Isaac KD and Jack L defend their critique of DSA’s dominant strategic orientation towards reform campaigns in a response to Sam Lewis’ “In Defense of Campaigns“.
The authors would like to thank Sam Lewis for his response to our essay featured in Socialist Forum’s Spring 2022 issue: “Stuck in a Loop? A critical assessment of DSA’s strategic orientation towards the fight for reforms.” We would also like to thank Socialist Forum for providing the space for this political debate, and we hope to see many more strategic debates in Socialist Forum in the near future! Socialist Forum published an excerpt of this article, which we are publishing in full here with Cosmonaut Magazine.
In our initial essays Legislative Campaigns and “Policy Feedback: An Assessment of DSAs Orientation Towards the Fight for Reforms, we made the critique that DSA’s dominant strategic orientation towards campaigns de-emphasizes a principled, oppositional and direct approach to working-class organization in favor of a compromised, coalitional one, where passing reforms as a junior partner to liberals supposedly creates more favorable organizing conditions. Rather than addressing this qualitative critique of how DSA engages in campaign work, Sam focuses most of his response on the quantitative question of whether or not the tactic of electoral and legislative campaigns should be a part of socialists’ playbook. The “electoral vs. anti-electoral” debate is a long-standing one on the left. There are certainly some who, as Sam puts it, “draw a sharp differentiation between our efforts in the electoral and legislative arenas and the project of organizing a mass working-class base,” and in doing so insist on a tactical orientation that avoids any electoral or legislative work.
We are not those people. In fact, we are in complete agreement with Sam on this point: “In the contemporary US, building a mass working-class base requires connecting electoral campaigns and the fight for transformative reforms with deeper organizing in communities and workplaces.” This tactical point—that socialists should work within the electoral and legislative spheres, as well as within workplaces and communities—is obviously correct to us. Again, the difficult question is the strategic one: how should socialists go about connecting all these tactics? While Sam focuses on the tactical question in his response, and does not discuss the strategic question in detail, we believe this is still an area of meaningful disagreement. Accordingly, we will focus this response on clarifying our position, and the differences that exist between our strategy and the one articulated by Sam (and held by many in DSA, especially those in DSA’s Socialist Majority Caucus).
To put the issue simply, the conception of the struggle for reforms articulated by Sam seems to confuse means (reforms that strengthen working-class power) for ends (working-class control and the institution of a democratic and socialist state). Our intention here is to bring that final revolutionary goal to bear when formulating a comprehensive strategic vision. We propose conceiving of reform demands as part of a thorough-going socialist program (a story about socialist transformation that takes aim at the current capitalist regime), and the struggle for reforms as part of a broader strategy to build powerful, independent working-class organizations capable of standing on their own two feet in our fight for the future of humanity.
Policy cart before class politics horse, “purity politics” abstentionism, and the importance of naming the system
Sam claims we “unfortunately” criticize the dominant strategic position within DSA as “knee-jerk reformism” that assumes the passage of reforms will “necessarily lead to class organization.” In contrast to our overly mechanistic criticism (a point the authors are willing to cede to Sam), he claims that DSA’s campaigns “represent a policy program that speaks to the immediate demands of working-class people and social movements while helping to build the long-term prospects of the socialist project.” Going further, he claims that “[s]ocialists will guarantee our own marginalization and separation from any mass working-class movement if we aren’t deadly serious about making gains that improve people’s lives. If socialists can’t deliver for workers, we will lose support to political leaders of a different character.”
Setting aside for a moment the issue of Sam’s far too narrow conception of a socialist program, this set of claims allows us to clarify our “unfortunate” criticism, which can be simply referred to as putting the policy cart before the class politics horse. When Sam says we must be “deadly serious” about making material gains for working people, what does this mean in terms of our political strategy? Does it mean that we must, for example, allow Jamaal Bowman to continue violating our organization’s democratically-determined commitment to Palestinian solidarity and the BDS movement because of his ability to help pass the “Green New Deal for Public Schools” legislative package? Does it mean that we must allow Julia Salazar to continue standing against the militant minority of public housing residents organizing against privatization because of her ability to help fight for Good Cause rental protections? Does it mean that we must stand idly by while our coalition partners water down our political demands to become palatable to the ruling class within the Democratic Party, so we can say, “At least we passed something”?
There are some (including Sam and the other signers of the “Unity, not Unanimity” petition supporting Bowman and criticizing DSA’s BDS Working Group) who seem to believe that these sorts of realpolitik compromises are necessary in order to ensure we can actually “deliver for workers.” When taken to its logical conclusion, this primary emphasis on delivering results for workers through policy can lead us to conclude that DSA should just play the bourgeois political game, cutting deals, making quid pro quos, and engaging in the horse-trading patronage politics that will allow us a seat at the table with the ruling class. Of course, this would be a strange strategy for socialists (although not without historical precedent), and it seems unlikely that anyone is actually suggesting we operate in this manner. Yet one does not have to think in this way in order to bend the stick too far toward an economistic political strategy that places primary importance on policy wins, even when that focus negatively impacts our ability to engage in class struggle (such as Bowman’s compromised position on Palestinian solidarity or Salazar’s compromised position on NYCHA resident solidarity). Both of these positions can be weighed in loss of organizers—the Bowman fracas led to the largest number of DSA quits in a single week, while Salazar’s moves contributed to the stillbirth of our local NYCHA WG. When compromises on socialist program and working-class organization are made because of the principal importance of passing legislation (or even just to get into the room where these decisions are made), one puts the economic policy cart before the class politics horse.
It is also true that one can bend the stick too far toward a strategy that ignores material gains and a concrete political program, focusing exclusively on working-class organization and political agitation. When taken to its extreme, this strategy cedes the terrain of reform to liberals and reactionaries. (This is also why we conclude, based on Sam’s correct observation that Republicans are the major actors eroding confidence in the state, that if socialists don’t lead the charge in exposing the anti-democratic, violent, and racist US state and connect it to our fight for democratic reforms and a true democratic republic, reactionaries will take these criticisms and use them for their own political ends).
Our contention is that Sam and the comrades in the Socialist Majority Caucus bend the stick too far toward a strategy of policy cart before class-politics horse. Others on the left bend the stick too far the other way, toward a “purity politics” rejection of all electoral work in favor of organizing the working class from the bottom up. These are the typical stakes of the old and tired DSA debate—base building and electoralism, never the twain shall meet. Both poles in this well-worn debate tend to mistake means (reforms on the one hand, organization on the other) for ends (working class control and democratic socialist transformation of the state). Our strategic orientation brings these two poles together, and in doing so re-emphasizes the centrality of socialists’ transformative end goal. We are “deadly serious” about unifying our struggle for reforms under DSA’s program, and we understand that our ability to win those reforms flows from working-class organization and socialist consciousness, which is the basis of socialists’ political power today, just as it was one hundred years ago. The primary importance of working-class organization and socialist consciousness in the struggle for reforms is apparent throughout history, and is a key axiom to orthodox Marxist thought throughout the centuries: far from “wishful thinking!”
The Socialist Majority Caucus’ strategy to socialist power seems to be to win socialist reforms in order to win a socialist (parliamentary) majority. The underemphasis on class politics in the tactical manifestation of this strategy (i.e., a willingness to dilute and compromise class politics and the socialist program) seems to flow from an under-examination of the capitalist class’s own politics, manifested in the state as an instrument of class rule. Take, for instance, Sam’s correct assertion that New Deal Reforms “delivered material gains for many working-class people and shaped the organization and consciousness of working people where they were passed.” In other words, the state is a political organizer capable of shaping public consciousness and shoring up support in its own way. So far, so good. Sam goes on to agree with us that “de-legitimizing the rule of capitalists and the capitalist system itself will require marshaling a popular majority in support of a democratic, socialist alternative,” Even better. But Sam is content to handwave the state away in the next instance, by insisting that this majority will naturally arise through simply “delivering for workers” through “making gains that improve people’s lives.” It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that the New Deal improved people’s lives and Socialists played a role in that. But the state outmaneuvered the Left and crushed it nonetheless, inspiring the quote “who gets the bird, the hunter or the hound?” We must be able to respond to that maneuvering (which we saw again in the George Floyd Rebellion), and getting the goods alone won’t cut it.
An interesting response to our piece came from a veteran of the campaign for taxi medallion debt relief, who pointed to that campaign as a successful model that we had ignored. He wrote that “the effort combined a whole lot of different elements into one: inside politics by an elected, policy support, comms + political education, and old-fashioned strike solidarity.” The tremendous victory of the TWA is a great concrete example of how to respond to state co-optation. The TWA’s victorious campaign, which led one taxi-industry firm to whine that “‘uncompromising militancy’ and ‘nonstop militant action’ are not tools to disturb lawful transactions,” recently led to indebted taxi drivers beginning to sign deals to massively restructure their loans. When signing these deals, the drivers posed with TWA placards that read “driver power, union power.” We can contrast this with New York state’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP). ERAP did materially help tens of thousands of renters avoid eviction, and it was much stronger than most states’ eviction relief programs as a result of the 2020s #CancelRent wave of tenant organizing and rent striking. But ERAP itself was only born after an alliance of big landlords and the right wing of the tenant movement cut a backroom deal to give up on #CancelRent. This deal weakened and demoralized the radical tenant organizations (demonized as radicals by state legislators as ERAP was passed). At the same time, ERAP contained a line item to fund the nonprofit social service agencies that opposed #CancelRent. The balance of power shifted decidedly away from the tenant movement, who subsequently failed to pass much of anything this past session. While both the medallion and #CancelRent campaigns ended in reforms and debt relief, delivered in part by socialists, they shifted the balance of power in opposite directions.
Organizing is an act of storytelling, of thick description. As Sam writes, the left’s “political challenge is to develop the politics and program that both has something to offer a working-class majority right now and contains a path to the revolutionary transformation and democratization of state and society.” Programs aren’t just lists of policies: they are roadmaps with clear paths to revolutionary transformation. In our original essay, we described a narrative technique of “delegitimating the state.” For clarity’s sake, we should have dropped this admittedly clunky phrase. Our radical history offers a better one. In 1965, the SDS was beginning to come into its own as an anti-war movement. The organization was realizing that the government was more impervious to change than it had been taught. With the US only increasing its brutal involvement in Indochina, the students organized the largest anti-war protest to date in early 1965. Standing in front of the Washington Monument, SDS’s President Paul Potter asked the crowd of 25 thousand, “what kind of system is it that justifies the United States or any country seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese people and using them callously for its own purpose?” It wasn’t just a war, it was a system, and the task of the crowd was to “name that system, name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and change it.” The basic story we tell in our campaigns—our socialist program—remains the same: name the system, understand it, and figure out how to change it.
Ultimately, if our analysis, strategy, program, and agitational message do not name the system of capitalism as one that is incapable of delivering the goods in the long run, and that only a democratic socialist transformation of the state is capable of delivering these goods, we are doomed to an ineffective form of incrementalist reformism: one that won’t deliver meaningful material improvements in the short term, and one that won’t deliver socialism in the long run. Socialists need to fight for a genuinely socialist program (a narratively powerful minimum-maximum program, not merely a laundry list of reforms) and tell a story about a potential socialist transformation that is unabashed in its criticism of status-quo politics. As Sam writes, “for the Left, there are no shortcuts”; compromises and white lies about where we’re going will do us no good in the end. They lead to the same apathy, and hopelessness that Sam rightly reads in mass consciousness. While engaged in the tactical means, we must be clear and open about socialists’ transformative end goal, what it takes to get there, and what stands in our way.
Experience is stonelike; meaning is volcanic
Sam writes that the Universal Rent Control campaign of 2015 (which predated our chapter’s involvement in tenant organizing) motivated him to revive his building’s tenant association. This was an experience that several others shared at that time, and again during the 2019 rent law campaign, when we were working within NYC-DSA’s tenant organizing committee. Sam’s piece targets our support for tactical diversity, but his own experience demonstrates a clear agreement that socialist campaigns must think beyond canvassing when imagining how socialists should engage with politics. When we wrote our article, it seemed as if all the chapter had to offer was “policy feedback,” with the idea that organizing would happen somewhere downstream of legislation passing. As Sam writes, campaigns “can have an overwhelmingly positive relationship to starting, reviving and politicizing working-class organizations.” In order to make sure that relationship exists, we need to think deeply and critically about the ways in which our campaigns are coming up short of this goal.
Unfortunately, Sam leaves us with an incomplete story. He revived and politicized a working-class organization, but what was the result? Does the tenant’s association (TA) still exist? How do Sam’s neighbors remember the struggle? How did they move on after the campaign’s initial failure in 2015? These aren’t easy questions, but they are essential for gathering meaning from the experience. Experience is stonelike, but meaning is volcanic—lessons from one struggle explode forward into our present work. Our goal is not to just provoke tenant organizing or to get wins (though both are indispensable). Rather, our goal is also to build collective understanding—of the meaning of the TA’s experience, of the lessons of the past, and of the roadmap for how to get to a world without landlords. Organizing, again, is storytelling, and the story we tell matters. That is why open political discussion is so crucial, and why our story (or our program) must address our thoroughly transformative end goal.
While we laud Sam’s commitment both in word and in deed to the principle of diversity of tactics, the policy he recommends creates serious obstacles to that objective. In 2021, we were active in DSA’s housing work as it transitioned from the more radical demands of the pandemic period (“Cancel Rent!”) to the more modest demand for Good Cause Eviction. Given the change in political mood from the most radical moments of the pandemic, this transition was probably necessary for DSA’s work in Albany. But, due to DSA’s lack of a firm program that named the eviction machine as an evil to be overcome and affirmed our commitment to those further transformative goals, this potentially tactical concession took on the character of a full-scale reworking of DSA’s policy orientation in the eyes of the most radical and effective tenant activists both within the organization and the city at large. Many of these activists left DSA to expand existing organizations like Crown Heights Tenants Union (CHTU), or, rather than joining DSA in the first place, they built their own organizations like Brooklyn Eviction Defense (BED) that were willing to name the system and make the radical demands that activate tenants into more militant activity. This divide has meant not just the exit of some of DSA’s most effective organizers, but, consequently, that literally hundreds of tenant organizers that could be building direct relationships and driving members to DSA from working-class communities of color are now telling those same communities that we are, at best, fickle and weak allies of independent tenant struggle and, at worst, enemies of that struggle at the behest of Democrats. To be clear, we are making no such claim, but given our current political orientation such results are fairly predictable.
The response from those close to the Good Cause push was to point out that its passage would give tenant organizers much stronger tools to win concessions for tenants. While correct on its own narrow terms of policy analysis, for the working tenant organizer, such demands are not theoretical questions of policy, but weapons used to build the consciousness that provides meaning and coherent narratives that tenant and labor organizers need to build militant, fighting organizations. What this narrow policy focus misses is what Bernstein failed to grasp in his phrase “the movement is everything, the end goal nothing.” Without the final goal of socialism (the abolition of class society by the workers themselves, as distant as it may be) in view, and without clearly naming the capitalist system as both the primary obstacle and primary terrain for achieving that goal, the many facets of working-class organizing lose their principle of coherence, and the competing tactical needs of each branch break the movement down into its component parts, each of which alone is easily crushed by capitalist forces.
This, again, is not to contrapose policy objectives like Good Cause, Just Cause, or Defund the Police to these higher ends. The fight for these reforms is essential to the higher end of socialism. They are not simply propaganda pieces that socialists know can never really pass; whenever we fight we should fight to win, not least because winning establishes the credibility of our movement. Instead, our real concern is that in the absence of a shared strategic vision, program, and narrative that names and knows what it fights, these reforms (the means of strengthening working-class power) come to stand in for ends (the conquest of power by the working class and the creation of a Democratic Socialist society).
Towards an alternative political culture and a mass socialist party
The notion that socialists should be “deliver[ing] for workers” reflects an incorrect relationship between socialists and the working class. Socialists need to get out of the trap of thinking about ourselves as acting on behalf of the working class. Our task is not just to win things for working people, or even to fight for or say the things we think will allow us to “marshal a popular majority” to our side: it is to merge the forces of socialism with the activated forces of the workers’ movement so that the working class becomes the protagonist in the project of socialist transformation. In order to do that, we can’t just focus on changing policy (and organizing the working class around those policy fights), although that is certainly a part of the project; more fundamentally, we must prioritize creating an alternative political culture that is grounded in a revolutionary program for democratic socialism and forges protagonists out of the merged forces of socialism and the working class.
We have caught glimpses of this culture before. In Summer 2020, as Hannah Black commiserated, “[g]rill smoke and weed smoke and Pop Smoke outlined the spectral presence of the New York commune that lived a second ghost life after its erasure by politics.” For others, it was time spent in the Sanders campaign. Or Standing Rock, or at the Bedford Union Armory, or a punk squat that grew into a solidarity movement with local houseless tenants, or anywhere. But here we are again, in the morass. How do we rebuild and sustain that culture – toughen its skin by learning from our defeats?
This is where the “orthodox Marxist revolutionary strategy” typified by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the late 19th century has lessons to teach us. The SPD was a true mass-membership socialist party by and for the working class. Guided by democratic decision-making processes, the SPD conducted political work inside and outside the halls of electoral power, but it also ran agitational newspapers, emphasized political education, and organized community groups, cultural groups, and sports groups. The work of the SPD was guided by a revolutionary minimum-maximum program (the Erfurt Program) that told a story about where socialists wanted to go (universal emancipation and collective ownership of the means of production) and how to get there (a series of political and economic reforms that, together, would constitute a break with capitalist state rule and the establishment of working-class rule). Clearly, reform campaigns were a part of the SPD’s strategy, but they were far from the only aspect, and were always subordinated to the organization’s political program. One can debate whether or not the SPD is a specific organizational form replicable in the contemporary US, but that question misses the forest for the trees. Ultimately, if we want to build the kind of mass, democratic, working-class socialist organizations that we all agree that socialists need, we need to develop an alternative, independent political culture, and organization that can act as the glue merging socialists with activated segments of the working class.
Unfortunately, the “means as ends” approach to campaigns currently being implemented by DSA’s Socialist Majority Caucus has hampered the crucial political project of independent working-class organization: one only has to look at how the Bowman/BDS affair or the Salazar/NYCHA Trust affair impacted our ability to organize with socialists and the militant working class to see that this is true. It is only when we change our strategic orientation away from the “means as ends” orientation of the Socialist Majority Caucus, and toward a programmatic socialism that names the system it is aiming to transform, that this alternative political culture—and, with it, a mass socialist party, the most powerful fighting force for socialism—will become possible.
