I have great respect for Shuvu Bhattarai, who I know to be a tireless activist and earnest revolutionary, but I believe his recent Open Letter in Cosmonaut to left-wing intellectual and presidential candidate Cornel West is a departure from socialist politics.
Shuvu’s letter expresses the hope that the West campaign can develop into a broad-based political movement along the lines of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. But whereas Sanders channeled his campaign into the dead end of the Democratic Party, Shuvu appeals to West to develop a political alternative bringing together millions of people.
While we can agree on the need for a mass working class political party, I do not believe it can be built on the basis of an electoral campaign. Critical support might be justified. It seems at least conceivable that the campaign could set off a political movement for a third party, and this would certainly be a positive development. But a truly working-class political party has to be built from the ground up – in factories, schools, and offices, where workers are compelled to band together in their struggle against capital at the point of production. It is not enough to say that a political party could unite the working class directly. Without a base in worker organizations, such a party would have no organic connections to the working class, and there would be no mechanism by which workers could control it.
That the letter is based on a misapprehension of socialist methods comes through in its repeated appeals to a single radical individual and his campaign leadership. Shuvu describes West’s campaign as having the potential to “give a political voice to workers.” Elsewhere, he says that without a party, the masses are doomed. What comes through is a view of the masses as essentially inert, listless, in need of salvation from a beneficent figure like West. Shuvu ends the letter with a final plea: “Dr. West and the campaign leadership – seize the moment, unite the movement of workers and the oppressed, and build the party!” Luckily, the initiative for building the working class movement does not belong to “Dr. West.”
Socialists should address themselves to the masses, not because this conforms to a pre-formed ideal but because our conception of revolution is a socialist one. This is not to say that we should ignore a political campaign. If Shuvu or others can make use of the campaign to spread socialist ideas, good. But it is necessary for socialists to maintain a strict class independence. An appeal to a campaign or candidate can only serve to obscure the need for the masses to take the initiative.
Prospects for the West Campaign
That the presidential campaign of a leftwing radical like West has managed to gain some degree of traction may be taken as one more indication of the radicalization of American political life, but it is hardly, as Shuvu describes it, “a political tremor felt around the world.” Most working people still have no idea who West is. His platform contains some radical demands, but these are mostly in line with previous Green and leftwing presidential campaigns, which habitually call for reigning in corporate power and American imperialism. West is a radical! But he is not a revolutionary. He does not challenge the labor bureaucracy, which is the first obstacle the working class will have to overcome in order to challenge capital. What radical demands he makes are couched in a muddle of petty bourgeois phraseology about “truth and justice,” “unleashing democracy,” “saving the planet,” and so on. Though he has broken from his longtime attempts to push the Democratic Party to the left, this break is a superficial one and may easily be reversed. He has provided no real explanation for his change of heart, other than a vague feeling that a new strategy is required to confront the rise of fascistic and authoritarian elements in the political establishment. The reality is that West’s campaign is still primarily an attempt to pressure the Democrats to the left, albeit via an external campaign rather than an internal one.
What, exactly, amid the paeans to the campaign, is Shuvu calling on West to do? There is only one concrete demand in the letter: use the campaign to build a “mass-membership party.” But West cannot declare a new party into existence, much less imbue it with a working-class character. Whatever organization he builds up will be structured around the needs of electoral politics and is almost certain to evaporate after the campaign. West’s use of the term “United Front” has little do with the historical meaning of that term, which referred to a united front of mass working class organizations – not of activist grouplets, much less an electoral tactic.
Shuvu stops short of saying so, but the unavoidable implication of his letter is that the mass party he calls for would have to come from a reform of the Green Party. Shuvu describes the Green Party as a work in progress on the road to an “independent electoral vehicle for the US working class.” But why would an expanded Green Party have any such function? In countries where Green Parties and other left “alternatives” have managed to achieve some measure of electoral success, they have quickly been integrated into the ruling establishment. What would prevent an American Green Party from being completely taken over by the capitalist class, and run like the Democratic and Republican parties? In fact, if our main objective is to reach the ears of workers, wouldn’t it make more sense to run inside the Democratic Party and then break from it after the primaries?
In the few weeks since Cosmonaut published Shuvu’s letter, West has decided to abandon the Greens and run as an Independent, just as he earlier left the so-called People’s Party for the Greens. The only explanation the campaign has provided is that West didn’t want to be weighed down by the “intricacies of internal party dynamics” and viewed these as an obstacle to “focusing 100% on the people.” This explanation makes no sense. Any serious attempt to build an alternative to the political duopoly would face “internal party dynamics.” Clearly, West does not share Shuvu’s vision of using the campaign to build a third party. As he does not even feel the need to apprise voters of the concrete reasons for this decision, we can only speculate on the real motives. However, the most likely reason for the split with the Greens is that the campaign, which is under great pressure from the Democratic Party establishment and the corporate media, decided that a run as an Independent would be less harmful to Biden’s campaign.
Shuvu explains that the Democrats and Republicans are instruments of the capitalist class for enforcing its class rule electorally, and that their structure is suited to this purpose. The parties are, as Shuvu describes, “highly centralized and disciplined, with their center being the funds and patronage ties given to them by the capitalist class.” Yet this is not the whole story. It is not just that the political parties get their money from the capitalists or that they are centralized “non-membership” organizations. The Social Democratic Party of Germany was a mass-membership party, but as every socialist knows, this did not prevent it from being subordinated to the capitalist state and ultimately used as a tool to repress the working class.
The problem is not just the structure of the political parties but the whole of bourgeois democracy, which arose historically in order to enforce class domination. The capitalist class does not just exercise power by controlling the political parties, but also by controlling the electoral system and the form of the state. More fundamentally, the state is bound up with the capitalist class’s control of the productive process, which is the primary source of its power. To imagine that capitalism can be challenged politically while the mode of production sits undisturbed is sheer utopianism.
Shuvu writes of the need for “a great political and spiritual awakening of the oppressed,” and “a mass movement that has at its objective the revolutionary transformation of the whole society.” But from what sources will this political awakening arise? What is needed, Shuvu says, is “a party which constantly injects the spirit of liberation into the masses.” But a political party is itself no more than one component of the class struggle. To speak in Shuvu’s terms, with the active role given to the party and the passive role to the masses, is to miss more than half the picture.
Shuvu here treats the dissemination of ideas (a “spiritual awakening”) as the decisive factor, but fundamentally, the initiative for a proletarian revolution can only come from the masses. The ideas and the political struggles can only flow out of the mass struggles, where workers build up their organizations and their outlooks step-by-step in their battles with the employer. Elections, on the other hand, are characterized by the masses taking a mostly passive role. When the election is over, the masses go home, while the winners are empowered to govern in their name. It’s true that the working class movement needs to fight for its interests politically, but if it concerns itself primarily with electoral politics, this would mean allowing the bourgeois democratic process to dominate the movement’s whole character.
Is the Labor Movement Obsolete?
Shuvu lists the major milestones of the recent period as “the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, the Sanders campaign in 2016, and the George Floyd Rebellion in 2020” – in other words, mass protests and political campaigns. On the other hand, he writes that the “economistic and local struggles” in the labor unions and elsewhere “are not even close to enough to truly challenge the rule of Capital.”
The upshot of Shuvu’s view is that the working class today is incapable of fighting capitalism in the productive process. The “local and economistic” fights of recent years have so far not broken out of the shackles of corporate unionism, and this is taken as evidence that electoralism is the only possible arena of class struggle. Here, we come to the heart of Shuvu’s view: “In today’s conditions of record low union density, of a highly transient working class that is constantly in and out of different jobs, and of issues that far transcend simple workplace concerns, such a movement can only take place as the movement to build a political party of the oppressed.” Having come to this conclusion, Shuvu has cast about for an alternative to the labor movement, landing first on the Democratic Socialists of America and now on the West campaign.
The socialist movement has never limited itself to “workplace concerns” but the most central concerns have always been economic – wages, unemployment, the ability to secure the means of life. The socialist movement was able to fight for the wider political concerns precisely because it united the working class in a common struggle that began on the factory floor.
Deriding this perspective as “economistic,” Shuvu lists “the execution of general strikes” near the end of his letter, almost as an afterthought, alongside such aspirations as “penetration into the rank and file of the state apparatus, and mass civil disobedience to bend to its will. [sic]” So Shuvu imagines that the state apparatus can be bent to the proletariat’s will. But the rank-and-file, that is the masses, cannot enter the state apparatus, and it is much more likely that those formerly rank-and-file militants that do will be penetrated by the state apparatus than the other way around. As Marx long ago learned from the Paris Commune, the state has to be smashed and replaced with entirely different forms of rule with an entirely different foundation.
The form that the working class has historically produced to exercise power democratically has not been a political party but workers’ councils. What was significant about the workers’ councils was not just that they were mass democratic organizations. They were workers asserting control over the process of production.
Today, of course, there are no such councils, which can arise only in times of revolution. Moreover, the trade union movement is weak and the labor bureaucracies, which act as enforcers of the legalistic, corporate unionism codified in the Taft-Hartley Act, dominate the unions completely. In this situation, the labor movement, as it is, cannot provide a foundation for any kind of political alternative, even a social democratic one.
But the working class in this country faced a similar situation during the era of the Great Depression. The conservative bureaucracy of the AFL had long controlled the labor movement, which was dominated by narrow craft unions, until a series of mass strikes built the industrial unions of the CIO and shattered the status quo. The new mass organizations are what gave the working class the means to begin to challenge the capitalists politically. And workers did begin to seek political alternatives. As early as 1939, a group of ten UAW locals led by Trotskyists came together to support the formation of a mass Labor Party that could fight for the CIO’s political demands on the national stage.
Today’s labor movement has regressed into craft unionism and has been dominated for a lifetime by the labor bureaucracies, which are integrated into the Democratic Party. Thus, a struggle in the unions will invariably require a renewed political struggle, both against the domination of the bureaucracies and against labor law.
There is no reason to assume that this struggle will be confined to the existing unions, which encompass only a small fraction of the working class. Nevertheless, we must still look to labor as the basis for political change.
It is true that workers today face new challenges in the expansion of gig work, and that the labor movement is fractured and subordinated to the capitalist state. Yet labor today is still social labor and workers are still being propelled into struggle by the inability of capitalism to provide for their basic needs. The process of capitalist accumulation is still, little by little, undermining the foundations of capitalist society, is more and more fettering the productive forces and creating the conditions for a proletarian revolution. Though factory work has declined, practically the entire working class today faces the common threats of gig-ification and automation.
And workers are less atomized than they may appear! The internet provides workers with an unprecedented means to talk to each other and organize over long distances, even to meet face-to-face via tools like Zoom. Capital is highly concentrated in a few hundred transnational mega-corporations, while the working class is larger than ever and linked internationally in a global web of production. Workers still work for a wage, still share common interests and face common enemies, and there is still the possibility and the growing need for a common struggle.
We are in the middle of a strike wave. This movement is still small, and still unable to break out of the shackles of corporate unionism, but it is clear enough that the working class is in motion. Working class leadership must be won through a struggle in the labor movement, above all by organizing the rank-and-file against the bureaucracy. This is the place for Marxists to start.
-Peter Ross
