In part one of a series, Renato Flores reflects on the rise and fall of the base-building tendency.
Today, in the developed core, and in particular the United States, we have the opposite problem: the class struggle Marx observed and attempted to make sense of and direct is predominantly dormant. Conversely, there is an overabundance of leftists, with many roadmaps or toolkits which purportedly will achieve this universal emancipation, but without a movement to act on. They are either trying to jump-start struggles, or are intervening in them when the status quo is briefly disrupted. These small eruptions can bring some temporary hope. However, despite how hypnotizing they appear in the moment, they tend to fizzle out, passing without much institutional memory. Instead of ‘prairie fires’ burning down the entire system, we are left with periodic cycles of forest fires that come and go, allowing the capitalist ecosystem to eventually recover.
Faced with this impotency, a ‘base-building’ tendency started to emerge around the early Trump presidency, represented by the network Marxist Center. With the demise of Marxist Center, this tendency appears to have collapsed, under the weight of its own contradictions. This article is a reflection on the origins, appeals and ultimate problems with this tendency, providing an immanent critique of where it went wrong and what to do next. I do not attempt to replicate most critiques of base-building, which I find unconvincing. Yes, politics was largely absent from base building organizations, but this was by design, and there were good reasons for this. With it, I do not hope to convince you that the base-builders were correct, but I hope that by the end of the essay you can understand why it was attractive, and where the actual limitations tended to be.
The Start
To understand why base-building was appealing, I will recapitulate some of its points that struck me as “yes, this is what we need”. In May 2018, Sophia Burns published an article in her personal medium page called “The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies.” The main thesis of the article was that it did not really matter what organizations believed, but instead what they did. Most existing leftists were in one of three existing tendencies in the left: the government socialists, protest militants and expressive hobbyists. These were not getting us anywhere. What we needed was a fourth tendency, the base-builders, which started by “recognizing that in the US, the working class exists in economic terms, but does not exist as what Marx called a “class-for-itself”: a class organized through its own infrastructure of institutions, capable of consciously contesting with other classes for social power. Because such an organized base for mass socialism is absent, base-builders think the top leftist priority should be to establish one.
At that time, this analysis felt like a new gospel: a material analysis of what the left was, and why we were in a bad place. The impotence I felt after protesting everything Trump did, and only winning very minor concessions, unable to disrupt anything, and attending protests just to see the same twenty faces at every protest (maybe a face per group) was very alienating. It was clear we needed to be able to call on a base that simply wasn’t there. What we needed to do was to “organiz[e] the unorganized and [avoid] activist networking,” to build a base of people who would show up next time we had an issue. I was done with my sect, tabling and selling newspapers to recruit a few members while losing a few others to a net zero (or slightly positive gain), or spending hours, days, and weeks on minor theoretical disagreements that would result in another split. I was not sure how to fully classify what we were doing, but to me it was clear that the road to change society did not go through this place.
Opposed to this stood the promise of base building, which was becoming more exciting by the minute. Marxist Center’s founding conference took place in Colorado Springs in the last week of November 2018. I could only gain glimpses of it from Twitter, but it was very clear something significant was happening. At the same time, Bernie was preparing to toss his hat in the race for the presidency, and sections of the left were poised to volunteer long hours to help him win. The choice between spending time “organizing the unorganized” and trying to phonebank or canvass potential voters, who from the experience of 2016 were predominantly middle class seemed pretty clear to me. The die had been cast, and I left my sect, met some new local people who felt similarly and eventually coalesced to create the Houston Tenants Union.
Tenants unionism was especially appealing, because I had been previously impressed by some tenants organizations in the way they were able to do effective base building. I had attended meetings where I had seen prospective members have intense emotional responses when they saw first-hand solidarity from other people who were able and willing to help fight for their homes. By providing help initially, many of the tenants would hang around, and then could be mobilized in other campaigns for just housing. The proof was in the pudding: I had seen it work, not only in the US but in Catalonia where a housing organization served as a platform for Ada Colau to become mayor of Barcelona. I was also impressed by the racial, gender and class composition of this organization, it was very different from what I was used to in the sect world. I slowly arrived at the conclusion that what we needed was to replicate this sort of local organization all over the US at an even larger scale.
We had hoped that the Houston Tenants Union would later provide a base for creating a Houston affiliate of Marxist Center. Our initial attempt, called Space City Socialists, was stillborn. It is not easy to start two new organizations, and meetings seem a bit superfluous when you spend most of your time doing base-building work, knocking on doors, starting campaigns, and presenting demand letters. We paid for our inexperience when we took on campaigns too large and ambitious for our resources, forcing us into the legal route. We failed some people, and we helped others. HTU is still going on, and I still partake on it. We have gone through cycles of leadership replacement, and we still hang on. I have learned much about organizing, and tried to reflect on it in Cosmonaut’s podcast by creating educational content for others who might find themselves facing similar questions such as how you structure an organization to prevent burnout, how you think about winning and losing campaigns, how you give orders and replace leadership, and future ones on mentorship, language justice and self-criticism.
However, this was not the most significant roadblock we would hit. Ironically, Sophia Burns had hit it earlier, as is made clear by her January 2019 article “What is the left?,” which I had dismissed. The same way people who critiqued base-building seemed to miss the target of why it was so appealing as they had not gone through the same motions as I had, I still had to fail more until I could understand where Burns was coming from.
In her new piece, Burns claimed to have “misunderstood [the] significance (or rather, the lack thereof)” of the distinctions between left tendencies. It didn’t matter that leftists did activism in different ways, because they all essentially come from the same pool. They are all each other’s friends. Base-building was an attempt to save the left from itself, but it had failed, and became largely a way for activists to keep on networking, and keep themselves busy.
At the time, this sudden reversal seemed puzzling. I didn’t really disagree with her ultimate prescription, which was a doubling down on some strategies which seemed sensible. I could intuit some limitations of base building. But only years of practice would bring to the forefront what these were, and the ultimate conclusions. Back then, the memory of the tenants organizations that did produce change were in my mind.
So what has happened with HTU to make me change my mind? We win some, even most of our campaigns. But it seems to me that aside from a solid cadre core, which can slowly grow, the promise of bringing in “the base” has not been fulfilled after three years. We won a rent strike in Texas, we even won several court cases. Our organization has grown, but unfortunately it is not the kind of growth I was thinking of. This may seem harsh to my comrades, who I really value, but the demographics we have right now, even if better than the average sect, have not escaped the kind of middle-class demographics base building hoped to break out of. I still find our work immensely useful: we have helped people who were in a really bad place. But the promise of organizing the unorganized hasn’t been fulfilled, and we have “just” managed to mentor a new generation of activists.
The End
The recent collapse of Marxist Center was not unexpected. While the 2021 conference played a decisive role in damaging the organization beyond repair, the cracks and differences were there from the start, as Donald and Parker wrote about in early 2019. I do not want to indulge too much in it, because larger players than myself have already written on it, and because I ultimately find it uninteresting: there were two competing and irreconcilable visions of what the Center should be. In a very summarized way, some organizations hoped it could be a network of national organizations oriented towards base-building, which would remain like this, and others hoped it could be a network of local base-building organizations that could coalesce into something more. The first type of organizations slowly (and officially) resigned after the conference, while the second type of organizations mostly fizzled out, mainly collapsing under the weight and challenges of running a small organization in the US, especially in the shadow of a larger and more functional DSA. People walked away until there were only around fifteen people left who finally drew the curtain in a dignified manner.
In his two reflections on Marxist Center’s collapse, Tim Horras offers an explanation that was not too dissimilar from Sophia Burns’s remarks three years earlier. The main point still holds: the working class is not organized for itself, the base is missing, so the ideas of base-building are relevant. He also talks about the existing left can be fickle and toxic, and mainly ends up relating to itself. He ends with a positive note: we need a vision for the future, we need new types of organizations, and it is unclear what awaits us until then.
The question remains, why did base building reproduce a similar left? Why can’t we not escape the social context even if we design organizations to escape this social context? A more pessimistic reading of this would be that the left is simply a super-structure product. We have the left we have because the barren landscape of the United States, with its suburbs, hellish commuting times and social isolation can only produce disenchanted middle-class people: the observers of socialism, and not the creators. And without a socialism to observe, base builders took on the task of creating it, but failed because it is a task beyond their means. We became stuck, trying to artificially create organic networks that arise almost spontaneously in other places where people live closer, have more permanent places of residence, and talk to their neighbors. It is hard for me to escape the conclusion that base-building is impossible in a city like Houston, when the tenants councils we create have largely fizzled out due to large turnover in tenants and lack of time. People are not willing to fight for (or even stay at) their homes in the same way as people in Barcelona. The “dead-end” for me is that after three years of trying hard, we have largely not managed to organize the unorganized. To add to this, the Biden administration’s lack of commitment to even the most marginal of changes has left us extremely disoriented, and the base builders aren’t the only ones bleeding while the right prepares to use CRT and Gender Panics to roll back the clock even further.
How to end on a more positive vision? For one, in some places there seems to be an uptick in struggle, and the recent wins at Amazon and Starbucks could mean something is changing. There’s also the George Floyd Uprising of 2020, but returning to the theme of this article I am slightly pessimistic- the energy seems to have dissipated especially after “defund the police” failed to produce any gains, and Democrats have actually increased police funding (or even blamed the slogan for making them lose). It also seems that this large protest was only possible, again, because the base allowed it: Covid had swelled the ranks of the unemployed, and government money kept many people alive and with time.
What else? Well, I was wrong about Bernie 2020. This time around, he was less appealing to the protest voters that were largely white men from the Midwest, who instead opted for Biden. His message this time turned out to be much more inspiring to working-class people, and to be especially appealing to Latinos and Arabs than I ever expected. Yes, he didn’t win, and that might be a blessing watching Biden’s impotence. But his vision for a better society did resonate with people so much that many DSA members are almost begging for a 2024 run which might solve some of the organizational issues by providing it with a lodestar again. Without falling into reformism and thinking that Bernie would save us, it is still worth reflecting on why working-class people relate to U.S. politics through the ballot primarily, and how we both use that and expand on it, instead of ignoring these campaigns by design like the base building organizations did.
This returns me to Horras. He points to a similar plan for the future in his article: “we would need to combine the formulation of a genuinely communist political program with efforts to make this program relevant to the working class and oppressed.” Bernie’s program was far from communist, but it was inspiring, and relevant, to large sections of the working class and oppressed. Formulating the kind of plan we need is much easier said than done. Even if some of the more economistic demands around healthcare and education are obvious, the political vision will be harder to develop. This is aggravated by the fact that the working class either doesn’t relate to politics or relates to it through voting.
In addition, the way the existing left related to his “movement” left much to be desired. His pull did strengthen the DSA and catapulted it to become the largest left organization in a generation, but the organization is now struggling to find a “Beyond Bernie” direction. So missing from all of this is another key ingredient: We need resilient organizations, with a welcoming and positive culture that at the same time are ruthlessly efficient, which can both relate to the working class and take every opportunity to win with our limited means. The existing left is the material of the communist movement, and we must learn how to use it.
This brings me to the end of part one. To relate adequately to the base, or material conditions, we have to deal with, will require a lot of experimentation. In my opinion, base building did not fail because it identified the wrong problem, it failed because rebuilding the base available to communists half a century ago through hard work exceeds the resources we currently have. Therefore, we must use another tactic. In the next parts, I hope to outline a more positive vision of how we can actually build this program, and what it will take to break the spell of capitalism and ballot box democracy on millions of people.
