I am writing from the perspective of a DSA member who is an outsider to Marxist Unity Group (MUG) —although I know a few members—and curious about its positions. Reading through old articles in Cosmonaut, more recent ones from Light and Air, and the handful of official documents that the caucus has produced has left me with a few questions. I made an effort to read widely before posing these questions, but it’s entirely possible that someone has already answered them. For some of these questions, however, there is likely no official answer. Nevertheless, I hope that some members of MUG (or even sympathizers) who read this could at least give their own individual thoughts on them.

Base building?

There has been some criticism in the pages of Cosmonaut of the (now all but extinct) “base-building tendency.” Parkinson (and other founding MUG members) were involved in this tendency and attended the conference of the (also now extinct) Marxist Center. However, it seems that there has yet to be a real summation of this period in Cosmonaut or elsewhere. (I was disappointed that Renato Flores did not continue his projected series of articles on the subject; even if he did not have “answers,” summarizing what happened is useful in and of itself.) The main organizations which continue the “base-building” tendency today, after the seeming demise of Marxist Center and the two ‘major’ Maoist trends (the idiotic and pointless Red Guards USA / Committee to Reconstitute the CPUSA and the less dogmatic, more tragic For The People / Organizing Committee for a Maoist Communist Party), are a handful of more sophisticated Maoist groupuscules such as the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries and non-Maoist organizations which survived the end of the Marxist Center such as Philly Socialists and DSA Communist Caucus.

Now, with regard to the coverage of “base-building” in Cosmonaut—which I am using as a sort of proxy for MUG’s somewhat more nebulous position on the matter—Flores’s articles was followed by two letters outlining different positions on the question. Flores’s letter (“Finding Out What To Stand For”) represents in my opinion something like a more intellectual and cultural variation on some of Mike MacNair’s ideas on the propagation of socialist ideas as one of the principle tasks of the party/organization. I personally think that trying to propagandize without some kind of mass-organizational basis is futile. Teresa Kalisz’s response to Flores (“The Fatal Flaw of Base Building”) is more on the money as far as I’m concerned, but I nonetheless feel that some of her remarks verge on an unhappy sort of tailism.

The organizational form that “base-building” centered around—that is, the tenant union—has received renewed attention in MUG’s 2025 “Tasks and Perspectives.” The importance placed on tenant unions in the new document is hard to exaggerate; they are described as “scenes of localized working-class self-governance that prefigure what Marx called ‘reabsorption of state power’ constitutive of class emancipation.” Quite a shift from the rather gloomy perspective expressed in the texts from 2022! I can even recall a prominent MUG member dismissing the tenant union as an organizational form too prone to apoliticism for the socialist movement.

Fundamentally, mass organizations can be approached in one of two ways: they can either be subordinated to a political organization or affiliated with a political organization in a non-hierarchical way. There is a continuum between these two poles, but they remain the basic points of reference. MUG is clear that they want mass organizations to follow the leadership of a party-fied DSA, but how is this to be done?

My questions: Is the position of the “Tasks and Perspectives” representative? What about other forms of mass organization? What does MUG’s picture of party leadership over mass organizations look like?

Program?

Many times, Donald Parkinson has extolled the virtues of the old-school minimum-maximum program and argued, following Mike MacNair, that it is infinitely superior to the transitional programs characteristic of Trotskyism. Despite this, many of MUG’s characteristic political demands seem like transitional demands. I am thinking in particular of the demand for a new constitutional convention, which is to be convened and organized on the basis of “universal, equal, and direct suffrage” instead of the procedure described in Article V of the US Constitution.

A number of the demands made in the 2025 MUG draft program (a member who shall remain anonymous was kind enough to send me a copy and assured me that doing so did not violate organizational discipline) are also present in Trotsky’s transitional program, only they are not framed as transitional demands. The MUG program puts forward three kinds of demands: demands for the foundation of a new republic, immediate demands, and internationalist demands. The demands for the new republic take the place of classical maximum demands. While they do have a socialistic bent (especially in combination with the immediate demands), they are clearly different from the brief sketch of socialism included in the program of the Parti Ouvrier or the more detailed roadmaps included in the various manifestos and programs produced by the Comintern. MUG’s political program more closely resembles the republican political demands made in the 1903 program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

As I said above, the demand for a new constitutional convention clearly seems like a transitional demand, but a number of the other political and immediate demands also seem transitional. Several of them are even included in the original Transitional Program. I mean, for instance, the demand for a workers’ militia; for expropriation of utilities, infrastructure, and finance; for the abolition of intellectual property (Trotsky uses the phrase “business secrets”); and for sliding-scale wages. Demands such as socialized housing etc. were made into typical transitional demands by later Trotskyists. (I am aware that some of these things were also included in the programs of socialist parties before Trotskyism existed, some notably in the Erfurt Program, but in retrospect they should properly be called transitional demands as well—abolition of the state’s repressive apparatus can hardly be called a simple reform!) Donald Parkinson’s article contrasting the transitional program to the minimum-maximum program is more focused on contemporary proponents of the idea than the original conception from the 4th International. While Parkinson’s opponents at LeftVoice say, in effect, that transitional demands are meant to rouse the proletariat to insurrectionary action, the text of The Death Agony of Capitalism merely distinguishes transitional demands from reforms on the basis that they will “ever more openly and decisively [...] be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime.” The demand for a new constitution seems very clearly directed against what MUG takes to be one of the bases of the bourgeois regime in the United States. It only differentiates itself from the Trotskyist strategy of “conning the working class into taking power” (as Mike MacNair polemically puts it) with transitional demands because it insists on establishing the revolutionary state in accordance with an orderly democratic procedure.

I would almost say that MUG’s program (and its “Tasks and Perspectives”) consists exclusively of transitional and immediate demands. The democratic socialist republic will expropriate the “commanding heights” of the economy, but what about private property in general? Is this republic meant to be a transitional arrangement, as some documents seem to imply, or is it the final goal? One can hardly call the program a minimum-maximum program when it lacks the maximum part. (For what it’s worth the program of the CPGB (Weekly Worker) includes a brief section on socialism and the transition to communism.) The joint R&R-MUG program does include a brief and somewhat elliptical description of the maximum program, but I got that it was the result of compromise due to its rather stilted language.

My questions: how exactly does the MUG approach to programmatic politics really differentiate itself from the old Trotskyist politics of transitional programs? Where does the maximum program of socialism fit into MUG’s approach?

Democracy?

Before my critical remarks, I must make one thing clear: putting forward a coherent strategy, even if I disagree with it, represents a very commendable step forward for the socialist movement.

One of MUG’s catchphrases—adopted from Kautsky by way of Mike MacNair and Lars Lih—is that democracy and political freedom are the “light and air” of the proletariat. Building on certain arguments made by Kautsky and a rich tradition of US history, MUG argues that the United States is not a real democracy, certainly not a democratic republic of the kind they desire. The Constitution is a document of slavers, the electoral college is tyrannical, and so on. I do not disagree with them about this. Nor do I disagree that a set up more like that of the Paris Commune would be preferable to the current constitutional order in the US. MUG follows Kautsky in claiming that the democratic republic, modeled on the Paris Commune, is the necessary (or at least the ideal) form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fair enough, but the United States is certainly more like a democracy than any other form of government. I find it unsatisfying to deny that bourgeois democracies are democracies and that the reactionary phenomena produced by bourgeois democracies are not connected in an intimate way to the specifically democratic characteristics of bourgeois democracy. I do not think that democracy is a panacea. I agree with the early Bordiga that it is both indispensable and insufficient, and that in the last instance revolution is not a question of forms of organization.

What does MUG have to say about reactionary phenomena that are a product of bourgeois democracy? Why and how would a democratic republic avoid such phenomena?

Strategy?

My questions about strategy should not require any additional preamble. I will just say that the industrial proletariat does not, has never, and will never compromise a majority of the population or the electorate in the United States or elsewhere. Socialists today are more open to other sections of the proletariat, especially service workers, but it seems fair to say that no existing socialist party or organization has really figured out the puzzles posed by the contemporary configuration of the working class. When it came to strategy, the old social democracy (or Orthodox Marxism, whatever) considered women, children, and the elderly principally as dependents of proletarian men who worked, joined unions, and voted. This is obviously not tenable today. The old American socialists and communists were racist and chauvinist in innumerable ways.

Many of MUG’s programmatic demands have appeal beyond the confines of the working class, even if the working class would be most benefited by them.

What becomes of the strategy of patience once the sociological dogma of the proletarian majority is discarded? Does MUG’s strategy of patience retain the old insistence on an electoral majority? (How does MUG define a majority?) How does the strategy of patience relate to the demand for a new constitutional convention? What is MUG’s stance on the middle class?

- A Curious DSA Member