, and in the semi-industrialized world, socialist revolutions were able to substitute the M of the Merger Formula with peasants.
However, we are in a situation where the existing M in the United States has been immensely weakened by a full-on assault against the legal rights of labor to organize and an evisceration of their advantageous class position. Removing American workers from the point of production through the shipping of their jobs overseas, along with a general shift in the economy towards service work, has taken away the power that American workers traditionally had, as they once had the potential to effectively seize the means of production. This has effectively neutered the strength of the American working class, as can be seen in the long-term decline of union membership and unions in general. (7) This presents the growing socialist movement with a major problem, as it sees its long-term growth as based on traditional institutions of labor such as unions. The socialist movement is completely disconnected from such institutions, being mostly composed of declassé and/or downwardly mobile petty bourgeois. The desire to return to such traditional institutions of labor is not motivated so much by a class basis as by a desire to find a viable alternative to what is called ‘identity politics’, contrasting the unity of
We must understand that while the decline in the number of factory workers that has led to the death of the traditional labor movement is real, the proletariat is something that is much greater than merely factory workers and therefore still exists. The proletariat is composed of those who are dispossessed from control over production and must therefore compete in the labor market in order to survive. When we start to think of the proletariat in this way, it becomes clear that everyone from permanently unemployed black people to service workers on meager wages are proletarians just as much as factory workers were in the 20th century and that the kind of workerism which dismisses them as lumpen (or whatever other nonsensical abstraction is utilized by bigoted Marxists) must be refuted as unscientific. The modern proletariat currently does not operate primarily through traditional institutions like unions, but still resists the capitalist class through various means of struggle that are scattered due to their spontaneous nature: forms of resistance like riots, wildcat strikes and protests of various kinds, all driven by a disorganized and unconscious proletariat. This means that riots against police brutality are just as proletarian as strikes, as both the rioter and the striker are proletarians struggling against capitalist exploitation even though said exploitation comes in different shapes—one being artificially imposed unemployment and racial discrimination, the other being direct wage slavery. The goal of the socialist movement must be to study these real movements of proletarian action and deeper sentiments that are in the proletariat which are inactive due to the suppression of resistance and figure out how to unify these scattered forms of struggle under the banner of the proletariat and move towards a well articulated and genuinely radical vision of socialism.
Organizing The Socialist Movement
Before we can even begin to tackle building the proletarian movement of the Merger Formula, we must first figure out how to effectively organize the burgeoning socialist movement into units that will best allow them to work
Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work takes a step in the the right direction in terms of how the socialist movement should be organized by tracking how neoliberalism developed from well-funded think tanks and proceeded to slowly but surely infiltrate the halls of power through the development of a clear and coherent alternative to the dominant Keynesian consensus of the 1950s and 60s, offering well fleshed out policy that could be enacted by politicians and a message that could win over a large enough portion of the population to create a new hegemony of free-market dogmatism. Of course this is all framed in a very limiting Neo-Gramscian framework that gives too much credit to the spreading of ideas in the rise of neoliberalism as opposed to the role of the evisceration of the industrial working class that served as the base of the Keynesian social democratic order that was carried out by the capitalist class. While this line of reasoning is ultimately wrong, they are correct in believing that the organization of socialist think tanks is necessary. They are also correct in wanting to study the success of mainstream political movements. The neoliberals could offer coherent policy proposals and give clear explanations for what they wanted with the authority of academic titles behind them, offering a vision of a new society, whereas socialists tend to focus on critiquing capitalism and offering nothing that isn’t either something that could already be put forward by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party or is just empty nostalgia for dead regimes. It makes sense then for the socialist movement, whose natural role is to be the mind of the revolution, to organize as think tanks which, instead of having a elusive focus on critique and eulogizing over the corpse of 20th century communism, works out the specifics of what a revitalized socialism would look like in power, proposing policy that is just as thorough in terms of being backed up by empirical data as something that would be put out by the Heritage Foundation or the RAND Corporation.
The think tank as a form of an organization has the benefit of dealing with the specifics of policy, analysis, and strategy through
Building the proletarian movement
With a rough outline of how to organize the socialist movement to be more effective, we can now begin to work out the
Neatly summarized, the three main tendencies that we need to tap into to revitalize proletarian movement are as follows:
- Raw Social Movements that have a proletarian class character and often express themselves in disorganized forms such as riots but who without real leadership end up being routed into the Democratic Party (e.g. Black Lives Matter).
- Populism and anti-political sentiments that have been building within the class due to an inability for their voices to be heard by the clueless political elite and the capitalist class that controls them in the face of their evisceration.
- The social alienation that has been growing due to the lack of community spaces in which people can be properly socialized.
How to tap in into the first is relatively easy to grasp as it would involve copying the sort of organizational structures that the Democratic Party already has with activist NGOs but instead of seeking to route raw social movements into the Democratic Party we would be pushing them towards the solidification of the proletarian movement and the eventual creation of a socialist party that unifies it politically. We would initially lack the resources that the Democratic Party has, but using some of the same methods of funding and leaning into the popularity of socialism among young people would allow us to gain the upper hand in terms of outflanking the Democrats when it comes to vying for control over movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street. To tap into the second tendency, we would need to do two things: organize campaigns for electoral reform, which would focus on how awful politics currently are, and give voice to the need for popular representation that would come from the formation of a major third-party in the United States, fulfilling the promise of American democracy. Propaganda efforts would feed into the discontent with mainstream politics that already exists within the proletariat in an effort to route them into a proletarian movement along with a proletarian party. For the third tendency, we should engage in what we will call “commune building”: what we mean by commune building is rebuilding the community bonding exercises and services that people used to have, such as bowling leagues and health facilities, but in a new socialist light. These will constitute the framework of the mass party. Mass parties of the past, such as the Black Panther Party and the Social Democratic Party of Germany during its heyday, were not only political organizations but also provided for social needs. The creation of socialist beer clubs, healthcare facilities, and other forms of alternative institutions will fill the gap left by bourgeois civil society in terms of creating thriving communities that will unite the class through the real social bonding that many now crave. Imagine if the young men who label themselves “incels” were taught and socialized through socialists schools instead of underfunded public schools and the dark corners of the internet. When we tap into all three of these tendencies within our society we will not only be rebuilding the proletarian movement by funneling them into a socialist mass party: we will also be bringing people together and improving their lives along the way.
The Democratic Offense
We have covered how to effectively organize the socialist movement and revitalize the proletarian movement, but before we can start to build the mass party we need to deal with the two-party system which dominates American politics. We cannot simply run third-party candidates in the United States because the two parties which the capitalist class supports have worked together to organize elections in such a way that it is impossible for a third-party candidate to be viable. In order to counter this we would need to enact real electoral reform like getting corporate money that usually ends up keeping third-party candidates from being serious contenders in elections out of politics and replacing winner-takes-all elections with the two-round system nationwide that would eliminate the “spoiler effect” that third-party candidates have the few times they are successful. The situation is tricky however, because in order to be able to enact the electoral reforms that are necessary for the establishment of the successful third party, and by extension a socialist mass party, there needs to already be successful independent electoral movement for said reforms, since they would have to be passed by elected politicians. This leaves us in an awful situation where the only way to build successful third parties is to already have a successful third party, so at the moment we cannot work through a third party. However, avoiding electoral politics altogether is not an option either since it still manages to reach a large portion of the population and has the potential to reach an even larger portion of the population given the mass coverage of electoral politics in the United States by the media. Having people already within the state when we move to take power will give us an advantage that simply avoiding electoral politics altogether will not give us, making the process of revolution an act of the popular will of the proletariat rather than a coup carried out by a small number of people. This means that we cannot simply avoid electoral politics as many leftists would want us too.
We are left with no other option than to work within the two-party system in order to undermine it. We shall not, however, simply tail the Democratic Party as DSA’s right wing would want us to. Rather, we must plan out a wave of hostile campaigns at all levels of office. By running candidates in both the Republican and Democratic Party we will be able to demonstrate that we are not progressive Democrats like the DSA candidates who are the loyal opposition to the Democratic Party but are rather an independent movement that has been forced to fight the duopoly within its own den, our platforms being focused on electoral reforms that will destroy the system, popular demands like universal health care, and actual socialist positions such as nationalizing/socializing major industries. The amped-up rhetoric and openly hostile positions to both parties will separate these candidates from straightforward Democrats and Republicans, allowing said candidates to tap even further into the vital anti-political sentiment that we previously discussed. We would have to be smart and abrasive about our socialist politics to effectively appeal to the proletariat that has been betrayed one too many times by smooth-talking politicians and loud populists. The conventional party leaders would then be forced into two situations that would ultimately backfire in their faces if they were to carry them out against the socialist anti-entryist insurgencies within their parties, either forcing them out democratically in the face of public backlash that would be organized through the revitalized movements of the proletariat and socialism, or trying to compete with the mass popularity of said insurgencies with empty populism and ultimately losing out. Either way, the democratic offensive will be successful in propagandizing for the movement. If and when we do win elections, we will have the means of holding our politicians accountable, unlike the DSA left of today, as we will have ways of organizing the proletariat outside of the Democratic Party with the institutions that we have built through the development of the proletarian-socialist movements. The candidates will carry out the electoral reform with popular support behind them, dragging the two parties along with them towards the establishment of a proper socialist mass party.
Through a slow build up of popular support through the development of socialist and proletarian movements and their merger in the form of the Democratic Offensive we can potentially create a clear road towards a mass socialist party and eventual revolution, working towards the emancipation of all of mankind in our revolutionary struggle.
