Diego AM explores the organization conundrums of the modern left, looking at the Democratic Socialists of America and the alternatives proposed by base-builders and Maoists.
The number of people who realize there are inherent flaws in capitalism is increasing every day. These people generally have good intentions, but might not know where to start. They are faced with a choice: join a group that already exists, or start your own group. The latter solution I will not talk about, because there is nothing that suggests to me that new groups will not end up replicating the same problems as the existing groups, unless the plan has been well studied and thought out for years like, for example, Marxist Center. Therefore, this article will speak about the actually existing organizations and their problems.
Sophia Burns provided the first shots for a materialistic analysis of the existing US left. While she has moved from her starting position, her analysis is still very valuable. It asks the correct questions: we should look at what people do rather than what they say they believe in doing. Ideology matters less than towards what we orient and how we organize. One of the main problems with the current US left is its organizational shape. Cybernetician and organizational consultant Stafford Beer once declared that the greatest threat to all we hold dear is our inability to change the way our societal institutions worked, treating them as static, and advocating for methods to reduce complexity which worked in bygone eras. While this seems exaggerated when staring at the consequences of Covid-19 and climate change it is worth taking his diagnosis seriously when assessing the structure of the organizations in today’s left.
The pressing problem is that we are trapped in a false dichotomy of centralization against decentralization. And most groups are situated on one or the other pole. For example, the US sects, regardless of tendency, are stuck in the centralism pole of democratic centralism. They form rigid centers, from which order and directives flow. This center has a stronghold on the party, and can barely be challenged. This results in the ossification of the leadership and an inability to absorb criticism. These factors can lead to a lack of real democracy even if everything is voted on. That is because people who join these groups either assimilate to the groupthink directed by the center or if they are unable to assimilate, eventually leave or are made to leave. Sometimes, a cluster of people opposed to the center can bond, and articulate criticism against this center. The process that usually follows is an attempt to provide an alternative pole of leadership through a faction, followed by a fightback from the center. This ends up generating a split rather than an adequate response or a sharing of power. The new party originating from the split usually takes up the organizational method from the parent organization without much questioning, which replicates the problems further down the line.
Witnessing this process can leave many with burnout and a lingering mistrust for any form of central authority, particularly in the form of a party. Others can become extremely skeptical of authority just by operating in today’s society, where bosses and parents often demand absolute authority and compliance and see no liberation through a rigid party structure. These kinds of people want to be in organizations that are decentralized and horizontal, the other pole of the dichotomy. The advantages of horizontalism seem obvious: in theory no one has more power over others. However, uncodified power just leads to informal power structures, as famously pointed out by Jo Freeman’s Tyranny of Structurelessness, and familiar to anyone who has spent time in these horizontal groups. Horizontal organizations often operate informally and are based on friendship rather than comradeship (I will get to this difference later). Splits do not happen officially, but people can simply walk away and choose another group of friends, and start a different horizontal affinity group. In principle, there is nothing wrong with keeping these horizontalist organizations small if the goals are limited: anarchist affinity groups perform valuable work as street medics or arranging food handouts, jail support, and addiction support, to name a few issues. However, these groups cannot hope to significantly challenge the established order with their numbers and the organization.
We need large-scale coordination to defeat an enemy that organizes at that level. Otherwise, we will be crushed because the enemy will have the ability to refocus resources across a much larger landscape. We need large organizations coordinated at several levels. And neither type of organization discussed above can grow much without being severely compromised, people come in and out all the time, and either leave individually when burned out or in mass to form a new organization. To avoid this, we have to understand that the solution is not to choose a healthy middle because this is bound to collapse into one of the poles if not supported by a well-designed organizational structure. If we do not take this challenge seriously, the same problems will continue appearing, and this will compromise any attempt at building socialism. These dynamics have historically set a soft limit on the size of leftist organizations in the US since the downfall of the CPUSA. While this is not the only factor driving the US left powerless, it is definitely one worth paying serious attention to.
In this piece, I will attempt to analyze the current structure of the Democratic Socialists of America, and why it has recently beat the soft size limit by a combination of its organizational model and happenstance. This is followed by a discussion on the inevitable problems that arise out of its organizational model. Then I will discuss the base-building and “mass line” solutions to party organization and how they are insufficient. Finally, I will add my own suggestions for how to build a party that can continue to operate effectively and grow even as the growth of membership reveals more problems.
The growth of the DSA
The DSA has grown immensely in these last years mainly from the young, dissatisfied, and largely white, leftovers of the Bernie campaign. Much of its growth can be attributed to chance: it is the first organization many hear about, be it either because it comes up first when you search for “democratic socialism” on Google, the publicity generated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unexpected win, or just because your friend or a certain online semi-celebrity is in it. But even if it is the first organization people hear about, the whole of this growth cannot be fully attributed to this.
To tease out the structural causes of DSA’s growth, it is worth contrasting DSA with Socialist Alternative. SA won a Seattle City Council seat with the open-socialist Kshama Sawant, and as a result it gained nation-wide publicity. The reelection of Sawant, as well as the campaigns around a minimum wage of $15/hour in Seattle brought it even more publicity. And while the general level of radicalism was another, there is still something to be said on why the DSA structure was more receptive to mass growth than SA’s. The obvious thing to look at is DSA’s conception of itself as a “big tent” for socialists, compared with SA’s commitment to post-Trotskyism. However, this cannot be the reason: Socialist Alternative’s politics are very dilute on their main communications, and it had very lax criteria for membership until recently. Indeed, SA and DSA attempt to recruit from the same pool of newly radicalized people with similar messaging.
The large difference is not so much in ideas as in operation. While SA runs the usual sect organizational model with a strong center, DSA’s “center”, for lack of a better term, is very diffuse, and there is no prescription for operation. What I refer to here as the center is not the National Political Committee (NPC), as it is the general guidelines for operation. What you do, how much you commit, and what you believe in is up to you. Contrast this with joining SA, or any other sect like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, where you would soon find yourself in a study group that would make you assimilate into their political line, and at the same time you would be cajoled into further recruiting members, selling newspapers or any other tool from the limited sect arsenal. However, when joining DSA, not only do you have the freedom of political line, which means anarchists coexist with social welfarists, but you also have the freedom of action, which means you can do whatever you want: union work, mutual aid or canvassing for a local or state election. If one is to unite (whatever that means) wide sections of the left like the DSA is hoping to do, then prescribing what members have to do is anathema. And this has worked. This diffuse center has permitted DSA to surpass the growth of other sects, because it acts majorly like a collection of locals, and the locals sometimes act as a collection of working groups. The diffuse center means that both the national DSA and its locals will be able to survive entryism which intends on splitting off a core, splits due to political or organizational differences (even if at some level entire locals can and have been lost, like the North Atlanta DSA chapter) and other problems sects are vulnerable to.
The problem of structure
The organizational structure of a group has been too often tied to its politics (i.e. democratic centralism for Trotskists/Marxist-Leninists, horizontalism for anarchists). But even if they usually come together, there is room for decoupling. This does not happen much: organizational critiques are painted as unprincipled, which is partly true– too often they are thinly concealed wagers for power with an implicit message of “I can run things better than you”. This has resulted in persistent organizational models that originate from a type of democratic centralism arising during a brutal Civil War which required an overbalancing towards the center.
But right now we are not in a Civil War. This long-running mistake should be amended if we are to build a structure that is operative and can present a serious challenge to the established order. The DSA’s response of letting local chapters possess the autonomy to run things as they please is an overcorrection that goes beyond what is necessary. The lack of a coherent center means that anybody can attempt to run as a member of DSA, and contest for its endorsement. Endorsements are often left to a vote by the locals, without definite criteria. Down the line, this leads to unaccountability. It is not only that a superstar such as AOC is completely unaccountable to DSA; this problem extends to any local member who has no real reason to follow guidelines from the organization after being elected.
Because of this, DSA in effect functions more like a horizontal collective than a socialist party. This comes with all the problems known as the tyranny of structurelessness: the lack of structure on paper just means that there is an unacknowledged structure and unacknowledged channels for leveraging influence in the shape of passing resolutions or directing chapter money towards certain projects. And while anarchist affinity groups almost never exceed dozens of people, DSA members are faced with this problem in an organization that operates at a very different scale, in the tens of thousands of members nationally, and within chapters which are composed of thousands of members.
Of course, DSA has a national organization that provides vertical integration through dues, newspapers, national mailing lists and even a forum. But this is not what is important. To understand how the center operates, we must answer the question: if DSA is multi-tendency and in practice functions closer to a horizontal quasi-anarchist collective than a socialist party, why does it seem so wrapped up in electoral and reformist approaches? Why is it seen from the outside as a platform for progressive Democrats to be elected, even if the actual work on the ground is much broader? The answer to this question is that the most important of the vertical integrators are the electoral campaigns, especially those at the national level. This is what determines how the organization as a whole is seen from the outside, regardless of the work done at the local level.
DSA’s growth is driven by electoral campaigns that get widespread attention. Events like the election of AOC to congress shows that socialism (with an asterisk) can win victories. This shared image has allowed, and still allows, the DSA to attract groups like the leftovers of the Bernie campaign better than any other group. The caucuses responsible for pushing the national Medicare4All campaign and the second Bernie endorsement know, either consciously or unconsciously, that this is what defines the DSA’s center, and not the mutual aid groups or the brake light clinics. To continue modeling DSA on that image, they attempt to use low-hanging national campaigns as a way to enforce some coherence on the national organization. Those who disagree with this approach often find themselves unable to communicate their disagreement because the proper formal channels simply do not exist, and they have little say in the informal channels focused on electoral campaigns. They end up misdiagnosing DSA’s electoral focus as a lack of democracy, a wide gap between leadership and rank-and-file. And due to the lack of proper “vertical” communication and decision channels, members who do not agree with electoral approaches are left only with a direct confrontation to the superior organizational level.
The real problem is that there is no real way to dissipate entropy. Mild conflicts arising from the diversity of membership cannot be solved, and the entropy increase has to go somewhere. In this case, the rise of the Build caucus is a symptom of this discontent and entropy accumulation. But the Build approach did not propose anything new except accentuating these problems by decentralizing further. This would do nothing to dissipate the entropy but instead would result in a progressively more chaotic organization. Build, or more explicitly anarchist caucuses such as the Libertarian Socialist Caucus, never managed to articulate an alternative vision for DSA’s center. This means that they were unable to challenge the national image of DSA provided by the electoralists. But ironically, even if the electoralists appear to have the upper hand, they have been unable to impose their vision on the members because of DSA’s horizontalism. There is no mandate to do certain kinds of work, another consequence of the lack of actual vertical integration. Which leaves DSA in an organizational conundrum that must be resolved.
All this is pointing towards a solution. What is needed is an adequate organizational balance that satisfies the criteria of local autonomy. Autonomy, unlike complete decentralization, is always relative, and never really absolute. In the large country of the United States it is useless to insist on a single tactic or approach. The autonomy of locals, and the autonomy of working groups, will generate a diversity of solutions to the problems of socialist construction the center could never come up with. Many heads are better than a single one, because they can see and hear much more, and can come up with many more ideas. However, these “heads” have to understand that they are embedded in the wider organizational task of socialist construction. In the absence of guidelines, autonomy becomes decentralization and functional units can lose their purpose. A local, or a working group, could easily dissipate after it frustrates itself. Even worse, it could become a self-sustained group that no longer tries to work towards the national or international goals of socialist construction and repeatedly pulls its resources for minor campaigns that do not look at a large goal on the horizon.
To avoid this, the center must provide strategic guidelines for the locals in a general sense, and the locals must provide some more detailed guidance to the working groups to act. Otherwise, working groups would start acting as affinity groups, which eventually will dissipate as they find themselves ineffective to make dents into the system, or worse, keep running and consuming resources and people while failing to achieve quixotic ends. The same could happen with the locals, becoming too enmeshed with their area of existence to look to their neighbors or to remember that the goal of socialism escapes the city level.
Fighting for a socialist center: The Maoist and the base-building critiques
The guidance of the actually existing, diffuse center is insufficient. It is often disoriented, directed towards campaigns that are taken up without sufficient thought on how they can be conducted or how the end goal fits in the broader strategy. The most outstanding example of the lack of direction combined with wishful thinking are the two Jacobin articles by Dustin Guastella: “After the Nevada blowout, it’s Bernie’s party now” after Sanders’ Nevada victory, followed by a capitulation three weeks after called “Where do we go after last night’s defeat?”. In its current post-Bernie shape, with approaches such as the “Rank and File Strategy”, it is hardly better. It shows little promise, as it attempts to replicate a few labor successes without attempting an in-depth analysis of what made them successful, which geographical areas and which jobs to focus on, and many other variables socialists should focus on to replicate them. What remains in practice is a vague “join a unionized job” directive, as unsatisfactory as the Medicare for All push. It significantly fails at the organizational level: a large organization as DSA could perfectly pull resources into a few strategic areas to make a large impact.
A big reason why the current national caucuses are unable to articulate a strategy is because of where their ideas originate from. More often than not, caucuses like Bread & Roses have not sufficiently broken with ideas originating from expired US sects that are simply not viable in the current political and economic landscape. Sophia Burns’ criticism of the left as too white and too petit-bourgeois (and sometimes too male) strikes home here. If the DSA at large suffers from these sins, these caucuses augment them even more. Because of this, it is worth taking seriously the base-building critique. In my interpretation, this critique says that the left needs to consciously change its composition by choosing work that will bring in the dispossessed. This will help change its character by making it more tied to day-to-day struggles, and at the same time provide us with worker power which can actually stop the capitalist gears.
The base-building critique is hardly novel. As theorized by Kautsky and taken up by Lenin, the socialist movement is a merger of the workers’ movement and the socialist intelligentsia. When socialist parties are no longer embedded in the struggles of the working class, they cease to be vehicles for class struggle. Trotsky, for example, was adamant in his prescriptions to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that they must recruit more workers to ensure that the political line remains Marxist. The fact that this needed to be pointed out is a testament to how far the current left is from its origins, and how it needs to “remerge” with the working-class movement to achieve its goals.
I choose to interpret the base-building critique as a critique of the actually existing left and its composition. Because of this, it is hardly a complete program, a long-term strategy, or an organizing method. It is just a statement of what is needed to recover the worker component of the socialist merger. We could also take base-building further than this, and it slowly becomes something akin to the Maoist “mass line”. Indeed, it could seem like the Maoist “mass line” is a superior version of base-building. In some ways, this is true: it is more of a complete program than base-building, as it also provides guidelines for a strategy (take the people’s ideas and reformulate them in Marxist terms) and an organizational model (from the people to the people). However, I see this as an illegitimate extension of the base-building critique, and Maoists again commit the sin of tying politics and organizational models too close together.
The best rationale for the mass line is provided by J. Moufawad-Paul in his book Continuity and Rupture. By mixing with the masses, the party cadres change themselves, and as a consequence, the party changes. The party program has to become a reflection of the demands of the masses, filtered and articulated using the party’s language. This opens another can of worms: the party must rise above the masses to translate their demands, but the party itself must be embedded and become part of the masses. It introduces a delicate “dialectical” balance to solve the problems of party bureaucratization, which has historically not worked. The cultural revolution in China was supposed to be the best example of this: by going to the people, and learning from them, cadres would be changed, and this way counter-revolutionary thought, or bourgeois ideas, would be wiped out. But as any reader of history knows, after the Cultural Revolution came the victory of “the capitalist roaders”. And Nepal does not show much promise either for the “proletarian line”, as the two-line struggle also ended up in a victory of the bourgeois forces. The mass line was never able to prevent what it was supposed to avoid, the triumph of capitalist ideas.
By failing to conduct thorough organizational study and insufficiently distinguishing between how things are supposed to work and how they actually work, the stronger versions of the mass line fall into a voluntaristic idealism where correct ideas alone will achieve correct results if we just were to struggle hard enough. But we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Instead, we should take what we can use and supplement it with adequate organizational science. A cultural revolution in US society is still necessary after the social revolution even if base-building and the weaker versions of the mass line do not provide an infallible solution for strategy and organization. We should look at these critiques as a way to ground the struggle around a working-class program. Indeed, all of DSA’s problems would not be solved by making Micah Utrecht and Bhaskar Sunkara distribute food in the Bronx, even if it might make them relate better to the actual working class and formulate better political demands.
Where to go from here?
To reiterate the theme of this article, what is needed is not only an adequate center with a clear communist program, but also a proper organizational model which will fight for this program.
For the first, I would propose a unifying center of programmatic cohesion rather than commitment to this or that branch of revolutionary Marxism. A program should be understood in the sense of something you can accept for the basic conditions under which you would take power. This is different from historical or theoretical agreement, or a current strategy such as “get union jobs” or ”support Bernie Sanders for president”. Accepting the program means you may disagree with some or many points but are willing to put yourself behind it as the overall expression of the movement’s aims. A program should direct the elemental energy of the masses, recently seen in the protests around the killing of George Floyd, into a purpose. Otherwise, this energy is dissipated like steam, failing to turn the engine of revolution.
I am unsure whether the DSA with its current form and class composition would be able to provide an adequate minimum/maximum communist program in the Macnairist model. One of the main reasons behind this is its current class composition: it seems to me that the majority of the organization’s current members would accept the taking of power under aims which would be at best social-democratic and insufficiently anti-imperialist and anti-racist, rather than communist. But this does not mean that for now, we cannot take this model, while we consciously work to make DSA reflect the composition of the working-class. Using the Marxist Center as a model, there should still be minimal points of unity that everyone agrees to. This would serve as a guideline for the organization, and based on this program, short- and long-terms strategic guidelines should be developed. These would be communicated to the lower levels, where flexibility on their implementation should be allowed, which can harness the inherently better ability of the lower levels to adapt to their local circumstances and best knowledge of how to use the resources which they have available.
For the second, serious organizational changes must be made to integrate properly all levels of the DSA hierarchy. The principles listed at the end of The Tyranny of Structurelessness must be studied over and over again. But this is not enough, Jo Freeman understood things must evolve as a trial-and-error. Furthermore, as a national organization, DSA has structures at several hierarchical levels: national, locals, working groups, and members. All of these must communicate with each other appropriately. While I do not have the answers to exactly how this should be done, we must take immense care in developing them adequately. First of all, it must be understood that if accountable communication channels and codified power is not provided, this will arise in an informal unaccountable manner. While the internet has made mass communication available, it is not always the case that this is an advantage. Members must not feel that they need to vent on Twitter or other social media. People who spend more time on the internet tend to have a disproportionate influence on the conversation, compared to those who spend time doing the actual work on the ground and probably have more to contribute. The ability of social media to give unchecked social power to certain people, as well as the inability to contrast facts on the ground with overblown publicity, has to be reckoned with.
An alternative to this would be providing a place to have a serious discussion and reevaluation of tactics, on time-scales faster than two-year national conventions. This would provide not only a feedback mechanism for the center to adapt its directives, but can also help generate horizontal communication channels across which locals share their experiences and learn from each other. This currently happens in social media for several reasons: ease of access, availability of readers… But an easily solvable one is that there is no place to do this officially. As long as this is not provided, informal horizontal communications will arise which are unaccountable (and often damaging) to the organization. An alternative solution such as bi-monthly members bulletins at national and local levels, which limit the amount of information and make sure that it is trusted, can be such an avenue.
These prescriptions are very general and open to debate. The organizational ones will require constant evaluation to check if they are solving the problems designed to solve. But I believe that they point in the direction of what is needed to construct a proper vehicle for fighting. The final idea I believe must be digested is an understanding that we are comrades and not friends. We have responsibilities to each other because we committed to a larger movement, not because we like each other. It is fine to disagree on the details, and this should not be taken personally. We stand together because we accept the broader goals of the movement. We do not have to share hobbies or feel affinity towards each other. We have to trust each other and know that we play on the same team. In that spirit, I provide this piece as a good faith attempt to solve some of the problems I see around me.
