Hello,
I would like to send a few thoughts on the most recent article. I recently joined Bread and Roses but have been following the debates around DSA very closely in the last two years.
I think the Trotskyist inheritance stuff is a bit overstated, but I can’t say for sure.
I think it is wrong to say that “Jacobin and its milieu has mostly oriented towards dedicated liberals rather than towards the socialist left and the working class.” Firstly, what is the purpose of a quarterly magazine? It’s not like Jacobin is a daily workers’ publication. Maybe it should be, or should launch one, but I imagine they see their project as a superstructural one. Secondly, what reason does Jacobin and its milieu have to orient itself towards the socialist left? What is the socialist left right now, in all seriousness, besides DSA, however imperfect? PSL, WWP, SAlt, some local groupings and collectives, but even the Marxist Center has maybe, what, 250 members? The constituency of Marxists is not the left, even the socialist left, it is the working class. Insofar as there should be coordination and alliances between parties, it should be if they have an actual base. These groups — with the exception of MC maybe, I don’t know much — have gotten nothing done and tail either foreign countries’ leaderships or local spontaneous progressive movements. Of course, there are probably thousands of unaffiliated Marxists, but if they don’t understand the fundamental principle of organization and haven’t yet reasoned themselves into joining DSA, the largest and most active socialist organization in the country with the largest concentration of Marxists, then in what sense are they Marxists?
These groups’ inability to grow at all besides capturing some of the recently-radicalized people should tell us something (and it is unsurprising that their recent growth has led them to implode because of how archaic they are). This is what the Sanders movement does for DSA: it is a test of growth, who wants to grow to a large working-class socialist organization, and in that sense it is a proxy for seriousness and orienting towards the working class in general, in other words for Marxism. Here’s why: you can talk to people about Bernie, his programs, how they will face difficulties and therefore presuppose the need to change various aspects of the government to be more democratic, and then you have activated a socialist. Getting in front of thousands of people by canvassing and door-knocking, as quotidian as these sound, allows you to grow DSA and grow active membership. It forces the organization to become more disciplined and better organized. And ultimately growing active membership — cadre — is perhaps the most important thing for socialists.
The DSA chapters that I am familiar with, in Virginia, where the “decentralizers” are in power do almost no practical work at all. Their general meetings are not well-attended and they sometimes do not meet quorum. They have reading groups where no one shows up but the organizer. Things are regularly rescheduled. We should call this tendency what it is: whether the decentralizers call themselves communists or whatever else, it is anarchism in practice. And B&R obviously is not entirely dominant within DSA — just look at votes from the convention. And if these anarchistic comrades have not properly grasped the lessons since 2016 — the need for organization and the need for principled electoral participation in some form — why should we trust their judgment on anything? It is unsurprising that their chapters are not well-run. I went to a meeting the other day and the chairs were set up in a circle — which immediately prompted me to think that they aren’t in the habit of any sort of parliamentary practice, and weren’t expecting that many people — and there weren’t any printed copies of the agenda and working group leaders (one of whom was absent, another of whom vacated their position in what is obviously a sign of inactivity and turnover) just read from their phones for an hour. They suggested everyone attend a bunch of random city council meetings. Where is the theory of change? Anarchists who love sitting through meetings instead of campaigning for our local socialist candidate. A mess.
You may have seen some of the recent Twitter exchanges about comrades in Ohio not doing Bernie work. I think they are mostly decentralizers. They are instead organizing tenants. That’s great, but have they considered that by doing Bernie work they could grow in a few months such that they could be doing tenant organizing and Bernie work? It’s very basic organizational things like this, focusing on expanding our capacity, that the Bernie campaign allows us to work on. That the decentralizers don’t understand this is why they are wrong. We must be serious about our practical work — growing, activating more members, political education, taking power one day. One of the Iowa comrade says they are working for the Sanders campaign, that way they get paid to do the same work apparently. But obviously not every single member of DSA has been hired by the Sanders campaign, so what are the rest of them doing? They seem to think that class consciousness operates qualitatively different in Ohio. And the fact that they are not campaigning independently for Sanders as socialists means that they are essentially just staffing local Democratic machines. So once again the decentralizers are to the right of everyone else, as you pointed out.
And about Bernie: his base is younger and poorer and more diverse than everyone else. It is also the most intransigent — only half of the people who prefer Sanders first would consider voting for another Democrat. This suggests that he has support from depoliticized people and from Republican voters. And he constantly harps on the need for a mass movement. For his faults, he is the working class’s candidate, and we must take advantage of that. And by the way, these comrades who are so radical that they think Sanders is not properly left, he puts out videos about jailing pharmaceutical execs! If throwing rich people in jail is not socialism enough for them, I don’t know what to say. But of course many of the decentralizers are prison abolitionists, so they may take issue with him on that.
I think it is useful to think about this decentralizer phenomenon sociologically. Virginia, whose DSA chapters are smaller and less active than we might otherwise predict, is the worst state in the country for workers. So there is I think an obvious link between the strength of the workers’ movement and this anarchism. When people muse that smaller or rural chapters are more “radical,” they neglect to consider that this is because those chapters are essentially just a Twitter account and an e-mail list, with no ongoing practical work. When you begin doing practical work, you must start thinking seriously, in a complex and nuanced way. And if you explicitly reject growth, your internal culture deteriorates. Look at the difference between DRUM and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers one the one hand and the Sojourner Truth Organization on the other.
And in another sociological way, we might like to ask what is the origin of these ideas. One of the guys who started Build wrote this piece about how he’s a “Freirian-Hortonian” https://
While there is no explicit blueprint for the dirty break, which is now DSA’s official position — and I don’t think we should underestimate the historical significance of a 60,000 person organization expressing its intent to found a working-class party — it’s possible to come up with the general idea in your head. We campaign for candidates who call themselves democratic socialists and advocate class struggle. In the process we build up our own independent electoral machines and our organization. Over time, we should be more strict with who we endorse and expect a greater percentage of them to come from our own active membership. Probably at the next convention we will adopt a proper platform to hold them to. Then when we judge its appropriate, based on number of politicians and the strength of our machines and the level of class struggle, we split. The Socialist Party grew from something like a dozen officials to 1000 in about a decade, so it is not unimaginable.
As for the ballot line, I think Seth Ackerman’s article settles that it is, like everything else for Marxists, a tactical question.
As an aside, I am surprised there is not more sympathy for Bread and Roses from Cosmonaut. I arrived at agreement with Bread and Roses via reading Macnair on Kautsky, so I am unsure where the disagreement actually comes from. Everything I have written above is informed very much by the idea of programmatic unity.
