Parker Shea argues that the Rank-and-File strategy is far from the magic bullet for building a socialist movement that many of its proponents claim it to be.
For the last five years, what is called the “Rank-and-File Strategy” (RFS) has been the dominant motivating political idea behind DSA’s labor work. If you attend a DSA political education program oriented toward labor, you will no doubt at some point be asked to read a version of Kim Moody’s enduring piece on the subject and will be expected to accept this strategy as the liberation gospel of the working class. Within certain DSA circles a more recent development is a further elaboration of the RFS’s place in the socialist movement: that the RFS is a precondition to finally building an independent mass workers’ party, or, as they usually call it, a labor party.
I absolutely look forward to future discussion of how we might connect the RFS to the work of party-building for what comes after DSA in all the Left journals and magazines. However, we must not allow the work of party-building to get off on the wrong foot and for the conversation to be dominated by the wrong people and the wrong ideas. We must not allow the strategy of the Left to be decided by those with an insufficient knowledge of history, the priorities pursued by successful socialist movements in the past, and the current material conditions of the U.S. today. From the outset, I can tell you this: that DSA’s obsession with the RFS is borne out of dual misapprehensions regarding how, on the one hand, to apply old Marxist ideas to the history of socialism, and on the other hand how we might apply those ideas to the real state of U.S. labor today. Not to mention, those who have developed this strategy left the rank and file long ago and are as out of touch with its pulse as any of the motivated but inexperienced young organizers who form the phalanx of the RFS in DSA right now.
It is in this context that we arrive at a recent article published in The Socialist Call by Jeremy Gong. This article is predictably both totally credulous of the RFS and well-received by notable members of the DSA, but it actually adds very little that is new to the debate about party-building or about the RFS itself. I applaud Comrade Gong greatly for calling for a national workers’ party independent of the capitalist class in this piece, but en route to his conclusion, Gong claims that “The perspective of the rank-and-file strategy is that, through workers’ struggles, through the leadership of socialists in these struggles, and given the endemic crises in capitalism which repeatedly threaten to undo the workers’ movement’s achievements, that workers will come to see democratic socialism as the solution to society’s problems,” which is actually a very hefty claim. From my reading, the article merely exists to parrot to the Call readership Moody’s old idea that the RFS ought to be the Left’s primary labor strategy to expand class consciousness in the U.S. on the path to building socialist power, but it suffers some tremendous mistakes on its way.
I will begin my argument by showing the massive errors in Gong’s article. I critique his article for both practical and intellectual reasons. First, the practical—it is being circulated in political education groups in chapters throughout the country, including my own, which gives me reason to believe that Gong’s critical mistakes have been read by thousands of DSA members who are, rightfully, credulous of their labor leaders. Then, the theoretical—it is being hailed by Gong’s caucus, and many outside of it, as a step forward in the enlightenment of propaganda for party-building, which it is not.
After critiquing Gong’s piece for these reasons, I move onto Moody’s actual ideas, disconnected as they have become from the RFS discourse murmuring through the DSA’s labor formations, in order to show the limits of the strategy. Finally, I return to an older Marxist idea, the labor aristocracy, in order to take issue with one of the premises that Moody and a whole generation of Trotskyist labor leaders based their strategy on to show that the conditions of the moment today and the history of Marxist thought have by no means vindicated the RFS as the primary party-building or class-consciousness-raising instrument. Quite the opposite, the real labor economy since the neoliberal onslaught has disproved the critics of labor aristocracy and provided us with a situation that renders the labor aristocracy once again a useful heuristic in the core of a declining empire, and one we should reach for in the process of party-building.
Rank and Filed Under: Dogma
Anyone pursuing the RFS or any union strategy should insist that the unions themselves have a responsibility to combat the false theory that non-union low-wage workers are the reason union workers’ wages are being driven down and to doubly reassert that it is, in fact, due to the greed of shareholders of absurdly profitable megacorporations that labor is outsourced to the Third World. Further, it is nothing less than irresponsible to allow conversations about unions to start anywhere but from their virtually unparalleled ability to improve the quality of lives of the workers. This, and only this, is the raison d’etre of the trade union as such. Given this context of Moody’s writing on the subject and the actual state of U.S. labor today, you can imagine my shock at reading the following from Gong’s article:
… As workers’ struggles grow in size and militancy, workers will start to realize that they can’t solve the crises in their industry through economic struggles alone. For example, if workers win higher wages and benefits at one company, that company might go out of business because it can’t compete with the lower costs of nonunion companies. A radical political solution becomes necessary: nationalization and the elimination of profit and competition from these important industries. Localized and merely economic gains are isolated and fragile without a broader political project.
I will charitably set aside the fact that Gong is repeating one of the most popular union busting talking points in order to provide some vital information to would-be unionists on the Left.
Just as union busters will say that “your wages might go down if the union wins”, they will say “your location might close if the union wins” or that “your job might be outsourced if the union wins.” All of these lies stem from the same faux-rationale: that the union existentially threatens the profitability of the firm due to increased overhead. The readership of the The Call should know these three very important facts about unions:
- Unions do not cause business failures.
- Unions do not hurt the productivity of businesses.
- Unions barely impact shareholder profit.
These have been confirmed by economy-wide studies in multiple countries and using multiple methodologies. Even for the capitalist class, there is a trivial economy-wide risk to increasing the rate of unionization by double or even triple. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that the economy-wide doubling of the unionization rate would only reduce equity value of firms by 4.3% but that this reduction equates to roughly $40,000 in transfers to workers (the increased wages we expect from the union) and what the study calls “inefficiencies” due to new union procedures (so-called “bureaucracy”).
This is not to confuse or downplay the vehement opposition to unions by capitalists as it is obviously in the individual capitalist’s or capitalist shareholder group’s interest to oppose the union, as they are the ones who stand to lose a substantial share of profit if a particular union succeeds. The class taken as a whole, however, is not threatened by unions alone, particularly given the trend of U.S. industry in the 20th century, where explosive capital accumulation existed parallel to between one-third and one-half of the private sector being unionized. It is also notable that capitalist crises have arisen as rates of profit decline in both unionized and non-unionized periods. And, finally, the bourgeoisie’s view of unions is basically expressed by the Democratic Party, which is nominally pro-union and even its most vicious pro-business members (Joe Biden foremost) supported last year’s Protect The Right to Organize Act. These facts very much support the classic Marxist notion that trade union consciousness on its own does not existentially threaten our class enemies; to the contrary, business unionism (as Moody and others rightly observe) is the bourgeois strategy for the permanent containment of labor militancy—an impedance, not a consolation prize. Rather, it is what can potentially arise from an organized labor movement, a militant socialist power in the form of a political party, that is the true threat to the capitalist class, because this, and only this, represents a political formation of the working class against its owners, not the trade unions.
Returning to Gong’s very basic mistake, socialists should know that there is only one reason a firm closes its doors because of a union: to stop the union.
To suggest one of the two bases upon which the working class will come to see the need for social democracy will be the nationalization of industries in which business failures are the result of successful unions is pure dream-logic imagination. If there is any argument that a dense union economy drives firms out of the market based on actual evidence, it is the argument from outsourcing. Well, if this is the line of argument we will charitably interpret from Gong’s writing, then Gong and the RFS proponents have even more explaining to do, as this is precisely the course of events that devastated the credibility of the RFS the first time around.
It is probably true that high wages for workers in American manufacturing was the main reason the capitalist class moved this sector almost entirely offshore. On Gong’s logic, this was a magnificent thing to have happened! The movement of manufacturing out of union firms in the U.S. to Asia and Latin America would be precisely what Gong is looking for, that is, the annihilation of union jobs as a result of the union itself. So, this process has been about completed, the original sectors targeted by the RFS—auto and steel—thoroughly sent over to Mexico and China, respectively. Where is the revolutionary consciousness, then? Where are the nationalized state enterprises, then? Of course it is absurd to ask this question, just as it is absurd for Gong to suggest this prediction, but Gong’s mistake does point us in the right direction of a critique of 20th-century American union entryists: that they didn’t see outsourcing coming down the pike. If interpreted as an argument toward outsourcing, Gong’s theory for building class consciousness not only fails on its own terms, but completely condemns the labor strategy of the last fifty-or-so years of American socialism. (Which, of course, is quite worth condemning, but that’s for another article.) The reality is that the movement of major union industries offshore was a catastrophe for American class consciousness because it de-socialized and de-proletarianized the character of the work.
In general, large firms with highly socialized means of production were each replaced in an economic vacuum by a thousand micro-firms, or even individual contractors entering the breach, dealing with the work of social reproduction (the so-called service sector). The process itself is described adequately on an orthodox Marxist view: the tendency is for profit to fall, as it has in the U.S.; and the corresponding tendency is for the capitalist class of the given country to expand to more profitable markets, which it has (outsourcing). But by no means was this a positive development for class consciousness in America. Instead, we see an ample opportunity for political reactionaries to mislead recently dethroned American labor aristocrats into racist and backward views of immigrants coming from countries where their jobs were sent; we see the character of American work is significantly de-socialized; widespread unemployment, urban malaise and the consequent expansion of the lumpenproletariat. Finally, there is the obvious and most important consequence: that the workers of a foreign country are imperially brutalized by corporations, which their comparatively weak (often socialist) governments do not have the power to resist.
As for the notion that businesses might get beaten out of the market by lower-wage competitors should unions succeed: this is a pure fiction, except in cases of firms that were run unusually poorly in the first place.
Trade Unions and The Party
We ought to move on to a more general consideration of trade union work in the American socialist movement, since this is something Gong deals with quite a bit in the article. I’ll return to Gong, where he goes on to invoke Lenin:
The perspective of the rank-and-file strategy is that, through workers’ struggles, through the leadership of socialists in these struggles, and given the endemic crises in capitalism which repeatedly threaten to undo the workers’ movement’s achievements, that workers will come to see democratic socialism as the solution to society’s problems.
But as Lenin famously argued in What Is To Be Done?, this process is not automatic, with union struggles leading by a straight line to socialist politics. Instead, socialists need to carry out political action, build socialist organizations, and promote socialist ideas in the here and now to win over those workers who are already looking for radical ideas to explain their oppression.
Turning now to the general priorities of the socialist movement one might wonder what exact role trade unions played in Lenin’s conception of the struggle. Confusingly, he is not quoted by Gong, so it’s difficult to parse what point the latter is exactly trying to make by invoking Lenin. Well, in Chapter III of What is To Be Done?, Lenin is clear on his view of the purely trade-union organizing approach adopted by some in the movement of his time. What he wrote of the situation in Russia, in less severe but qualitatively identical terms, could be said just as well about the strategic terrain socialists in the U.S. face right now. Quoting Lenin at length here:
Is it true that, in general, the economic struggle “is the most widely applicable means” of drawing the masses into the political struggle? It is entirely untrue. Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less “widely applicable” as a means of “drawing in” the masses. The rural superintendents and the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and the police treatment of the “common people” in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and liberal intellectuals — do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected with the “economic” struggle, represent, in general, less “widely applicable” means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into the political struggle? The very opposite is true. Of the sum total of cases in which the workers suffer (either on their own account or on account of those closely connected with them) from tyranny, violence, and the lack of rights, undoubtedly only a small minority represent cases of police tyranny in the trade union struggle as such. Why then should we, beforehand, restrict the scope of political agitation by declaring only one of the means to be “the most widely applicable”, when Social-Democrats must have, in addition, other, generally speaking, no less “widely applicable” means?
And so we see that Lenin’s view of the limits of trade-union organizing and its response to the brutality of the status quo is precisely the opposite of the way it is presented in this article. It is not primarily through the trade-union struggle that class consciousness is obtained, but through a variety of struggles happening on many fronts between the ruling and subject classes. Gong, to his credit, offers many disclaimers throughout the article that, even if the RFS is to be regarded as gospel in labor work, it is not the magic pill for organizing a party:
But a left party based in the unions isn’t a silver bullet on its own. The once mighty socialist labor parties of Germany and other countries famously capitulated to imperialist pressures to support World War I, fatally fragmenting the powerful international socialist movement of the time. And today’s Labour Party in the UK has become a vehicle for neoliberalism, despite maintaining its links with unions. The problem isn’t just the lack of a labor-based party in the U.S. — which on its own is a major challenge — but also that the unions themselves have become top-down and conservative, while most of the millions of union members who remain are disengaged, disempowered, and/or won over to right-wing politics.
Gong fails, however, to break with the RFS dogma in not admitting that trade union organizing is not the be-all-end-all of class consciousness.
I will now defer to the intellectual inspiration of the DSA’s version of the RSF, Kim Moody, regarding the conspicuous lack of that class consciousness in some periods of history. Moody writes:
Lenin was one of the first Marxists to explicitly draw the link between reformist consciousness and the economic impact of capital’s expansionary imperative. In Imperialism, written in 1917, he saw the problem of backward and uneven consciousness as a function of the development of a privileged layer of the class. Although he didn’t use the term, it has generally become known as the “labor aristocracy” explanation. (The term was first used by Engels.) Lenin attributed the growth of imperial expansion to the economic surplus generated by monopoly profits. This same surplus, Lenin argued, allowed capital to buy off a privileged section of the working class, which became the base for reformism. The economic analysis, borrowed from a British liberal economist as well as from the Austrian Marxist Rudolph Hilferding, that imperialism is the result of a “monopoly” surplus doesn’t accord with the facts of the time. A far more plausible explanation for the expansion of overseas investment and the rush for colonies, above all in Africa, that began in the late 19th century was the falling rate of profit that was at the roots of the world-wide crisis of the 1870s.
Lenin’s view can’t explain, either, the enormous employer resistance to craft unions of skilled workers in most countries throughout the entire period he writes of and after. This was the era of Taylorism (deskilling), Homestead, and the “Open Shop” drive in the U.S. and of skill “dilution” everywhere. Such a vicious employer offensive directed at skilled workers is better understood in the context of the repeated crises and profitability problems of the era and contradicts the picture of the corrupting hand of capital passing out raises to craftsmen. Additionally, the “labor aristocracy” approach can’t explain why these same skilled workers can become revolutionary in outlook as they did in many countries during and following the First World War. Finally, it doesn’t explain why the mass of unskilled industrial workers can and did become just as conservative in outlook in the years following the Second World War.
I don’t think very many on the Left using the term “labor aristocracy” today would say that the position of U.S. workers in relation to the victims of its imperialism would preclude any spontaneous trade union consciousness here at home. The claim is not that there are no circumstances in which labor in the imperial core would become unruly and organize for their demands, but, merely, that the benefits of empire impede the development of revolutionary consciousness broadly among those who live here, as a general trend. But instead of relying on Moody’s view backward toward Lenin to adjudicate the heuristic, let’s look at the present state of the U.S. labor. Can it be denied that when we talk of the conservative tendency of trade unions, that fundamental to this conservatism is anti-immigrant racism toward Mexicans and Central Americans? There is no reactionary turn in American organized labor without one piece of ideology espoused by the Right: that the existence of unorganized immigrants is driving down wages economy-wide, thereby threatening the security of the already-organized labor by dampening their own bosses’ profit margin.
Meanwhile, the party to which the trade unions have sworn their allegiance is programmatically committed to maintaining and expanding U.S. imperial interests in Latin America and Asia, not to mention its bolstering of the immigration surveillance state and border town militarization (since at least Obama and now continuing under Biden). We don’t have to search very hard for a basis to claim the existence of an American labor aristocracy in falling rates of profit and overaccumulation in the 20th century. It is likewise uninteresting to probe the pre-Breton Woods United States. It is the latter half of the 20th century where the labor aristocracy heuristic came to describe U.S. workers. The share of immigrants coming from Latin America and Asia (the imperial front) versus Europe tripled between 1970 and today. The period of industrial unions’ rightward drift that Moody writes of is one when over 80% of immigrants to the United States were European, in other words, not directly victims of U.S. imperialism. Today, that number is a mere 13%, the rest from countries that have largely been victimized by U.S. invasion or destabilization. This fact alone—that immigrant labor has now come face-to-face with a white middle class’s decades-declining standard of living—should make the rightward drift of American workers a bit more clear on the labor aristocracy view, but allow me to expand my argument further to hammer home this point.
Since the time of which Moody wrote, we have witnessed the extraction of surplus value from the victims of our imperialism intensify to the degree that we are bombarded with the victims directly as they flee the conditions created by our plunder. During the period of intense globalization (once again, long after the period of which Moody writes) would-be immigrants’ labor in their home countries gave Americans ready access to cheap commodities, but when they are driven out by imperial plunder and come here to sell themselves on our own comparably better labor market, they are met with scorn by the very workers who have enjoyed access to these cheap commodities produced by their labor the last few decades.
Take, for example, the case of the Chevy Silverado full-sized pickup truck, one of the standard-issue pickup trucks used by the Border Patrol. The Silverado four-door is manufactured in several plants, but the lion’s share now come from a plant in Silao, Mexico, that was opened in 1996. Believe it or not, the plant is unionized, albeit unhappily, under the Miguel Trujillo López Union, an affiliate of the cartoonishly corrupt Confederation of Mexican Workers, which was a reliable partner at the side of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the ruling party of Mexico for about 70 years and the same one that welcomed NAFTA with open arms in 1994. What better illustration of the labor aristocracy than this! Our bourgeois governments sign NAFTA in 1994, General Motors outsources the production of Chevy pickup trucks to Mexico two years later, the plant is kept under tight management by the ruling regime’s corrupt government union, the trucks are exported to the other side of the border only to be instantly purchased on the wholesale market by our own federal government, receive a neat green decal, and get stuck right back on the border to make sure none of the campesinos or maquiladora workers—who are extorted on one side by their police, on the other by their boss, on yet another by their union, and on the last by their own government—don’t try to skip the border and finally attempt to access some significant fraction of the surplus value they created. The vast majority who try this are dehumanized in all sorts of exotic ways and then summarily thrown in the back of a pickup truck that their own countrymen built. This entire story could not have been told without the Democratic Party, who are loyally wed with the Republicans on foreign trade with Mexico and on border militarization, and whose own Clinton signed NAFTA and whose own Obama almost certainly oversaw a great number of purchases of Chevy Silverados by the Department of Homeland Security (assuming deportation counts positively correlate with pickup purchases).
If Moody does not see some element in this story and the millions I could tell that are just like it of labor aristocracy, which is merely a heuristic put forward by Karl Kautsky and then applied to a theory of imperialism by Lenin, then I’m not sure what labor aristocracy he’s talking about. Here’s Kautsky’s use of the term:
It has also frequently been pointed out that this guild-like character shows itself first of all in that the workingmen organized in trades unions form and constitute, similar to the old-time Journeymen organized in guilds, an aristocracy of labor, which isolates itself from the unorganized workingmen, which raises itself above them, which pushes them down the deeper into the social mire, the quicker it elevates itself…
On the other hand the workingmen organized in trades unions cannot constitute for themselves alone a political party, but always only one part, and indeed often a powerful one, of such a party. If they leave the unorganized workingmen to their own political resources instead of uniting with them in one political party, then the former must become the tail of a capitalist party that pretends to be friendly to the workingmen, but which, no matter how it tries to protect the interests of its proletarian voters, can never muster the necessary courage in face of capitalism and is doomed to fail the sooner, the more the proletarian character of its followers clashes with its own capitalist notions – just as is manifested to us by the fate of the Liberal party in England.
Doesn’t Kautsky’s quotation perfectly describe the trade union attitude toward the unorganized? Replace “Liberal party in England” with “Democratic Party in the United States” and you’ll have perfectly stated the situation at hand. For his part, Lenin wrote something else that is very apt on this subject in a pamphlet to do with the self-determination of nations:
The important thing is not whether one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of the small nations are liberated before the socialist revolution, but the fact that in the epoch of imperialism, owing to objective causes, the proletariat has been split into two international camps, one of which has been corrupted by the crumbs that fall from the table of the dominant-nation bourgeoisie—obtained, among other things, from the double or triple exploitation of small nations—while the other cannot liberate itself without liberating the small nations.
It is not before World War II or shortly after that this excellent statement from Lenin became true of our own “dominant nation”. It was later than that. And perhaps this labor aristocracy is fading. As the unions in the imperial core deteriorate and the American workers are increasingly immiserated, our conditions become less distinguishable from those of the victims of U.S. imperial plunder and the benefits of empire become difficult to discern. Perhaps we must regard our own working-class now as the labor aristocracy dethroned and the reactionary turn among the white workers as the resentment of this dethroning. In any case, the labor aristocracy heuristic is useful. It is impossible to see how it is not, and, in my opinion, it is vital to describing not only the U.S. workers in relation to the international working class but also the unionists in relation to those they exclude. One must look no further than the recent collaboration among the Teamsters, Uber and Lyft in Washington to see a salient example of the kinds of work that the labor aristocracy refuses to expand vassalage to. Those Trotskyists, such as Charles Post, who minced the labor aristocracy into a million pieces with uncharitable interpretations and cherry-picked economic data have done away with a concept that is worth its weight in gold for both lay analysis and propaganda usefulness, but that is, of course, assuming they’re interested in contesting power outside the business unions. Once again, this leads to a larger issue, so it ought to be set aside.
The Real World
Socialism is built on far more than merely a labor party. But within the discrete domain of labor work’s role in building socialism and building some kind of socialist party, is the RFS really the best strategy right now? We now turn away from Gong, Moody, and Lenin entirely to the actual conditions in order to answer this question.
The rate of unionization in the private sector is at a near-record low of 6.2%, which is about 7.1 million workers. The news came out recently that that number fell substantially year-over-year between 2020 and 2021, despite the media illusion of increasing labor militancy last year. For the sake of the argument laid out in this response and for a proper description of the working class as it exists in reality, the reader must know that that figure is significantly lower than the current undocumented immigrant population of the United States. As of 2020, there are about as many union members in California (from where I write and work) as there are undocumented immigrants—granting the woefully inaccurate numeration of the latter—and one in ten workers in California is undocumented. California is one of the most unionized states by percentage of workers at about 14% in the private sector.
Speaking now for just California—simply because it is representative of both the variety and the extremes of the whole country’s economy—the material realities of this economy prove, especially for the millions of non-union workers in the primary sector and the non-union building trades, that there is a vast gap between those who receive the attention of the DSA’s strategy (a trifling minority of the working class mostly concentrated in well-paying public sector union jobs, the SEIU and, more recently, the Teamsters) and a representative cross-section of the actual working class. There is no existing trade union to infiltrate in order to expand its domain over these millions of workers. This arrives at the biggest critique of the RFS not as it is put forward by Moody, but as it has been adopted by the DSA: that it does not have an answer for how to organize the unorganized. Undocumented workers, gig workers, and service workers divided, de-socialized, alienated and disenfranchised of their rights, working among thousands of tiny firms, now comprise a huge share of American labor. On the dominant view expounded and put into practice by the DSA, which is basically just union entryism stripped of all nuance, the RFS has no answer for these workers. The industries that this kind of union entryism was built for by Moody and others have left the country. This is the real economy, the one they left in their wake.
What is worse, many in the DSA seem to believe a socialist workers’ party cannot exist prior to the level of organization they desire to see in the society, rather than seeing the party as our own instrument through which to organize society. As Gong puts it:
Unfortunately, a new mass party can’t be simply “built” by those of us who want it. A party needs a social base in the working class. That won’t come about until workers are both organized at work and conscious of the need for political independence. And none of this can develop without struggle.
This is, sadly, not a mistake confined to Gong or the Bread & Roses caucus. This is a mistake that is still swimming freely across the entire spectrum of politics within the DSA. As I have written elsewhere in (or to) Cosmonaut, it is the work of comrades engaging directly with each other vigorously and constantly to determine the future of party-building. It is by no means possible to “simply” build a party, as Gong says, but it is neither possible to wait for quack dogmas amounting to little more than secular liberation theology to somehow, magically, create some spontaneous form of class consciousness or “social base”, as Gong puts it, that is the precondition for us to have a socialist party. The formation of a socialist party is the business of socialists, just as the continuation of the DSA is, we all agree, the business of socialists. These are both instruments with which to actualize political possibilities using our collective will. There is no contradiction here. The only difference is that one represents the whole host of possibilities of socialist organization and capacity, whereas the other represents only a mutant appendage containing a preselected few of these possibilities.
I mean no offense by this response to Kim Moody, who is doubtless a guiding light for the socialist movement and a well of historical insight. Nor would I ever deny that the RFS is an incredibly important tool for socialists at this moment, and this is certainly not a sectarian attack against a particular caucus. I am, though, disappointed in the editorial standards of the Call and concerned for the future of the DSA’s labor efforts that this article has been so well-received among so many. This indicates that the RFS is becoming a form of dogma among a political movement that has been persistently impoverished of any theory of action and remains, despite occasional self-delusions of improvement, very distant from the real working class.
What is clear is that we need new ideas that take better stock of the conditions we face. The raw data necessary to establish the reality of those conditions is not accessible from either a university desk or a stuffy union office. Between DSA’s dependence on the Democratic Party for all its electoral legitimacy and its dogmatic insistence on bending weakened, ever-more consolidated trade unions that are rarely inclined to organize the unorganized, the DSA is ignoring not only the infrastructural, but also the super-structural content, of the class struggle today. For the vast majority of the masses, the DSA has no plan of struggle.
When Lenin wrote of “The rural superintendents and the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and the police treatment of the ‘common people’ in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and liberal intellectuals,” he spoke to the conditions we face today. Wasn’t there a nationwide spontaneous Black uprising against police totally independent of a political party two years ago? With the state doubling down its militarization of the police, will there not inevitably be another in the near future? With Biden on his heels about resuming student debt payments, isn’t there an opportunity to intervene with a massive organized student debt strike? With cost-of-living inflation increasingly immiserating the precarious non-union immigrant laborers whose wages do not increase during inflationary periods (many of whom, by the way, have heard news of socialists taking power in their home countries just the past few years), are the conditions not ripe for a renewed struggle against racialized capital and the crypto-apartheid suffered by our nation’s meekest workers?
In other words, “…do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected with the ‘economic’ struggle, represent, in general, less ‘widely applicable’ means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into the political struggle?”
Turning to a different corner of the party-building discourse, Dani Lotand wrote in Sweet Dreams of Marxist Unity a charge against the anachronism of the Marxist Unity Group’s program that I think fits to end this critique: “However noble you may consider both democracy and communism to be, there is not currently a democratic mandate for communism. There is no reason to think this would change were the leading American social democratic pressure group to embrace a litany of proposals to attempt necromancy on the Second International, which it is also not inclined to do.”
It appears that the RFS is turning into an attempt by Bread & Roses to perform this same resurrection spell on the labor strategy of the International Socialist Organization, and I suspect it will meet similarly with a massive gap between its theory and the results of its implementation. The basic industrial composition of the country is totally different now. When the RFS was being developed, the auto workers, steelworkers, and miners were all still substantial unions representing enormous industries. That is simply no longer the case. The RFS was built for the American empire at its crescendo, when mass popular movement toward an international working class consciousness rightfully seemed decades away. Well, those decades passed, and now we find new and every day more unexpected and exotic revolutionary potentials spilling out of every crack in the foundation of the political economy. We must understand our strategy as something able to evolve in order to constantly exploit these potentials, yet there are so many in our ranks who insist that the only device we could use to exploit all of them, a real political party of the working class, cannot be formed until the social conditions—which are every day becoming less ideal!—are absolutely perfect. Who decides perfect? This is furiously debated. Who even decides the conditions? Likewise.
Truly, it is a morass.
As Bhaskar Sunkara notes in the most recent issue of Jacobin, “We might feel more confident about the prospects for the Left if, rather than a momentary shift leftward in liberal economic priorities or the rhetoric of certain parts of the mainstream media, there had been deeper inroads made among workers. There have been rare exceptions, but on the whole, it would be delusional to say that our ideological left has made a decade of progress merging with a wider social base.” When he says this, he admits his own failure. So, we should take him and his magazine at its word that they have failed. Onward.
For a new era of American socialism and a new era for America itself, we must develop new ideas. Basing the direction of the entire organization on what have become narrow obsessions like the RFS, like so much going on in the DSA, is little more than a strategy to keep us confined between the lines of a Pete Seeger song—the party is long gone and its revelers mostly dead, but the broken record keeps spinning for an empty room.
