Comrades Kent Kiser and Awi Blanc are correct when they charge DSA debates around the ‘party question’ with being couched in abstract and vague terms. Unfortunately, the rest of their article, supposedly a response to my article ‘Principled Partyist Strategy’, doesn’t say much at all, at least in terms of a critique of MUG’s position. It’s almost entirely a strawman. Each tendency seemingly has its own description of party strategy, from ‘dirty break’, to ‘dirty stay’, ‘party surrogate’, ‘realignment’, etc. Even worse, each of these ‘strategies’ has its own varying meanings that seemingly change from individual to individual. MUG has mainly stayed aloof from promoting a vague title, and instead arguing for the necessity of genuine democratic centralism (i.e., revolutionary parliamentarism, not the sect version inherited from the 1921 militarization of the Soviet Communist Party) and a vision of party work based on the revolutionary social democracy outlined in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and Kautsky’s The Road to Power. These debates are usually formalistic, but I suppose one could call MUG’s strategy ‘party surrogate in form, clean break in content’, which itself could be described as a variant form of the ‘dirty break’. The Red Labor comrades charge us with wanting to break with the Democratic Party, but not yet. Not so. This misunderstanding comes from their formalistic reading of the ‘party question’, and a confusion of strategy with tactics, both things that nearly the entire US Left is guilty of.
DSA is essentially already a political party in the Marxist sense. It has a mass (though still small) dues paying membership, a platform (even if it’s mostly ignored), an elected leadership body, varying levels of bureaucracy, etc. What it lacks is a separate legal shell. Not to say this isn’t important: we want to stand under our own flag as much as possible. But the bigger question is: what class do you operate under the discipline of? It is theoretically possible for DSA to have legislative fractions across the country operating in the same manner that the RSDLP’s Duma representatives did without a DSA ballot line: i.e., under genuine democratic centralism, as a pure opposition there to conduct mass agitation against the constitutional order and for the establishment of a democratic republic. They could refuse to join the Democratic Party (and Progressive) caucuses once elected and instead only caucus with other socialists, foregoing committee assignments, contracts for their constituents, etc. in order to be an effective peoples’ tribune and organ of mass revolutionary agitation, as described by Lenin and modeled after Wilhelm Liebknecht in WITBD. The crux of the issue is not the legal shell we operate under, but rather the strategy pursued once elected.
It is possible, actually inevitable, that a legally separate bourgeois Labor Party would operate under the same toothless popular front strategy pursued by DSA electeds. That is why MUG stands for a Marxist party rather than a labor party (the Socialist lawyer Louis Boudin made this argument excellently in 1910). What usually fails to get mentioned is that DSA members elected in municipal elections often do so not as Democrats, because many local elections are non-partisan. I don’t mean to suggest we shouldn’t put effort into building ballot lines or running legally independent campaigns, or that there wouldn’t eventually need to be a total legal separation. But the ballot line is a secondary, (mostly) tactical issue to the issue of operational discipline and parliamentary strategy. The popular front strategy entails the suspension of criticism of liberals in order to fight the far right. On a rhetorical level, only the fringe right wing North Star caucus of DSA is willing to openly argue for this. Yet not many tendencies are willing to require that electeds use their position to constantly indict both capitalist parties. While the ‘squad’ will occasionally do something they aren’t supposed to that makes the Biden regime squeamish, like their recent and very late defense of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, they for the most part operate as the left edge of the Democratic Party, and even the ‘strongest fighters’ for Biden’s agenda (Build Back Better, etc.). This is not a problem of the legal shell they’re elected under, but rather the class under whose discipline they operate.
I’m not sure that the Red Labor comrades closely read my article. Their digression on trade union politics and the rank-and-file strategy is not at odds with what I reported or MUG’s position paper on labor strategy. In fact, I strongly criticized Jonah Furman, a star representative of the post-Shachtmanite left labor reform movement, for running left cover on AOC’s rail vote. It is true that many DSA labor leftists and champions of the rank-and-file strategy take an over-optimistic and uncritical view of Teamster president Sean O’Brien and other labor reformers that sometimes verges on ‘labor liberalism’. Yet the labor reporting of Cosmonaut, including some by MUG members, has been explicitly critical of this.1 The sections of my article on the fight for expulsion is another tactical question. However, how Marxists relate to the state-loyalist wing of the workers movement is strategic. My view is that this was best theorized by champions of the Comintern’s united front strategy, including Trotsky who advocated it in the 1930s as Stalinism was swinging wildly between third periodism and the popular front.2 The tactics I argued for in my article are downstream from this strategy. If Marxists in the US are going to be successful in putting forward pro-party and revolutionary vision in DSA, we must have the ability to distinguish form from content and tactics from strategy. Unfortunately the article from Red Labor comrades falls short of this.
Parker McQueeney
- See Edgar Esquivel’s https://cosmonautmag.com/tag/edgar-esquivel/ on the Teamsters and MUG member Shuvu Bhattarai’s article on the rail workers fiasco https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/12/how-the-rail-carriers-wall-street-and-the-us-government-crushed-class-i-freight-rail-workers/
- A good interpretation of Trotsky’s united front policy is Ian Donovan’s 1998 article for Revolution and Truth, ‘Trotskyism, the United Front and the Popular Front: Against Class Collaboration and Sterile Sectarianism’. Unfortunately, the web domain hosting the article has lapsed. It may be necessary to republish this article somewhere. John Riddell’s writings on the united front are also useful, see for example https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1316/birth-of-a-tactic/