The following is an excerpted version of a piece authored by NYC-DSA members Marvin González and M. Fleischman in response to Warren Montag’s 2021 article “The Necessity of Taking Back the Streets: Notes on DSA.” Using Montag as a starting point, González and Fleischman take on a variety of topics including questions of authoritarianism, the proper method for conjunctural analysis, examples of such analysis applied to the history of political systems that currently circumscribe political action, how those systems are instantiated and managed, especially in the face of crisis throughout different epochs, and the current political situation within the right, the liberal center, and the left. These excerpts are specifically focused on a history of the political conjuncture in the US from its founding until the late 1960s and early 70s.
On Conjunctural Analysis
Let us first consider the accusation Warren Montag makes that the left has an altogether too metaphorical understanding of class warfare. What is to be understood by his indictment that “strategy” has lost its truly military character in the discourse of the contemporary left? Montag is describing a particular kind of appraisal of historical circumstances, a knowledge of the relations of forces of one’s enemies, of one’s own movement, and of their respective positions within a complex social terrain. If this is indeed a military lens, then its use for the left, or for the right, in understanding social conflict, and not literal military conflict, has always been to provide a means of seeing non-military questions in new and useful ways.
Hence, the actual import of the military technique of understanding social forces is its use for political ends. The problem isn’t whether political or military enterprises are failing to use military strategies, however, but whether the left is capable of making a sober assessment of the challenges it faces and the actions it must take. At any rate, what we are really considering is whether typical political processes are still intact, or whether a war by other means or any means has superseded normal considerations.
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Althusser, in The Reproduction of Capital, warned us precisely about the limits of such accounts. He writes that within the ‘science of social formations’ it is important to distinguish between description, or ‘descriptive theory,’ and theory proper. According to him, description alone could not secure proper knowledge. While in a certain register description commences theory, nonetheless, “the ‘descriptive’ form in which the theory is presented requires… a development of the theory that goes beyond the form of ‘ description’.”1 But how do we move from the realm of description to that of theory, or better put, to a proper conjunctural analysis?
To think in the conjuncture, to have a theory of the conjuncture, is to move away from an inventory or description of the ensemble social determinations and to grasp what makes them specific to a historical arrangement, their precise interplay and movement, and to anticipate how those determinations might be reconfigured. In Machiavelli and Us, Althusser, reflecting on the question of thinking ‘in the conjuncture’ concluded that
this inventory of elements and circumstances…is insufficient…The conjuncture is thus no mere summary of its elements, or enumeration of diverse circumstances, but their contradictory system, which poses the political problem and indicates its historical solution, ipso facto rendering it a political objective, a practical task.2
In this case, Althusser refers to the political problem and historical project of Italian national unity, which he believes to be animating Machiavelli’s work. Only after Althusser’s modification does the notion of ‘relations of force’ signify something more than the given, already determined, constituted, and real set of forces that need be merely observed in the wild — i.e. the left and the far right. The conjuncture is more than a moment of conflict, but a historical crisis that alters all the existing elements within the social formation, such that “they become real or potential forces in the struggle for the historical objective, and their relations became relations of force.”3
Rather than emphasize the novelty of a military assessment of social forces, as Montag’s example of Trotsky does, it matters more that we understand what the specific problem of a given conjuncture is. Moreover, if only the military sense is taken, then there is nothing to necessarily differentiate a conjunctural moment from any other, for when is the class war not happening? On the contrary, a specific conjuncture only arises when the existing social order encounters a problem that threatens its existence, but which it cannot resolve itself. Gramsci is helpful here:
When an historical period comes to be studied, the great importance of this distinction becomes clear. A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts…form the terrain of the “conjunctural”, and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organize.4
Carefully identifying the historic problem that has introduced conditions of conjuncture is crucial, for otherwise one risks imposing arbitrary aims and desires, likely taken from other conjunctures (i.e. European fascism as the skeleton key for the reactionary forces circulating around the Trump Presidency), and even reifying the forces of the past as the true forms of contemporary ones.
Another issue is, as Gramsci says, the elements of a conjuncture might be at play for a long period without there ever being revolutionary or counterrevolutionary forces developed enough to take command over that conjuncture. Therefore, before we can begin to analyze relations of force, we must be clear about what the conjuncture is, what has prevented existing powers from resolving it, and only then what the maturation of the relations of force are that are organizing to determine it.
Naming the Conjuncture
For there to be a crisis at all, there must be something disrupting the capacity of the ruling political parties to carry on doing what they already have been doing. In other words, it’s not enough to say that there is a route in which the electoral system can be subverted in more dramatic ways than it is already; in this case (our contemporary conjuncture), it must also be shown that there is something awry in the traditional representational structure that would compel a significant portion of at least one Party to break from it and for the rest to support the dismantling of the political system. Further, if the threat comes from within the Republican Party, most likely from its militant fringes, it must be shown that it is capable of overpowering the other elements of the Party that would not want to see the breakdown of the system that has enabled its capacity to maintain minority-rule for so long.
And yet, we are not arguing that there isn’t a crisis unfolding, just that Montag’s representation of it is unconvincing. A breakdown in the electoral system is undeniably a growing anxiety among liberals and the left alike. As Corey Robin recently put it, “we have one party…currently out of power in the national government, trying to legislate a future in which it can lose elections but legally acquire or hold on to power. We have a second party, currently in power, doing little to stop the first.” For Robin, as for others attuned to the longer political-institutional history, such as Jedidiah Britton-Purdy, there is nothing new about Republican strategies to limit the power of democratic majorities. This is not just a political strategy, it is also the institutional design of the Constitution. The weakness of the Democrats and the strengths of the Republicans are not, Robin explains, a result of the activity on the “margins,” but rather animate the “matrix” of power. It is the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the Constitution that is the source of what Britton-Purdy names the “crisis of democracy.” For them, Jan. 6th is only a “symptom.” Or, as Stuart Hall once commented, “the ‘swing to the Right’ is not a reflection of the crisis: it is itself a response to the crisis.”
The Long Crisis of Democracy
For a moment, let us assume that the conjuncture we are in is, in a crude sense, actually a two and a half centuries-long crisis of representation, initiated by a counterrevolution of elites against the revolutionary classes after the American Revolution, the result of which was the replacement of the Articles of Confederation with the 1779 Constitution. This counterrevolution of elites, representing the planter class in the South, industrialists in the North, and coastal banking interests, was for a moment able to overcome their antagonisms for the sake of national unification, the dangers of their own revolutionary classes (made all the more urgent because of the uprising of the small-holding agricultural classes along the western territories), and out of fear of foreign powers making their own claims on the continent. The solution these elites arrived at, what gave them dominance over the crisis, was the creation of an anti-democratic, yet democratic-in-name, Constitution that mutually ensured that each faction of the elites could resist political incursion, not just from each other, but more importantly from the revolutionary classes within their various domains. For it is not just that the Constitution is anti-democratic: it is, in fact, an inspired and durable instrument for class war. One of the stunning results of the Constitution is that by electoral and representative design it became possible to eventually permit universal suffrage without a viable system for class representation emerging as well. This is not to say that preventing one from being created did not take fierce oversight and intervention.
What is historically remarkable about the US Constitution, and what attracted so much praise from abroad, was that it was able to overcome what European nations had not been able to: the simultaneous, uneven struggle of the transition from feudal to capitalist market economic arrangements that were as, if not more violently, fought out in the political arena. The continuation of monarchical rule in Europe, despite the example of a fully realized system of popular self-government in the US, placed European states in a perpetual series of crises throughout the 19th century, because they could not find a means by which the bourgeois classes could be given political power (necessary because of their newfound economic and social positions) without also empowering the burgeoning proletariat classes or the increasingly volatile peasantry. The unfolding experiments in cross-class alliances and betrayals are well documented. Coalitions between the proletariat and the bourgeois would crash against aristocratic and monarchical compacts with peasants. Whenever bourgeois interests were successful in wrangling a position of dominance in a governing coalition they were before long forced to undermine the very source of their own power, popular sovereignty, in order to defeat the lower classes who had put them there. This problem, the problem of democracy, is what prompted Tocqueville to say that if democracy is not a problem that can go away, then
the first duty imposed on those who now direct society is to educate democracy…to purify its mores; to control its actions; gradually to substitute understanding of statecraft for present inexperience and knowledge of its true interests for blind instincts… A new political science is needed for a world quite new.5
Indeed, it was in the US, where it was not a contradiction for John Winthrop to say that “liberty is maintained in a way of subjection to authority,” where Tocqueville believed the problem of the order-shattering pursuit of limitless equality had been successfully decoupled from the epochal requirement of political democratization.6 In this way, finding dominance over the conjuncture in the 18th century brought the US into the future, a future that Europe looked toward as their own.
Nevertheless, any casual observer of the history of the US in the 19th century will tell you that even if the Constitution provided the means for managing the problem of democracy, it was a problem it was never capable of resolving. The American Civil War is only the most obvious example of the fragility of the compromises between rival interests that had been concretized in the Constitution. Even after the war, what remained of those rivalries still needed to be repaired in order to prevent the real crisis from tearing down the antidemocratic levees that abolition had damaged. W.E.B. DuBois said as much in Black Reconstruction when he wrote:
The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free — were given schools and the right to vote — what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.7
After the incredible tumult, constitutional revisions, as well as the extraordinary achievements for freedom and democratization, were in many ways reversed through another political counterrevolution that put an end to the reconstruction era, and a new crisis within electoral politics emerged.
Starting in the 1890s, near the end of the Gilded Age, the threat of working-class and left-wing parties compelled the two-party system to adopt a set of restrictions, which Seth Ackerman describes in detail in a Jacobin article critical to understanding DSA’s project and which we will return to again when discussing DSA. Again the solution to the crisis ensured the bourgeois parties, through substantively anti-democratic but formally democratic measures, would be free of political incursion from outside forces. However, this time the solution was not rooted in the Constitution. Prior to the US adopting the ‘Australian ballot’ laws (i.e laws mandating government-printed ballots cast inside a private booth), US parties were entirely private institutions that conducted their own affairs through open ballots. During the Jacksonian Democratic era, a patronage system prevailed where movement in the party was accomplished by “currying favor with a few key party workers.” The system began to be disrupted by candidates and factions that actively, often employing coercive electioneering methods, campaigned for nominations and offices. When these campaigns devolved into chaos and violence, and party leaders began to lose control of their constituency, “their response was a series of state-level legislative reforms that permanently transformed the American political system, creating the electoral machinery we have today.”
From then on the US Government would administer party primaries as well as ballots for primary and general elections. Similar measures were taken abroad, though they acquired important unique features in the US. Whereas, in places like the UK and France, ballot access was merely a bureaucratic formality (e.g. often signing some paperwork), the US adopted highly restrictive measures such as thousands of signatures. Ackerman writes, “In state after state, petition requirements and filing deadlines were tightened and various forms of routine legal harassment, unknown in the rest of the democratic world, became the norm.”8 He goes on to underscore how undemocratic this system has been:
The Council of Europe, the pan-European intergovernmental body, maintains a “Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters,” which catalogs electoral practices that contravene international standards. Such violations often read like a manual of US election procedure… In fact, some US electoral procedures are unknown outside of dictatorships: “Unlike other established democracies, the USA permits one set of standards of ballot access for established ‘major’ parties and a different set for all other parties.” That America’s election system is uniquely repressive is common knowledge among experts.
These restrictive measures would only get worse as the 20th century progressed and working-class and socialist parties began to flourish around the rest of the world.
The forces necessary to maintain this system of anti-democratic management produced the contradictions that returned as threats to the order: from the racial prejudice that fractured the working classes while insulating capitalist exploitation, to the arrogance and callousness of leaders of capital who sought to more nakedly institute class domination, to the national and racial chauvinism fueling US imperialist exploits, to the blatant disenfranchisement of workers organizations; all these have come back, again and again, as radical movements that rattled the American system and inspired waves of democratic reform. In the 20th century, unlike the US in the 19th century, even if conditions were never fully revolutionary, socialist revolution was, as Lenin put it, “on the agenda.”9 From the early to the mid-20th century, the conjunctural problem was whether or not the US would join the socialist revolutionary present that was engulfing the world. This new threat to the liberal capitalist order instantiated a series of reformist activity within the political organization of the country. From the New Deal to the end of the post-war liberal consensus, the dominant forces were able to manage the demands of both an increasing organization of the left and radicalization of the disenfranchised elements of the working class through a combination of overseeing the creation of a system for workers to barter for concessions from capital and by promising to improve the living conditions of all through the construction of a state apparatus for national welfare. Of course, the reverse was also always at play as the US expended enormous energy fighting the socialist threat at home and abroad.
Ironically, it was at the height of a period of affluence and US international political power that we witnessed the emergence of yet another profound period of crisis. Despite the sometimes undeniable generosity of liberal welfarism, the political institutionalization of unions’ role in representing workers, and even the intervention of the courts on issues of racial and political inequality, as well as other significant concessions to the left, the 1960s was a period of naked cultural conflict. During that decade many different social forces produced political movements, which then clashed: the civil rights movement, integrationists, segregationists, black nationalism, black power militancy, the student movement, the Vietnam war, the anti-war movement, strikes, riots, cop riots, off-shoring, downsizing, automation, assassinations, the buzz of nuclear confrontation, free love, drugs, more assassinations, and so on. Although it was a period of radical movement organizational development, one thing that never emerged was a Party capable of absorbing these currents; in fact, the ruling-class system of political management meant it could not emerge. Subsequently, the Democrats, unable to adapt to the conflict and take command over its meaning and over its future, succumbed to the right, or what was called the New Right. The New Right had grown up under liberal dominance, searching to find a way in which they could successfully overcome the liberal promise to raise conditions for all by maintaining prosperity, rationalizing and centralizing administration, and overseeing the transition into a fairer, more democratic system of representations. In 1968 the right emerged triumphant under the banner of law and order. It was the success of that political incursion that then made possible the subsequent, decades-long project of dismantling the welfare state through a two-party neoliberal consensus. The best example of that decades-long transformation of the political terrain was that it was the Democrats who under the Clinton administration passed NAFTA in 1993, then enacted the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.
As always, the ability of the ruling order to manage the crisis does not mean they are capable of resolving its underlying conditions or, for that matter, not overplay their hand. The period of relative political stability following the conservative ascendancy was also characterized by a massive destabilization of economic and social conditions in the country. Both inequality and wealth exploded, primarily due to the loosening of regulations on the exploitation of labor, an increase in the direct transfers of wealth through tax policy, by dismantling the state social safety net, by the granting of almost unlimited freedom to finance to gamble with the great ocean of debt holding the entire formation together, and the class and race war unleashed in the name of law and order. Although all this certainly set the nation on the path to crisis, none of these are in themselves the problem of the conjuncture. Unlike earlier periods, the historical task or the problem of the conjuncture — the always revolutionary agenda of real democracy — has not been on the table. This is at least in part because the simultaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and the left within the US removed the necessary organization for political opposition. The dispersal of the left made the only meaningful question one of how the left would reemerge, not how it could take power. In our time, the historical task is back on the table. That is to say, people recognize what the problem is, even if for most it is still unclear what political form is meant to overcome it. For the left, we know that form to be socialism and a sign that others do too is that socialism is once again a name that the ruling political forces are actively opposing
Conclusion
The presumption of conjunctural analysis is that a force will rise to dominate the crisis; we assume that hegemony succeeds the crisis. Yet, what elements assemble to triumph over all the others, are not necessarily cohesive, until they are. For heuristic purposes, we try to use conjunctural analysis to make sense of the countless struggles that populate our time and try to weave them together to understand where there are opportunities for action that is as much productive for creating our own organizations as it is for their victories. Likewise, we want to know when our many enemies might begin to work together. While conjunctural analysis does not provide a ready-made blueprint for each individual struggle, it does allow us to consider larger tendencies and at times how these might come to inform concrete strategies.
- Louis Althusser, On The Reproduction Of Capitalism: Ideology And Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2014), 77.
- Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, ed. Francois Matheron, Second Edition (London: Verso, 2011), 18-19.
- Ibid., 19.
- Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (London: International Publishers Co, 1971), 178.
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence, Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 12.
- John Winthrop, “Little Speech on Liberty (1645),” in American Political Thought: A Norton Anthology, ed. Isaac Kramnick and Theodore J. Lowi, Second Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 18.
- W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York, NY: Free Press, 1998), 13.
- Seth Ackerman et al., “A Blueprint for a New Party,” Jacobin (Jacobin Magazine, August 11, 2016), https://jacobin.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic-labor-party-ackerman.
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “State and Revolution,” in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 332.