The legacy of the Base Builder trend will be discussed in some sectors for a while especially as the current left struggles to regain its footing. Renato Flores has been one of the few individuals coming out of this milieu trying to grapple with the lessons rather than accept that we just failed base building. Regardless of my assessment of his work, I am grateful for Comrade Flores in this. I am especially grateful for his most recent letter to Cosmonaut “Figuring Out What to Stand For”. It is the first attempt to not just see what went wrong with Marxist Center but to express the deep shortcomings of the Base Building trend. However, it suffers from the same issues that lead to the impasse the trend finds itself in.
Base building as a trend was positioned as an alternative to the failed and stagnant political practice of the left. This alternative was based on a strong dichotomy between itself and activism. Base building was a long process of building relationships and organization among the unorganized while activism saw a group of insular activists often from privileged backgrounds that repeated the same cycles of protests. The latter group was seen as dominant among the pre 2016 left which led to both easy cooptation by the Democratic establishment and barely sustaining ineffective, at best, and actively harmful, at worst, sects. All of this while workers stayed demobilized and increasingly less organized. Base building was an escape from this cycle and renewed reformism manifested in the DSA.
But here is where the fatal flaw of the trend began to show. While the Base Builder trend managed to get a whole generation of socialists, revolutionary and reformist, to take organizing and reaching out to the working class seriously, it cultivated an approach that was fundamentally disconnected from the working class. This can be seen in the assumption of the working class as disorganized but also it made us come with preconceived notions about how we were to organize workers and along what lines.
Even though workers are largely not organized into formal organizations, they are organized in informal ways among their communities, family and friend networks, places of worship, relationships to coworkers, etc. To take a point from Rodrigo Nunes book, Neither Vertical or Horizontal, to speak of an unorganized worker is to speak of nothing. The moment a worker comes into contact with others, they are immediately organized into a relationship with them. While it might be nitpicky to point this out as our trend clearly intended to refer to the lack of being organized into formal organizations, it is exactly the lack of concern for the informal organization that caused problems for base building. It cut Base Builders off from vital vectors of support and growth. Political organization must integrate into the pre-existing informal forms of organization of the working class. Without doing so you cannot build a political base.
This comes to the other aspect of the flaw. Base Builders in carrying out the organizing of the unorganized did so with preconceived notions of what they were going to build. We came to working class communities to do mutual aid projects, distributing food or having free stores, or to organize tenant unions. But at no point did Base Builders as a trend ask ourselves about what the working class communities we sought to organize demanded and what their conception of what their needs were. This certainly was much worse in cases of mutual aid efforts, as tenants unions could be vectors for finding answers to this question in a particular area of struggle. But for the most part the decision to organize tenants unions was not made based on the investigation into our local conditions. We built them because it was one of the easy starting points for building worker organizations with few resources and it was the model set and encouraged by the Philly Socialists, the leading organization of the trend.
This flaw combined with the foundational suspicion of protests led to suspicion and lack of action around the 2020 George Floyd uprising, a mass political expression of Black youth from largely working class backgrounds against police violence and national oppression. This also exposed the structural sectarianism within the Base Builder trend, as well as a chauvinistic view of what struggles we should engage in. You can’t properly base build if you can’t engage actions of the working class that you aren’t directly involved in organizing, nor if you deny the importance of struggles of the oppressed. Ironically, the Philly Socialists’ broke with the Base Builder orthodoxy of its supporters and engaged in the protests.
So to return to Comrade Flores’s letter, Comrade Flores centers issues for base building, and the left more broadly, around the media and motivating the masses. Comrade Flores notes:
On the contrary, our rivals, which control the media and control many other spheres, can mobilise and organise at much larger scales than we can. We are really in an unfair terrain: they can pour money into media projects to recapture rebellious energy in right-wing manners (c.f. Peter Thiel), while we are stuck knocking on doors. They reach millions while we’re lucky if we get to the thousands.
This certainly is correct to some degree. Lacking resources and media control is a massive disadvantage as it does limit some of the scale of the work we do, but media control and money is not sufficient to do what the right wing has been able to do. What they do that we haven’t been able to do is merge their political goals with organic demands of certain layers of society. As more information about January 6 came out, in spite of most attempts at painting Trump’s supporters as white workers, the actual composition of the participants have been solidly petty bourgeois. The far right was able to motivate disgruntled petty bourgeoisie not because they just have the media and resources we don’t, but because they were able to connect their goals to frustrations the petty bourgeoisie had about the lock down. The lock down early in covid crushed a lot of small businesses. The far right latched onto this and radicalized much of this layer. The QAnon cult was also quite effective at spreading during this period along similar lines and they certainly had a lot fewer resources and successfully beat out the establishment right in several elections. Bernie and the 2020 protests were also capable of making the impact they did because of their ability to connect with existing frustrations and needs of layers of society they were able to mobilize.
The Base Builder trend with its predetermined formula for how it would go about the working class was incapable of connecting with the organic demands of the class and cut itself off from the networks that would allow it to reach larger numbers of workers. Furthermore with its single minded focus on building organization and focusing on economic demands (demands against specific landlords, demands against a specific boss), it was unable to conceive of how to act politically on that scale anyways. This became apparent when the Base Builder trend utterly failed to respond to the 2020 protests. It can also be seen in its timid response to the rent crisis of the same year. Its response to ultra left calls for a nation wide rent strike was dismissive and refused to present an alternative political action to mobilize those rendered unable to pay rent but rather repeated the insistence on just building tenants unions.
The focus on media, social media outreach, and so on rather than presenting us with a path out of isolation repeats the same problem that has us locked into where we are. It seeks a solution independent from workers and approaches them as a mass that we just need to find the right point of leverage to move rather than a social class with its own dynamics and motivations that we must understand and merge communist politics with.
There is an additional point towards the end of Comrade Flores’ piece about left culture. How unpleasant it is and that unpleasantry is why we get sucked into fights on twitter and get sucked into reading about the past movements. I think the problem with this line of thinking is that drive towards infighting, hyper intellectualism, “serious” organizers finding meaning in drudgery are not socialists chasing meaning or trying to find enjoyment but symptoms of two problems.
The first much more apparent is that we are in a period of stagnation. In spite of some gains, the momentum that we had only a couple years ago has trailed off or completely dissipated in some areas. When things begin to die down, there is less keeping our focus beyond ourselves and naturally we turn inwards. Our energy that we have fewer outlets for and our frustrations get launched at each other. There is just less holding us together, many people don’t chase around spreadsheet contacts by choice but by necessity, though some might embrace the task to cope with the reality. For others this wish for better times or detachment from struggle during these lulls find refuge in intellectualism. It might be a fine detail to distinguish this from trying to find pleasure in an unpleasant left, but it has a different solution.
This solution is largely what Comrade Flores rejects. We do need to go to the masses and historically going to the masses is fairly successful in its goals. While the Narodnik Going to the People was itself a failure, the US left has gone to masses and have successfully integrated in ways that have had long lasting impacts even if they failed to achieve revolution. Where the Going to People failed was not in the idea of going to peasantry to try to organize them, but in acting as missionaries rather than organizers. The suggestions that Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley give might work to some degree but they are much closer to these missionary type approaches. They are methods designed to proselytize. But artificially making yourself appealing, charismatic, ridiculing enemies, etc. have just as much chance of attracting people as repelling them. People know when they are being pandered to, and public ridiculing just as easily reinforces what makes us seem unwelcoming in the first place.
Going to masses requires that we abandon our preset formulas of organization, our conception of how we propagandize, and our abstract notions of appeal. If we are to make a left that is inclusive and not hostile for the masses, we must start with how the masses derive enjoyment, and build and maintain community. There is no one way to make our organizations and movements enjoyable to the masses as the masses are made up of a large variety of cultures and nations. There is no unified working class culture. Things like inflatable rats might have meanings to workers with experience in the labor movement, but might very well be meaningless to others.
Comrade Flores came close to this realization when he said: “Solutions like alternative cultures are hinting at something but I’m not sure we can achieve them with our means.” We can’t achieve them by our means, and we shouldn’t try. No left wing alternative culture, at least in the US, was ever a product of the Left’s own means but were products of collaboration between the Left and organic efforts of the masses. It is only once we abandon our preconceived notions about what the masses want and need, what organizational forms are needed to address it, and how we can make us and politics appealing, that we can engage in the work that we need to do.
The fatal flaw of the Base Builder trend does not have to be the fatal flaw of our movement going forward. We need to take a step back from the formulations and assumptions of the Base Builder trend and carry out concerted effort to understand the existing informal organization and networks of the working class and oppressed that already exist, what politically motivates them and what their needs are, and how we might merge with them and politicize them further. As Mao argued in “The United Front on Cultural Work”, we must operate with two principles in mind: “[…]one is the actual needs of the masses rather than what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their own minds instead of our making up their minds for them.”
This requires that we take the merger formula seriously, not try to create the movement that we think should exist that might have no basis to exist. We need to make use of tools developed and tested by other revolutionaries, such as the Mass Line, Worker Inquiry, and Social Investigation and Class Analysis. In doing so we can begin to answer questions that the Base Builder trend was not able to, to act politically not just economically, and to conceive of what we are building a base in order to do. Comrade Flores in his honesty about the difficulties in creating a positive vision has opened the door for more critical reflection on our trend and its legacy. I hope my response helps further this.
Teresa Kalisz
