In just a few days, Marisa Miale’s most recent article in Cosmonaut has created some waves on the communist Left. Its examination of the culture of the movement and social factors within DSA have provoked quite a bit of thought in myself, as I know they have for many others. Miale wrote many worthwhile things about the correct revolutionary ethics governing relationships among comrades, a topic that goes virtually unexamined in most magazines and journals but one that really does deserve much more articulation than the usual well-worn issues that ignite fruitless debate in a Sisyphean cycle every month in our corners of the internet. I don’t intend to critique Miale because I haven’t yet found anything whatsoever in their writing to critique, so I’ll just say that upfront to be clear about this article’s purpose. I think of this response as merely a continuation down the same line of examination, in the hopes that successive writers will follow to create a new body of literature on this subject in Cosmonaut. As such, I’ll write under the assumption that the reader has already read Miale’s article.
I’ll use as my launching point the following excerpt from Miale’s piece. Apologies in advance for quoting at length, but I think this section of their writing deserves special attention, as it implicitly suggests something very important about structural problems with the DSA:
As we learn how to party-build, we will need to answer some questions along the way. First, where do we draw our line in the sand? What are the outer limits of unity between communists, and what common politics bring us together? Sectarians make the mistake of using almost everything as a litmus test for unity: if we can’t agree on the correct interpretation of dialectical materialism, the class character of the Soviet Union, the moral high-ground in any given geopolitical conflict, our exact relationship to the labor movement, or whether to run food distribution programs, we do not belong in a shared party. Sectarians have a shared affinity around a solitary tendency, a single answer to tactical questions that functionally limits their bonds with the working-class and the rest of the Left. Rather, we must seek harmony between tendencies that share a commitment to socialism, revolution, and working-class internationalism. Sectarian logic leads to constant splits and purges, which has left us with a dizzying array of uncoordinated sects. While disparate sects are sometimes able to form coalitions to pursue common aims, coordinating and communicating becomes a more complex process each time we multiply, exponentially increasing the energy required to challenge capital.
On the other hand, DSA officially draw their line around anyone who identifies as a socialist and agrees to pay dues. While DSA is not apolitical, chapters tend to focus on single-issue campaigns and rarely determine common strategic vision. DSA struggles to articulate its own purpose and push its network of chapters and committees to fulfill it, despite having many movement veterans amongst its ranks. Compounding this, politicians affiliated with DSA have no loyalty to priorities set by the membership. For instance, Congressman Jamaal Bowman drew fire from a large section of DSA’s rank-and-file and its BDS Working Group for supporting US funding for Iron Dome, an air defense system used by Israel to slaughter Palestinians. While dozens of DSA chapters across the country published calls pushing to discipline or expel Bowman for violating their commitment to international solidarity, Bowman remained unmoved and DSA’s National Political Committee refused to censure him. While socialists move in one direction, their representatives move against them.
Many of us standing between these poles, including those clustered until recently in Marxist Center, have answered that we are for base-building, forming direct relationships with working-class people and helping them build their own structures for combating their class enemies. As comrades Jean Allen and Teresa Kalisz identify in their dossier From Tide to Wave, however, “the apolitical trend in base-building now threatens to make what socialists and communists are building a base for left progressives rather than a revolutionary working class movement.
If I understand Miale, it is the correct navigation of the social body through contradictions among comrades that produces a revolutionary culture that is conducive to constructing a party and, it follows, a revolution. In simpler terms, Miale argues there is some set of interpersonal morals that comprise a revolutionary ethic that will allow the movement to organize into a more unitary, effective whole. If no one inherits some belief about the ideological specificities of their tendency and their beliefs aren’t fixed—that is, a comrade who is misaligned with respect to some problem may at any time change their mind—then it follows that a revolutionary party can be formed among those with opposing viewpoints so long as there is a revolutionary ethic guiding their interactions that ultimately leaves open the possibility of changing beliefs while also preserving the possibility of organizing in practice in the meantime. Inevitably, any authentic disagreement will eventually produce a change of mind in one, the other, or both, and the important thing is that both sides of the disagreement can work together in practice while resolving the disagreement. Only after this possibility is made actual and exhausted without any change of orientation on either side is a split justified.
Running contrary to this view are the sectarian splits Miale references, which presume that political beliefs are fixed (and for some, even inherited, either from the CIA or from the opposing propagandists of one’s orientation, with every other aspect of one’s ideology and even their moral character following deterministically from there) in any individual or even caucus or larger grouping, when this is not really the case. Individuals and groups do come to change beliefs through both principled debate and constructive cooperation. As Miale wrote elsewhere in the article, a revolutionary ethic governing comrades is not one that either demands we constantly all be changing our minds or be completely open to an infinite range of debate, nor is it one that demands strict adherence to every single atomic belief of a given sect, but rather it is one that merely allows the possibility of change of beliefs within the social body through the course of the evolving life-process of cooperation.
So, once analyzed, I think Miale’s point is really one against sectarianism and has very little to do with the problem that DSA faces.
I don’t think that DSA merely sits on the other end of some temperamental spectrum from sectarianism. In other words, DSA doesn’t have “the opposite problem” of the most extreme sectarian ideologues in the communist movement. DSA’s problem is of a qualitatively different nature. As Miale writes, “DSA officially draw their line around anyone who identifies as a socialist and agrees to pay dues.” One might be tempted to think that sectarianism merely means exclusivity, whereas DSA’s “big tent” principle means inclusivity, and that would mean these are two sides of some pole and that the correct approach lies somewhere in between. That’s not what’s going on.
The Democratic Party is a capitalist political party, and Jamaal Bowman, a DSA member, contravened a basic position that is virtually unifying for the global Left. From the imperial core, he in part caused the U.S. to give material support to a warlike government in its pursuit of its colonial project. As so much ink spilled has already said, this issue should never have been up for debate in the first place. The fact that DSA did not have automatic procedures above-and-beyond its democratic bodies to discipline Bowman shows that the DSA’s big tent really does extend, in theory and in practice, to capitalists and imperialists. It is one thing to claim that the movement toward socialism can happen by having we, socialists, infiltrate the Democratic Party to revolutionize it from within. Even though I strongly disagree with this method, I am willing to give it credence and work among socialists who see this as the way. It is totally different for an organization to allow the possibility of an empire-builder within its ranks. The latter discounts it as a socialist organization. This should be obvious. Put another way, the most materially powerful DSA member in the world wants to fund the Iron Dome. This absurdity cannot be emphasized enough.
So, is it really any wonder the socialists in DSA aren’t motivated and lack a correct revolutionary ethic and culture? Are we really so surprised that a crypto-capitalist organization like the DSA National fails to inspire a revolutionary spirit all the way down to its locals? Are we really surprised that the example DSA National has set has not inspired comradely trust and a cooperative, even loving, spirit of revolution? This has nothing to do with DSA’s being a big tent to socialists. It has everything to do with not being committed to socialism in the first place. Is it really so surprising that DSA wouldn’t be able to come up with an inspiring national program to which every local put its weapons if the national simply … isn’t socialist? Many big caucus folks will say that DSA is what we make of it. You don’t like it? Change it. Easy for them to say. The dominant caucus in a democratic body will always fancy itself as the technician of the body’s whole. But consider how absurd what they are asking for is in the current context of DSA National. They are now in the bizarre position to tell everyday proletarians and socialists alike hovering around the DSA that their responsibility is the following:
Revolutionize the United States.
→ How? Revolutionize the Democratic Party or parasitize it from within.
→ How? Revolutionize the DSA National by joining our caucus.
→ How? Merely hope and pray the leadership at your local is competent enough to make use of your talents, if you even have a local. If not, you have to start it all from scratch. (and the devastating corollary: if you don’t do this, then you’re not a serious organizer)
I intend absolutely no offense to the hard-fighting caucus warriors who know so much and do so much internally within DSA’s processes and who struggle to undo the Democratic Party-oriented path to power that has dominated DSA’s national strategy for so long. It looks like they are becoming the functional majority of DSA, for which they deserve enormous credit. But do you see how internal this logic still is? This model for revolution is purely navigating successively more influential rungs of political micro-intrigue. This is exactly how a nonprofiteer or a Democrat would conceive of creating political power. Meanwhile, the majority of America still doesn’t even know the name of the DSA. The majority of the working class certainly doesn’t. On its face, the DSA advocates for a mass movement of the working class, and many people in the DSA are committed to that. The institutional inertia, the fundamental legal structure of the organization, the parasitic relationship slightly left-leaning capitalist politicians have with it, and the unfortunate realities of organizing during COVID will continue to hamper DSA’s effort to evolve into a real political party independent of the capitalist parties and the bourgeoisie.
The dirty break camp says we need to get out of bourgeois politics at haste and form a new party. But even people in this camp say that it can’t happen all at once and that it can’t simply be declared by fiat. Of course. But to divert our vision in another direction: what is the purpose of pouring so much energy into an organization that asks us to organize three political bodies (caucus→DSA NPC→Democratic Party→split/take congress, depending on who you ask) in the process of constructing merely one that actually works for us? So many hurdles of organization have been jumped by ardent, hard-working socialists doing their best within DSA for years now, and it has gotten the U.S. Left virtually nowhere in terms of real material power. Meanwhile, the projects that have left the DSA entirely, such as the tenant movement that Miale mentions, have made tremendous progress. The same goes for the totally unexpected new growth in the Industrial Workers of the World and the creation of many successful journals, magazines, study groups, project collectives and the revitalization of old ones. The Left is building institutions and charismatic leadership and these float around DSA like a solar system, but they are not unified by it, because it does not have the correct structure or spirit to be a unifying force. And, crucially, as Miale writes, these kinds of projects cannot be allowed to become coopted into reformist bourgeois politics. That is the greatest danger. I further add that their peripheral relationship to the DSA is risky for this very reason. They need to be tied to a real socialist political party, and become part and parcel of its big-vision strategy for taking power in the United States. The sooner this project begins, the sooner socialism in the United States can be liberated to grow in size, power, and institutional wisdom.
To those who say that the DSA is what we make of it, I turn their line of reasoning back at them. If the DSA is nothing more than us, then we are the only source of its power. Why not leave this troubled mess behind, join together and create something that works? If we, the general membership, are the sole source of political power upon which DSA relies, then it is our free choice to build something different with that power. The American people will not lament the loss of the DSA if it falls into obscurity under the towering shadow of a new political party in the United States, because the American people will never have heard of the DSA to begin with. There is no propaganda cost. I can imagine the caucus leaders organizing with each other and using all the resources at their disposal to begin the actual process of party building. Why not? As we see that reactionaries and outright fascists in the bourgeois political bodies outnumber us nationally 10-to-1, we get no press as a political organization, we lose a large majority of the electoral fights we undertake, we are completely marginal in the mainstream labor movement, we have no penetration into the environmentalist movement, capitalist politicians parasitize our free labor, and we cannot claim the authentic working-class institutions that are built in the Left parallel to our existence, isn’t it obvious that the DSA is built to lose? Why not build something that has the capacity to win for a change?
It would be a joyous opportunity for me to tell my friends, family and coworkers that my political party got me a job, an apartment, helped me start my local community garden, is putting up one of its own members for such-and-such election, and that on top of all this I write for its newspaper. Imagine their reaction. They wouldn’t be able to contain their enthusiasm to join a political party like that, at a time like this. In terms of propaganda, the appeal of its effectiveness and real material output would, in this case, precede the appeal of its ideology. People respond well to well-organized projects. That’s how you build popularity. No matter how the reader feels about improvements in the DSA’s level of organization the last few years, the perception is that it is still a mess, both by people with years in the game and distant observers on the periphery of our movement. So consider the insanity that right now, there are people orbiting DSA doing all this good work that I just mentioned, but triflingly little of it is formally considered DSA work. Plenty of caucuses have great newspapers, plenty of DSA members are housing unionists, plenty of DSA members are working within their union or, in my case, constantly in the flow of organizing their non-union workplace. A mass popular party is one that unifies these efforts under a single program, division of leadership, and propaganda aesthetic. The work is already being done by us, the actual people who supposedly keep DSA running. I have an abundance of faith in the people. DSA, on the other hand, is a tar pit of structural contradictions and bad historical examples. This is all in the horrifying political context of the United States, where the Right is coalescing into an informal popular front and formally controls the levers of judicial and police power. Their model for taking power, which is to turn the GOP into a fighting force for fascism, is not only reasonably attainable, but is fully underway and working with a startling speed and efficiency that the Left couldn’t currently dream of. We don’t have several years longer to complete the project of turning the DSA into a fighting force. The urgency is immediate.
The reader may have noticed that I have become somewhat exclusively sidetracked with discussion of DSA in response to Miale’s article. But that’s unavoidable. If one is talking about party-building in the current moment, the great divide between DSA locals and the national is naturally what one is talking about. Hopefully, more comrades participate in the dialectics of party-building as these ideas continue to evolve in this magazine.
– Parker Shea
