Which Way Forward for the Marxist Left?

In light of the liquidation of DSA’s BDS working group, Charlie Frank argues that Marxists must continue the political fight rather than turn towards localist activism or the various left-wing sects. 

The question came up as to what ways we should take. Somehow general agreement was lacking. Someone…said that work on the Illiteracy Committee was of great importance. Vladimir Ilyich laughed, and his laughter sounded rather harsh (I never heard him laugh that way again).

“Well, if anyone wants to save the country by working In the Illiteracy Committee,” he said, “let him go ahead.” It should be said that our generation had witnessed in its youth the fight between the Narodovoltsi and tsarism. We had seen how the liberals, at first “sympathetic” about everything, had been scared into sticking their tail between their legs after the suppression of the Narodnaya Volya Party, and had begun to preach the doing of “little things”. – Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin¹

The DSA NPC has de-chartered the organization’s Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions Working Group (BDS WG). Ostensibly, the reason given is that the working group refused to remove a month-old thread criticizing Jamaal Bowman, a DSA member in Congress who voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome. The NPC has claimed that this thread was ‘misinformation’, yet as will be shown, the actions of the NPC, and their justification for these actions, only show the accuracy of the BDS WG’s thread. As a result, the NPC narrowly voted to de-charter the Working Group and collapse BDS organizing under the International Committee (IC), all under leadership appointed by the NPC. However, they neglected to even let the IC organizers know of this ahead of time. They also voted to suspend the BDS WG leaders from leadership in DSA for the next year. In the wake of this decision, it is imperative that the Marxists in DSA, and all those committed to organizational democracy and anti-imperialist politics, chart a path forward. To do this, we must briefly sketch how we got to the current moment.

Following Bowman’s repulsive vote to fund the Iron Dome, and AOC’s cowardly abstention on the vote, there has been a large push within DSA to both un-endorse Bowman as well as expel him from the organization as a whole (he is one of many paper members of the organization who joins as a means of furthering their political career and getting volunteer labor for election campaigns). These calls did not occur in the abstract. While DSA’s NPC has removed the link to Palestine from its website (Palestine.DSAUSA.org results in a “This site has been archived or suspended.” return), since 2017 the organization has, on paper at least, affirmed its commitment to solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle broadly, and the BDS tactic specifically. From one of the few Palestine related links still functioning (an advertisement for a February 6th event on BDS, we can read the opening paragraph:

Palestine is not only a humanitarian issue, nor is it only a Palestinian issue. Palestine is a political issue with serious consequences at stake for both Palestinians and average US residents. As socialists, we recognize the interconnectedness of our struggles under capitalism. In solidarity with Palestinian civil society’s nonviolent struggle for equality, human rights, and self-determination, DSA adopted a resolution at our national convention in 2017 in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In 2019, DSA reaffirmed its commitment to the BDS movement by voting to establish a BDS and Palestine Solidarity national working group.²

These are fantastic words, and for the rank-and-file DSA member, who has no institutional power on the international stage, perhaps this would be enough. But for the organization as a whole, especially given the multiple DSA members sitting in the US Congress, the question must be asked: are we in favor of Palestinian liberation in words, or in action? If we affirm our commitment to the liberation of Palestine, but accept members who vote to fund Israel’s genocidal war machine, how much do our beautifully written words mean? If we verbally stand in solidarity with Palestine, but allow elected officials, both endorsed by and members of DSA, to vote to fund Palestine’s colonial oppressor, then what good is our solidarity? 

At the most recent convention, there was a resolution put forward by the Marxist Unity Group called “Tribunes of the People and Democratic Discipline” that aimed to address this exact question.³ Important for our discussion, and without citing the resolution in whole, any candidates endorsed by DSA would have been obligated to “make a formal pledge to fulfill the following requirements towards DSA:

• The candidate must be a member of DSA.
• They must accept and pledge to promote and fight for the DSA national political platform if one is passed.”

This resolution did not make it to the convention floor. A different amendment, which would have made acceptance of the platform the criteria for membership in DSA, was voted down, essentially 2-1 against. The majority of delegates, who also voted to approve an actual political platform for DSA, voted against making this platform have any concrete meaning for the organization beyond more nicely written words. The democratic discipline of elected officials would be too much, apparently. This begs the question: do these elected officials exist to serve DSA, or does DSA exist to serve the elected officials? Should their politics be subordinate to ours, or vice versa? Because as much as DSA may on paper be in favor of Palestinian liberation, so long as its elected officials continue to operate within the Democratic Party (an imperialist, pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian party through and through), and so long as its elected officials are not actually bound to DSA’s paper politics, then these politics will remain just that, paper. 

Yet after the convention, at least Working Groups and chapters were more than welcome to criticize DSA elected officials and the DSA NPC, and many did, considering that both the DSA’s congressional members and its NPC are politically to the right of the rank-and-file membership.⁴ This has been one of the best features of DSA. In a political landscape of small microsects, where the most important question is the class character of the Soviet Union, and membership is contingent on agreeing on a whole host of secondary questions (and not expressing disagreement when it exists), it is refreshing to have an organization that has accepted public criticism of its leadership.

That has come to a close with the de-chartering of the BDS WG. Matt Miller, who was closest to the Marxist Unity Group at the convention, has proven to be a renegade of the highest order with his vote in favor of de-chartering the BDS WG. His explanation for his vote, posted on the DSA Forum, is instructive of the twisted logic of the DSA Right. In justifying his vote, he claimed that the BDS WG tweet thread

continued a pattern of making sweeping uncomradely accusations of the motives of others who political disagreed with them: “those most impressed with Bowman’s performance are people more interested in Palestine as a political prop to advance a short-sighted domestic legislative agenda or gain access to Capitol Hill at any cost – including Palestinian humanity.”  This fits a pattern over the last few months of the working group making unfounded accusations against those who they disagree with politically in a way that inflames conflict and makes it impossible for us to debate these important issues.⁵

Yet in the previous paragraph in his same explanation, he writes “the meeting was off-the-record to begin with: sharing reports of the meeting, especially inaccurate reports, undermines our ability to work effectively as an organization. I want us to build strong relationships with our elected officials with real accountability, but we can’t do that if they think we aren’t going to abide by our promises.” The meeting being referenced was a closed-door, back room meeting between the NPC and Bowman, following his vote to fund the Iron Dome. Additionally, on March 9th, Bowman wrote on his website that he voted against an incarceration bill, but that “There were elements of the defense spending section that, if voted on separately, I would have supported, including additional military aid to Ukraine and funding for the Iron Dome — which I have already voted once before to fund and support.”⁶ Closed-door meetings with elected officials who vote to militarily fund an apartheid state, followed with criticism and attempted silencing of those who comment on this meeting, seems to be evidence enough that those who sided with Bowman do, in fact, care more about short-sided domestic legislation than Palestinian humanity. Additionally, it would appear to be Matt Miller who is engaged in misinformation by neglecting to clarify that Bowman only voted against funding for the Iron Dome because it was packaged with something else he did not want to fund, rather than implying Bowman has had some change of heart.

There is perhaps a secondary issue here, besides the primary issue, which is freedom of lower bodies to criticize the actions of higher bodies: horizontalism versus centralism. Should the BDS working group, after a democratic decision by the NPC to not expel Bowman, continue to litigate a campaign for expulsion, “at the expense of their actual organizing campaigns” (according to the right)? The reality is that the Working Group did no such thing. There was no suspension of the fight for Palestinian Liberation in light of the NPC’s decision to disregard Bowman’s vote to fund Israel’s war machine. There was, however, criticism of this. But were there calls to suspend DSA organizing? Did the Working Group attempt to stop any tangible organizing that other members, caucuses, or working groups were doing in DSA? Unless you consider any criticism of elected officials to be an unconstructive impediment to electoral campaigns, the clear answer is no. Without the freedom to criticize actions of our leadership, we quickly devolve into another sect with a self-perpetuating leadership where criticism is not spread within the organization, and oppositional arguments have no chance of winning without a split.⁷ 

Following this vote, many prominent members of the DSA Left have begun to resign from the organization. Austin G, an NPC member who voted against de-chartering the Working Group, and who has been a leader in the International Committee, resigned from DSA altogether.⁸ Aaron Warner, an NPC member who voted against de-chartering the Working Group and for expelling Bowman, has also resigned from the NPC, though this is related to his very poor taste joke about the AIDS crisis on Twitter. It is worth questioning if Warner’s joke about the AIDS crisis is worse than support for one of the parties that caused the AIDS crisis and today continues to mismanage our current pandemic as the bodycount continues to rise. In their stead, the current, right-wing NPC will be able to elect two more people, giving them a further majority. The question remains: what is to be done?

This decision, according to the NPC and DSA liberals in socialist clothing, is justified because working groups must be subordinated to the collective whole. Yet this sort of subordination was voted against at convention, and subordination to the actual platform that outlines DSA’s democratically voted on political agenda was voted down at the convention. Further, Bowman’s support for Zionism, which the DSA right justified by saying that his constituents in his congressional district were largely Zionist, was not enough to even un-endorse him, let alone expel him.⁹ Yet criticism of Bowman has been enough to de-charter the Working Group. In practice, this means subordination of DSA to elected officials and their political careerism, rather than elected officials being subordinated to the DSA. And in practice, this is a clear power grab by the DSA right, which has recently been clamoring about the ‘ultra-left’ of DSA, or, to be more precise, the DSA members who think DSA elected officials should have to in practice align with DSA’s politics, or, heaven forbid, that DSA as a whole should break from the Democratic Party and make good on its verbal commitment to anti-imperialism by no longer supporting one of the two parties of imperialism.

It is clear that this decision is not just about the BDS WG. It is a proxy for the larger fight within DSA over a break with the Democratic Party, or a continued tailing of left-liberals and the ‘left wing of the possible.’ By DSA’s own admission, new membership growth has “slowed to a trickle.”¹⁰ The reason for this is the continued capitulation to the Democratic Party by Bernie Sanders and the Squad, and the abandonment of the fight for working class goals in favor of championing Biden’s platform, which, it must be noted, has amounted to absolutely nothing. The de-chartering of the BDS WG amounts to an assault on the left wing of the DSA, and a power grab by the right, class-collaborationist leadership.

So how should Marxists respond? Do we leave DSA, as many real-life, as opposed to paper, members have begun to do? Do we leave politics? Do we join one of the sects? Do we do “good work” locally without joining a political organization? Do we leave to form our own organization? Or do we stay and fight? Max Ajl succinctly argued on twitter that “people leaving DSA without eventually re-consolidating into a genuine anti-systemic force uncorrupted by the Dems is a victory for the right wing of DSA.” If our horizon is a socialist republic, then any decision we make in the current crisis must be aimed toward this horizon. Thus, we can eliminate leaving politics altogether from our options. 

So should we join the sects? Having been in a sect, albeit (in my opinion) one of the better sects, I would argue resolutely against joining any of the variety of political sects in the US. The majority back the Democrats to the same degree that the DSA does, just less successfully, and none of them have a healthy internal culture of criticism and dissent. If the de-chartering of the BDS WG was bureaucratic overkill and a politically motivated move to silence criticism, the solution to this cannot be joining a bureaucratic sect with its little fiefdom of leadership that has never allowed an open faction to exist. 

Do we do “good work” locally? Should we leave DSA to do ‘mutual aid’, or organize around single issue campaigns? The Lenin quote that began this article would argue no. This is not because individual issues are not important, or because mutual aid/charity is bad. It is because, absent the struggle to build a coherent political organization charting the path toward the final goal of a socialist republic, this form of organizing has no chance of overcoming capitalism. As Rosa Luxemburg argued in Reform or Revolution, “[b]etween social reforms and revolution there exists for the Social Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.”¹¹ To paraphrase Lenin, we must fight in a revolutionary way for reforms, not in a reformist way for a revolution.¹² Any organizing we do must be part of a broader fight for socialism, and the history of the 20th Century has shown very clearly that the fight for socialism cannot be won without a party fighting for this goal.

Yet many champions of this “good work” have been happy to see good left-wing organizers leave DSA in the wake of the decision to de-charter the WG. The question must be asked: is it better to do “good work” locally, with no perspective of attaching this work to the fight for socialism than to fight for revolutionary politics in a reformist organization? Is it better to devolve into localism and avoid the larger question of the conquest of political power by the working class, than to have to fight with reformists and social-liberals about the path forward? I think the answer to both is a resounding no. It amounts to nothing more than ceding all political power and legitimacy to the right-wing of the socialist movement, abandoning any possibility of an insurgent left winning mass support or power. It is better to fail than to abandon hope beforehand. The sects, for all their faults, at least have the horizon of socialism that they aspire to. If we abandon this horizon because it takes a fight to get there, we will never overthrow capitalism.

The retort here is that DSA may be compromised, that it is too reformist to operate in, that we must keep the banner of Marxism ‘pure.’So we are left with two choices, if we actually aspire to a socialist future. Do we stay and fight, or do we form something different? We must analyze what a formal split, resulting in the creation of another organization, would mean. As Mike Macnair argues in Revolutionary Strategy, “splitting does not purge the movement of opportunism. It is a defensive necessity, not a means of offense.”¹³ The evidence given is the opportunism of the Bolsheviks in the early days of the February Revolution of 1917, and Zinoviev and Kamenev publishing their opposition to the impending October Revolution in the bourgeois press. Yet the examples could just as easily be the numerous splits in the socialist movement in the USA, which, despite the apparent differences between the groups, have nearly universally resulted in the sects’ eventual capitulation to capitalist parties, whether that be CPUSA’s nonstop lesser-evilism, the RCP’s support for Biden to stop the ‘fascism’ of Donald Trump, the SWP’s essential backing of Trumpism, PSL’s refusal to run La Riva in a state where Bernie had a shot at winning (had he been the nominee), etc. etc. etc. It is clear that these splits, rather than purifying the workers movement, have served mostly to shrink its scope, and cause the rank-and-file members of the various sects to have unwarranted animosity toward each other, as this animosity and ‘irreconcilable’ differences are the continued justification for the splits. In practice, this has contributed to the dismantling of the US Left, and the ceding of hegemony to liberals and union bureaucrats.

 I think the answer is to stay and fight, at least for now. Judging by the responses in the DSA Forums, this decision by the NPC is extremely unpopular, and I think it is a very clear example of what the right wing of the socialist movement will resort to when they are challenged in any way.  As Lenin and Zinoviev argued in Socialism and War,  “On all important occasions…the opportunists come forward with an ultimatum, which they carry out with the aid of their numerous connections with the bourgeoisie, of the majority on the executives of the trade unions, etc. Unity with the opportunists actually means today subordinating the working class to ‘its’ national bourgeoisie, alliance with it for the purpose of oppressing other nations and of fighting for great-power privileges; it means splitting the revolutionary proletariat in all countries.”¹⁴ Mike Macnair furthers this argument in Revolutionary Strategy: “The right is linked to the state and willing to use ultimatums, censorship and splits to prevent the party standing in open opposition to the state. It insists that the only possible unity is if it has a veto on what is said and done. The unity of the workers’ movement on the rights terms is necessarily subordination of the interests of the working class to those of the state.”¹⁵ We have seen this practically, with the ultimatum that the BDS WG either cede control of its social media accounts and delete its thread criticizing Bowman and the NPC’s unwillingness to expel him, and with the NPC’s eventual de-chartering of the BDS WG and removal of the link to ‘Palestine’ on the DSA website. Clearly we cannot have full unity with the right, and certainly not on their terms. To do so would be to become yet another left-wing organization committed to tailing liberals. But to split entirely risks becoming another sect completely detached from unions and public consciousness, and to fall back into the pattern of different tendencies isolating from each other. 

So how do we fight? How do we manage to neither split into irrelevance nor stay in subordination to the right wing of DSA and the socialist movement? Mike Macnair’s solution is as follows:

Marxists, who wish to oppose the present state rather than to manage it loyally, can then only be in partial unity with the loyalist wing of the workers’ movement. We can bloc with them on particular issues. We can and will take membership in parties and organi[z]ations they control – and violate their constitutional rules and discipline – in order to fight their politics. But we have to organize ourselves independently of them. That means we need our own press, finances, leadership committees, conferences, branches and other organi[z]ations.

It does not matter whether these are formally within parties which the right controls, formally outside them, or part inside and part outside. This is tactics. The problem is not to purify the movement, which is illusory, but to fight the politics of class collaborationism.¹⁶

The letter circulating from Comrades Jean A and Annie W is a good start, at least as a way of counting our forces and rallying the left of DSA toward opposition to the NPC decision.  The calls for a special convention are encouraging as well, and all caucuses and chapters opposed to this bureaucratic maneuvering need to work together to force a special convention. This is important, both to get an NPC that actually represents the will of the DSA as it stands now, and to cohere the left of the organization in opposition to the NPC decision. Unity at all costs will not be enough, and we cannot sit by idly while this right wing power grab happens. Importantly, two left-wing members of the NPC have resigned. A special convention is needed to re-commit DSA to anti-imperialist organizing. This can only happen by forcing the NPC to recharter the BDS WG, and holding a special convention and voting out the right-wing members of the NPC, who have shown in practice that their commitment to backroom deals with unaccountable elected officials is more important than their commitment to anti-imperialism and the fight for socialism.

But we cannot end the fight there. Clearly, new leadership is needed, but as was mentioned earlier, this is part of a larger fight over the orientation of DSA. The fight for a special convention and a new NPC must be part and parcel with the fight for elected officials that are subordinate to DSA’s politics, and for DSA to break from the Democratic Party and begin the fight for a mass, class-independent, socialist party in the United States. Without this first step of class independence, the horizon of socialism in our lifetime will never be reached.

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1. Nadezhda Krupskaya , Reminiscences of Lenin (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2018), 13.
2. https://act.dsausa.org/survey/dsa-bds-and-palestine-solidarity-panel/
3. https://convention2021.dsausa.org/2021-dsa-convention-resolutions/#P1F, #6.
4. Evidence can be seen from a survey of the membership, where Communist and Marxist (not surveyed in 2017 or 2019), polled at 27% and 38% respectively, while the percentage identified as Anarchist increased to 15%,, whereas the percentage of Berniecrat, Liberal, Democrat, Progressive, Social Democrat, and (adjective) Socialist all saw significant decreases in popularity. This was shown in a slideshow presented at the most recent DSA convention.
5. https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/update-regarding-the-bds-palestine-solidarity-wg/20238/174p
6. https://bowman.house.gov/press-releases?ID=CC295767-DA4E-4011-B5FA-FD5DE2356786
7. See “In Praise of Factionalism” by Brian O’Cathail in Rupture, from 10/13/21; https://rupture.ie/articles/in-praise-of-factionalism
8. https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/regarding-my-recent-conduct/20324
9. This begs the question of whether the constituency of DSA elected officials is the people in their congressional district or the members of DSA at large. In my view, it should be the latter, and elected officials should champion DSA and its politics, rather than DSA acting as nothing more than a campaign vehicle for aspiring left-liberals.
10. https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/2021-convention-dsa-holds-course/
11. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/intro.htm
12. The original quote is from a letter to Anatoly Lunacharky, the future People’s Commissar for Education: “We must fight in a revolutionary way for a parliament, but not in a parliamentary way for a revolution; we must fight in a revolutionary way for a strong parliament, and not in an impotent “parliament” for a revolution”; https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/oct/11avl.htm
13. Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity (London, England: November Publications, 2008), 99.
14. Vladimir Ilʹich Lenin, V.I. Lenin: Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1964), 311.
15. Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity (London, England: November Publications, 2008), 91.
16. Ibid.