Rosa Janis and Parker McQueeney respond to “DSA Convention: Fog & Storm,” arguing that the approach the authors argue for de-emphasizes issues of political struggle.
The intent of this article is to engage in a good-faith critique of another that was published recently by Cosmonaut, “DSA National Convention: Fog and Storm “by Gabriel Pierre & Miah Simone. In writing this we hope not only to create a polite dialogue on tactics and ideology but to lay out a “Macnairist” position for the future of the DSA. We only begrudgingly label ourselves, along with others on the editorial board of Cosmonaut, as Macnairist because we derive our politics from the work of the British Marxist Mike Macnair, particularly the politics laid out in his book Revolutionary Strategy. However, the task we set out for ourselves is not simply to follow the word of Macnair but to adopt the theoretical developments of his work in the context of the particularities of the United States. This involves working within the DSA and other organizations like Marxist Center to unite Marxists around a clear minimum-maximum program to form a mass party-movement. Standing in the way of this goal is petty factionalism which turns what should be even-handed discussions of issues into an all-out sectarian brawl. The article that we are responding to is tainted by that obfuscating brawl in its analysis of DSA, using a faulty typology to argue in favor of the political line of the DSA Build caucus (though they claim to not be caucus) as an opposition to the Bread and Roses caucus. This is not to say that the Bread and Roses caucus is not guilty of any errors or wrongdoing, There is, however, no meaningful reason to privilege Build over Bread and Roses.
The Problem of Typology
Gabriel Pierre & Miah Simone open their article by describing the way in which the struggles within the DSA are usually framed: the narrative of centralizers (Bread and Roses) vs decentralizers (the Libertarian Socialist Caucus and Build DSA). While being somewhat accurate, this framing ignores the strategic differences between these factions. They view the factions from the perspective of what they actually do rather than focusing on their ideological divides to categorize them, which on paper sounds like a good idea. The problem is the typology they use, which is that the US Left supposedly has only four tendencies (lifted from Sophia Burns). This typology is incredibly limiting and they do not apply it accurately. The tendencies go as follows:
Government Socialists — Government socialists are pragmatic above all else. They exist either explicitly within the “grassroots progressive” Democratic Party faction, or else as local-level political players within its broad sphere of influence. While they disagree about the ultimate goal of the reforms they pursue (some want outright communism at some unspecified future point, while others think a Sweden-style system is enough), they are united in their policy-focused, realpolitik approach. Winnable reform fights are their bread and butter. They would rather impact policy by “getting their hands dirty” than retain “ideological purity” at the cost of actual influence.
Protest Militants —These view government socialists with contempt, seeing little difference between them and the outright liberals with whom they collaborate. Protest militants tend to stay away from policy campaigns and electoral since in their view, protest and “power in the streets” is what really matters.
Expressive Hobbyists — Many expressive hobbyists attend the same demonstrations as protest militants, but for them, the point isn’t exciting “revolutionary” confrontation. Rather, they’re the alphabet-soup sects that bring their own signs and start their own chants to “raise consciousness.” They hold academic conferences to talk about the latest developments in radical theory, form endless study circles, and start online journals to read each other’s analysis. Different sub-tendencies prefer social-media arguing and meme-making, seeking faculty or progressive-media jobs, selling newspapers at whatever protest is in the news this week, or making zines with their friends.
Base-Builders — Base-builders start by recognizing that in the US, the working class exists in economic terms, but does not exist as what Marx called a “class-for-itself”: a class organized through its own infrastructure of institutions, capable of consciously contesting with other classes for social power. Because such an organized base for mass socialism is absent, base-builders think the top leftist priority should be to establish one.
The first major problem with this typology is that it is completely ahistorical in terms of understanding how leftist organizations functioned during the 20th century. While it may be true now that plenty of leftist organizations are limited in their capacities to the point where they are limited to only one of these tactics, in the 20th century every successful mass organization from the early German Social Democratic Party to the Black Panther Party pursued multiple routes of organizing at the same time. The German SPD engaged in elections and pushed for democratic reforms while creating newspapers, schools, cultural and athletic clubs. The Black Panther Party pursued what could be called base-building in the form of their Serve the People programs, yet they still ran candidates for local offices and taught theory to people through their regular publications. No successful mass party could ever possibly fit within one category of this typology as it is merely describing all the functions that are necessary and developed simultaneously with each other (propaganda, engaging in the battle of democracy, “base building” etc).
The second problem with the four tendencies typology is that there is no meaningful distinction between the practices of “community organizers” (which would fall under the category of ‘protest militants’) and the actual practices of “base-builders” beyond radical posturing. In fact, even liberal activist NGOs seek to organize poor people into a mass base through things such things as tenant unions, community organizations, etc. Red Guards Austin attempted to do the kind of organizing that is described by Sophia Burns as unique to the “base building” tendency while still being “protest militants.” To pretend that base-building is a new tendency rather than common practice among leftists of almost all shapes and sizes is fundamentally absurd.
There’s an overarching reason for “base-building” not being a real tendency on the left. That is that, for all the pretenses of it being a meaningful strategy for the left, it has no real strategy. Base-builders do not lay out a path for taking power but focus on what is essential community organizing because they are desperate to avoid the real ideological differences among them: the divide between anarchists, communists, and socialists and their approaches to the political program. In her essay, Burns, along with many other (but not all) theorists of base-building, seeks to sidestep any questions of the political program, the road to power, and post-revolutionary society in order to pursue unity in practice. While being fine in the short-term, this will lead to major conflicts and disunity in the future when the mass base for socialism exists but is rendered completely befuddled as to what to do with their newfound strength. Even though Burns has abandoned the framework that she initially set out in her essay “What is the Left?”, the authors of “Fog and Storm” still use the typology of “Four Tendencies.” Many who initially embraced the idea of base-building as a tendency have given up on it as well, as people to the right of them (such as DSA Build) have adopted the framework.
An Error of Analysis
As alluded to earlier, Pierre & Simone do not accurately apply Sophia Burns’s flawed typology to DSA internal conflict, which on the surface appears to describe the rift between the Bread & Roses caucus and Build DSA (the Libertarian Socialist Caucus gets lost in the shuffle as they are barely talked about in the article). Since The B&R caucus is focused on electoral strategy, in particular that of the “dirty break” with the Democratic Party to split the party into a new labor party through the weaponization of the Bernie Sanders campaign, this would fit them into the category of government socialists, as Pierre & Simone say in the article, while Build DSA is founded on the principles of base building, fitting them into the base building category. While the description of Bread & Roses as government socialists is a definite fit, if we follow Sophia Burns typology (as Pierre & Simone do), Build DSA fails to fit into the category of base-builders on closer inspection. To quote from the Build DSA website:
“For generations, activists pitted tactics like direct action against tactics like electoral politics. For so long, activists in the street wouldn’t and couldn’t work with politicians in the halls of institutional power. We must work with both. We must see tactics in context and decide when and how to deploy each. Electoral victories are not an end unto themselves. Those victories must serve the movement. Direct action shouldn’t happen in a vacuum or for its own sake, independent of larger goals or a broader strategy. The working class isn’t identical to the labor movement. We must keep one foot in the institutions, one foot in the streets.”
This makes DSA Build a combination between protest militants and government socialists as ‘direct action’ is used to spur on reform; if we are following Burns’ typology we would label them militant reformists. This also goes back to the more significant weakness of Burns’s typology: trying to ignore ideological differences in favor of practical differences. This is an inaccurate understanding of the relation between theory and practice, due to the fact that it does not take into account how theoretical differences would inform practice and vice versa. As a result, DSA Build goes in the direction of becoming an ideologically incoherent mishmash of liberal activism and reformism because there is no one thinking about programmatic strategy.
Some of Build’s proposals mentioned in Pierre & Simone’s article that failed had the stated goal of moving the DSA’s “…composition to more closely mirror the composition of the class as a whole – which includes many oppressed and marginalized peoples” included a by-law change (“Nobody too Poor for DSA”) that would essentially abolish dues. While supposedly aiming to be inclusive, this was another tactic to limit the funds of DSA as a national organization, but perhaps a much worse effect of it would be to get rid of the pre-party, membership-driven form that DSA is struggling to grow into. Dues are a method of giving the rank-and-file of an organization material ownership and investment in the organization. It is ironic that the people pushing for dues abolition were the group accusing the other side of wanting to turn DSA into an “NGO-style organization” since this is basically what it would become without dues from rank-and-file members. In DSA, dues are already extremely low, and monthly dues are optional with most members contributing low annual dues. If anything, DSA’s dues should be higher, monthly, and mandatory. It is, of course, true that people who cannot afford a monthly five or ten-dollar buy-in to DSA should be able to join DSA. The solution to this is making dues sponsorship (which already exists) more streamlined and easy to access. There will never be a dearth of comrades willing to pitch in a few bucks to swell the ranks of an organization.
While the decentralist coalition viewed itself as a ‘left opposition’ on identity and electoral issues, in truth it was nothing of the sort. It may be true that many in DSA who consider themselves communists (who are only against centralization under the hegemonic ‘social-democratic’ politics of Bread and Roses) are members or sympathizers of Build, the coalition is not politically coherent and, in classic popular front style, the politics of the more radical are subsumed by those on their right. In a way, the soft-Maoist and anarcho-liberal combination of Build is reminiscent of the 1980s rainbow coalition. On some issues, the decentralist coalition found itself sharply to the right of its opponents. One such example was the ‘candidate litmus test’ resolution, which would have implemented a democratic socialist minimum program that candidates at any level would have to adhere to. This resolution failed; Build whipped against it and no doubt its communist members voted it down because it was a ‘centralizing’ and ‘electoral’ resolution, despite the fact that it actually limited the ability of DSA to endorse bourgeois liberal Democrats.
On the other hand, the reputation of Bread & Roses in the decentralist camp and on the wider left isn’t necessarily wrongly deserved. Bread & Roses represents the dominant ideas of DSA as a whole, and the writers and editors of Jacobin seem broadly aligned with the caucus, as well as older socialists who have recently come to DSA from third camp Trotskyist (Draperist) groups like the ISO and Solidarity. Some of these members spoke up against the Cuba solidarity resolution, for example, as a result of this ideological heritage. Because their primary goal is to win the left-wing of the Sanders movement to democratic socialism, over the last few years Jacobin and its milieu has mostly oriented towards dedicated liberals rather than towards the socialist left and the working class. Obviously this has had an adverse effect on their political content. While Bread & Roses clearly states they desire a ‘dirty break’ with the Democratic Party towards a democratic socialist/labor party, there is no real blueprint or discipline on a strategy for political class independence, and moreover, they view the ‘ballot line issue’ as essentially unimportant.
The Way Forward
While their analysis of the situation may be incorrect, there are points that are worth noting in Pierre & Simone’s article. We agree that progress has been made by the DSA to address the issues of imperialism and settler colonialism, and should be defended by Marxists within the DSA. We also agree that attempts to circumvent democratic procedure by any faction is opportunistic, even if we are not “decentralizers”, and further agree that any meaningful mass organization should not be reduced to that of a theory-sect, which means allowing for a wide range of factions to exist and debate inside the mass organization. We follow a “Macnairist” commitment to programmatic unity, which differs from theoretical unity in that programmatic unity is based around a series of concrete political demands that establishes the basis for both the dictatorship of the proletariat and the upper phase of communism in a clear program. This is counterposed to having organizational unity based along the lines of theory (metaphysics, methodology, or various political-economic theories that fall under the category of Marxism). In favoring programmatic unity over theoretical unity, we allow for the party to have a functional internal democracy with open factions and debates existing within as opposed to theory-sects which seek to impose a one-size-fits-all view of the world as the basis for a revolutionary movement.
To elaborate on the last point, programmatic unity is the joining of Marxists around a clear set of demands that establish the dictatorship of the proletariat (or socialist republic, cooperative commonwealth, etc.) in the minimum form and communism in the maximum form which will be the framework of a mass party. We hope to achieve this end by engaging in polemics with other Marxists, winning comrades to our position and working with other theoretical camps of Marxists who still disagree with us on specifics towards the creation of an independent mass socialist party. This is how the original socialist mass movements formed out of the swamp of early socialist sects. Seeing as we are essentially forced to start over with the breakdown of the workers’ movement through the detour of the short 20th century, we must wade through the swamp and drag each other, as comrades, towards the shore of Marxist programmatic unity.
