Katja and Jakob, based in Germany, have a discussion with our editor Alexander Gallus on a number of different issues, ranging from DSA and the Marxist Unity Slate to timely theoretical questions of the socialist movement. This conversation took place a month before the DSA convention of August 2021.
Jakob: Let’s start with the Cosmonaut blog project. You are part of the editorial team of Cosmonaut. Can you tell us first what kind of project it is and since when it exists? What is its goal?
Alexander: The idea of Cosmonaut was born from some small attempts to build organizations that on the one hand wanted to do base-building, i.e. to organize unorganized workers, and on the other hand wanted to try to implement or popularize the Marxist theoretical ideas of Mike Macnair and the Weekly Worker from the CPGB. Many of us, by 2015, were active in the radical left in America, in various left sects, i.e. syndicalist, Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist and so on. What these organizations have in common, and what we no longer wanted, is that on the one hand they are often very bureaucratic, and on the other hand there is not enough open debate. These organizations are not sufficiently carried by membership, and they hardly feel really responsible for them because there is always a certain line to which you have to be faithful. And if you’re not, sooner or later you get kicked out.
In the long run, it’s very difficult to keep that up. At the same time, yes, you have your own brain and you ask your own questions, but you can hardly get into a conversation about it. [With] this experience in the background, it is very important for us to have more public discussions and especially more strategic discussions and not just always go out on the street and achieve nothing for the class over the decades. Our idea is – some call us neo-Kautskyans for this reason – that we build institutions of the working class towards a left mass party movement that produces a politics of democratic republicanism, and that we we thus overcome the bureaucratism of the small left sects.
History of the worker’s movement
Katja: We’ll come back to democratic republicanism later. First of all, I would be interested to know why the examination of the history of the workers’ movement plays such an important role for you in strengthening the public debate about Marxist or socialist strategy. What is the importance of this debate for the reconstruction of a socialist movement today?
Alexander: Dealing with the history of the workers’ movement is very important for us because, in our opinion, the essential ideas of Marx and revolutionary social democracy are still very relevant. If we really want to change our society, then we need a social revolution; and this goal is closely related to the question of where we want to go and how to get there. And generally speaking, we are very clear about where we want to go: We want socialism and we want a social revolution, and that means class struggle. There is a lot for us to learn about this struggle in our examination of history. Of course, a lot has changed as well. We are also often accused of being too concerned with history. But we think that precisely for the question of where we want to go, this preoccupation is inevitable, because there are many parallels with history. This history is by no means passé. Because we still have a capitalist system and we still have class struggles. In 2019 and 2020, hundreds of thousands of American workers were on the streets, striking because of conflicts with their employers.
Katja: One could counter that while the essential ideas of Marx are still relevant, at the same time the labor movements of both the Second International and the Communist International failed very fundamentally. At the same time, your blog gives great importance to the politics of the Second International and the politics of the Bolsheviks and what happened around the October Revolution. If my impression does not deceive me, you are in a way trying to rehabilitate the politics of the Second and Third Internationals to some extent against certain leftist distortions, or to put them in a new light. Why do these stations of the workers movement form such an important point of reference for you?
Alexander: Of course, we don’t want to deny that both the Second and Third Internationals have their weaknesses. But the strength of the Second International is that the working class organized itself politically within social democracy to a degree whereby it actually achieved a self-confidence that it almost never achieved again afterwards. And that’s a big part of what we have to do today as well. The working class must realize that it is in its own power to conquer political power and become the master of society itself.
When it comes to the development of the Third International, one should always keep in mind that the European revolution failed in the other countries. Only on this basis is it possible to understand what became of the Third International in the 1920s and even more so in the 1930s. The hope of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was that the revolutions in Germany, France, etc. would be victorious. But clearly, the strategy of the Third International failed, and we really need to talk about the reasons for that.
Jakob: I’m with you that we have to build a proletarian party, but I’d be interested to know how you then classify the betrayal of social democracy in 1914. This was not a small slip but substantial and initiated the policy of social democracy to no longer pursue politics for the international class struggle but to pander to the capitalist nation-state. This failure is very present in the German radical left, so I would be interested to know how your positive reference to the Second International relates to this turn of social democracy?
Alexander: That’s a very complex question, I’m sure you could talk about it for hours. But maybe in a nutshell: There were opportunist tendencies in the SPD from the beginning. When Bismarck passed the Anti-Socialist Law in 1878, the majority of the SPD was perhaps opportunist, that is, reformist and not yet revolutionary in orientation. This changed with the period of illegality under the Socialist Law, because the Marxists in the SPD around Bebel and Liebknecht became more central during this period and thus managed to achieve a certain hegemony in the party. Already Marx had said at that time that if the opportunists manage to dominate in the party, then hope for the revolution is lost. But this concern, which Marx and Engels clearly had and also openly expressed – especially toward Lassale’s wing, i.e., the state socialists in the SPD – their followers in the party did not heed to the same extent. They were no longer so determined in fighting opportunism within the party [at a certain point], and that can even be understandable because one does not want to constantly spray poison within a party. But in the end, by 1914, the opportunists clearly gained the upper hand and the Marxist center and left wing had lost. The approval of the war credits must be understood, I think, as a symptom of a larger struggle that the Marxists lost over time.
Katja: In the English-speaking world there is quite a lively debate about Kautsky’s politics. In this country [Germany], one is surprised at first, because one has actually heard little or nothing about Kautsky. At some point I started to read something by him. What I ask myself in view of the US debate is: What does a revolutionary Marxist do with Kautsky? In the U.S. debate it’s mainly the reformist wing around Jacobin magazine that is influenced by him, why do you refer to Kautsky, what is his revolutionary legacy?
Alexander: Good question, yes it’s true, there is a lot of talk about Kautsky here. Regarding Jacobin, I have to say clearly that the people in Jacobin hold very similar ideas to ours. At the same time, I have the impression that Kautsky is often misunderstood publicly and in popular understanding in the DSA. He is not understood enough in the political context in which he lived and wrote. When one reads Kautsky, one realizes that Kautsky was on the left. The framework of discussion in Die Neue Zeit – the leading theoretical journal of the SPD – was very revolutionary. For example, whenever he intervened in the Russian debate between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, he was almost always on the side of the Bolsheviks. People like Lenin were very much influenced by Kautsky – not for nothing was Kautsky called the Pope of Marxism, because he spoke lucidly about Marxist political strategy and social revolution in his writings.
Of course, he could have been a bit clearer about what exactly the revolution should look like, but this is true not only for him, but also for many others, Rosa Luxemburg, for example. It is true of revolutionary social democracy in general that there was hardly any talk about violence. I think it was not present enough at the time because many assumed that the social revolution, the struggle for socialism would be more like a civil struggle and less like a civil war. Kautsky’s ideal, and that of revolutionary social democracy throughout the period, was that the proletariat would be organized into mass organizations. If the proletariat then had the majority of society, at a certain point the party would have such overwhelming strength that there would no longer be a major struggle. Maybe that’s not so wrong either.
But one should probably have a bit more clarity about what exactly would happen in a revolution and what exactly a state within a state means. For example, that a revolutionary party should prepare to defend itself. Yet one should also remember that there was censorship in Germany. The SPD was in illegality for a very long time and was very happy when it was legal again to be a Social Democrat and operate in public. One had, of course, through legality, many more possibilities for organizing, educating and agitating, for example, through newspapers, demonstrations, meetings, social and sporting clubs – as we enjoy today.
Jakob: One thing that also seems to me to be problematic, and which has not been addressed very much in social democracy, is in my opinion the question of the structures of a socialist democracy. There was too much orientation to the party form, and then when the council movement came along, people didn’t really know how to deal with it. The question of democracy and how it should be constituted was not discussed enough. Other social democrats, such as Eisner, on the other hand, immediately tried in the soviet revolution not to play off the soviet movement against the party, but to put it into a fruitful relationship. My impression of Kautsky, on the other hand, is that he was too focused on the party, and that the question of the soviets therefore remained under-lit. And when the councils were there, there was no constructive way of dealing with them, which made it easier for the right-wing parts of the SPD to assert themselves.
Alexander: Kautsky was actually not against councils. Eisner did accept the councils, but he was also very reformist and didn’t really want a revolution in the sense that he wanted a[n independent] workers’ state.
Jakob: But he wasn’t militarily against it either, like Ebert
Alexander: Yes, true, the whole USPD was not against it. Kautsky wasn’t against it either, he wrote an article where he talks about the council movement and that this is the revolution. Almost everybody on the revolutionary left saw that. But the reason that the Bavarian revolution failed is, on the one hand, because the USPD split further. In Bavaria, after Eisner was assassinated, Ernst Toller split off from the national USPD and founded the UUSPD or something like that. That was a problem, of course: starting and trying to go through with a revolution with a party that was not at all capable of governing. The USPD was not capable of governing in 1918/19. It was also not ready to programmatically unite with the KPD; that happened only later, in 1920 with Paul Levi.
Katja: To summarize that again, you would say that Kautsky’s strengths lie in his idea of patiently building a mass party, with the vision of it winning the majority and organizing the proletariat under a revolutionary program.
Alexander: Yes, exactly.
Revolutionary Strategy
Jakob: Then we come to questions of political strategy in general and also in the present. You already mentioned at the very beginning that you want to popularize the ideas of Mike Macnair, among others. In particular, the book “Revolutionary Strategy” appears again and again as an important point of reference. In it, Macnair outlines as a strategic vanishing point a cross-currents party based on a shared political program, with an open dispute between the various tendencies. On the one hand, he opposes this to the revolutionary left, which is fragmented along denominational lines and, as the guardians of its revolutionary tradition, is disappearing further and further into insignificance; on the other hand, he also opposes the “pragmatic” left – modern social democracy – which, through its surrender to the administration of capitalism, is also in the process of becoming superfluous. Now, of course, one could object that the revolutionary strategy outlined in this way has so far produced few tangible results. To what extent do you think the strategy described by Macnair can be of help to us?
Alexander: That there are different tendencies within the workers’ movement is quite natural. There always will be, and the important thing is to stir up a fruitful debate among these tendencies and to build common institutions. And the DSA is trying to do that right now in various measures. By the way, the Jacobin wing of Bhaskar Sunkara is also influenced by Mike Macnair. Unfortunately, though, it’s a bit unclear at this time what concrete politics Jacobin is pursuing. The basic idea of Mike Macnair is actually that if you don’t want to isolate yourself as a sect, you have to unite in a party and follow certain democratic principles. How else are you going to develop a political force?
Katja: And what are these principles?
Alexander: The principles are first and foremost programmatic unity: that is, you give yourself a program that is accepted by everyone. There are then no longer a thousand lines, but one agrees on common political goals in the form of a minimum-maximum program. This idea is already quite popular on the American left. The minimum program states, for example, that one will not enter into coalitions with bourgeois parties and instead will make certain demands that can create the basis for a revolution. The maximum, of course, is communism. Another important principle is the publicity of the discussion within the party in the form of newspapers or today online media, in which debates are held and also the various political tendencies that exist within the party are represented.
Jakob: I would be interested to know again how you see the relationship between reformist and revolutionary tendencies in the party. When we looked at history, you said that one of the problems of German social democracy was that opportunism ultimately became hegemonic and that the issue was to win the struggle against the reformists. How would you see that in terms of the different factions? What kind of relations should revolutionary Marxists choose with reformists?
Alexander: I think an important condition to solve this problem is precisely programmatic unity. The be-all and end-all of an organization is that everyone within it accepts a common strategic vision. Then the struggle that we have to wage as Marxists is that this vision follows a revolutionary program. If one had such a program, then the question would be why reformists would want to be in a revolutionary party in the first place. If they then try to say, for example in newspapers, revolution is not really on the agenda or we should take it more leisurely, then we should fight them publicly. Then you can say “Hey look, this is our common program, don’t you accept this? Then you’re not members.” The program is sort of a threshold to become a member, a condition. Not one that’s beyond scrutiny or debate of course, quite to the contrary, but a condition nonetheless. If you want to be a member, you have to accept the program, the minimum and the maximum program.
Katja: But when it comes to the question of whether you accept the program, there is a bit of room for interpretation. Perhaps there are people who formally share the program and say, yes, we want communism, but we push it very far out and we must first continue to manage capitalism. Should the right-wing around Bernstein and Vollmar, for example, have been kicked out of the former Social Democracy? There is at least the problem that if you kick them out, there will be a split again and thus no more unity of the different tendencies.
Alexander: I think there should have been a split, as Luxemburg demanded, because the right wing did not accept the program. Of course, there are also discussions about the Erfurt program, whether it was a revolutionary program at all or not. I would say, yes, it was understood as a revolutionary program in its time. So you have to kick out the people who don’t accept the program, at least in that scenario. Otherwise we will be kicked out, or worse, murdered, like Luxemburg and all the others.
Katja: Behind Macnair’s idea of uniting the different Marxist and revolutionary tendencies within one party is the idea of unity. Why is this unity so important? At Cosmonaut there was a debate with a more anarchist tendency, whose text argued that there are differences within the socialist movement and therefore one could simply build different groups and organizations that can complement and support each other. Why do you think that’s so important, that this socialist movement organizes itself within a party and forms different factions within it?
Alexander: Yes, there is this one model of federation where we have many parties and there is the model of a mass party. I would say that the problem with the federative idea is that it is not clear how it can become a unified movement that is capable of taking political power. Assuming that we now have several parties with a similar goal that work well together and are able to work together on a daily basis, the question is why shouldn’t they work in one party? Otherwise, it’s a waste of energy. If we have twelve small parties that can agree on a federation, why do we need twelve times the people who make posters, who keep the whole organization alive, etc.? Second, after all, ultimately our goal is for the working class to gain the self-confidence that it can win, and that means that it can govern and manage society. And this is a very concrete thing: in a socialist government, everyone would have to pull together and agree on what policies to implement, what measures to take, what laws to enact, etc.
Why should we start agreeing on such common policies only after the revolution? In my opinion, it does not make sense. You have to talk about it a lot before, now, and for that you have to be very close. So the goal of a party is to be closer to each other. That’s why we published texts like “Many Parties”. We try to create a dialogue, which is much easier if you are a member of the same party. Also, it confuses people when you go out on the street and demonstrate and then there are always umpteen different small organizations, just because a handful of leaders of these little sects can’t agree on the minute different lines they have. Why should the workers tolerate that?
It is not at all obvious from the outside why these splinter parties cannot agree. Are the differences so great that they cannot work together on a daily basis? They have the same goal. So actually it is not up to us to answer the question of party unity, but rather up to the people who would rather have a federation. It is often the case that it is primarily in the personal interest of the respective leaders of these splinter parties not to unite with others. Because then they would no longer be the leaders of that organization.
Jakob: Following on from that, perhaps an even more general question about the party: In Germany, there is skepticism on the part of many radical leftists about organizing in the form of a party at all, or at least working towards something like that in the longer term, because there is a very general criticism of the form of the party. The party is associated with bureaucratism, proxy and organizational fetish and, in contrast, the self-organization of the wage-dependents is emphasized, which should lead to the own thinking and acting of the working class. Parties would always tend to form authoritarian structures, as history has shown. How would you counter this very general criticism? And how could you counter these dangers that the form of the party poses.
Alexander: That’s a very good question and actually follows on directly from what we just discussed. It’s definitely central that no dictatorial conditions arise within a party. Incidentally, the early Marxists, i.e., Marx, Engels, Liebknecht and Bebel, also fought for this when they opposed Lassalle’s policy of autocracy within the ADAV and strove to build a party that would function according to democratic principles. If you have the fear – and it’s a good fear to have – that there can be authoritarianism in a party, then it has to be, first, about strengthening the wage-earners within the organization – that is, promoting their self-confidence and their activity – and, second, it needs institutional mechanisms that encourage this and function according to the principles of democratic republicanism. We’ve written a lot about that, but there’s a lot more research to be done.
A lot of this is about what are the best mechanisms to ensure the control of the representatives vis-à-vis the members. It’s important for the self-activity of the wage earners that the local chapters of the party, for example, have their own media where discussions take place, so that everything doesn’t just take place at the central level. Debates at the local level are extremely important, because there are many different problems that are local, and it is important to encourage the membership to express themselves. Learning to write and advocate is not something that happens overnight, it’s a process that people have to learn.
Katja: Could you elaborate on what is meant by the principles of democratic republicanism?
Alexander: To relate the question to today: The social conditions in America are very bad and the legitimacy of the political system is very weak. Before Biden it was even weaker, because now Biden pretends to be a leftist, but he is not. He has done practically nothing for either the working class or the left. For example, where is the $15 minimum wage? It doesn’t exist, that was an empty promise, just like all the other stuff. But the thing is, we have socialist parliamentarians, four or five sit in Congress, but they are not subject to democratic discipline by the DSA.
Rather, they work with the bourgeois forces of the Democrats and try to negotiate compromises with them. This fruitlessness is a very ineffective strategy to win over the working class because it has nothing to do with their interests. The idea of Democratic Republicanism is that there are mechanisms in place to make sure that DSA representatives act on a socialist program instead of negotiating any deals with the Democrats. They would then have to do what has been agreed upon within the party.
DSA
Katja: Let’s come back more generally to the DSA and its development. The DSA got a big boost from the Bernie Sanders Campaign in 2016. You describe the campaign in an interview as a kind of catalyst for a reorganization of the US left. Since 2016, membership has been extremely strong. Can you say more about how the DSA has evolved in recent years? Who are the members, what strata do they come from? And how is the DSA structured?
Alexander: The DSA was founded in the 70s by Michael Harrington. From the beginning, the DSA’s strategy was to build more relationships with Democrats and use them to push through some social reforms. However, this more reformist-oriented policy of the DSA has been increasingly challenged in recent years. This is because the members who have joined the DSA since 2016 are mainly young people, part-time workers, students and so on. Students are perhaps the largest group, as is often the case on the left.
The staff leadership at the national level is still the old leadership. However, this could change in August because now the majority of the National Political Committee, which is the highest body of the organization, are mostly young people from communist and socialist factions, especially from Bread and Roses, the largest socialist faction within the DSA. Therefore, especially given the leftward shifts of the last two conventions, there is a good chance that the organization will become more radical with the party congress in August, and that the strong orientation toward reform and toward the Democrats will be replaced by a more radical socialist perspective. And on the question of how the DSA is structured: there are many local groups that have quite little to do with each other and very big differences. Some are very anarchist in nature and pursue mainly Mutual Aid projects, others are more on the side of the Democrats.
Katja: So what are the most significant factions within DSA and what is their practice and strategy, especially from Bread and Roses that you just mentioned?
Alexander: I would say the biggest caucus, so the hegemonic wing in the DSA, Bread and Roses, has a very strong focus on and activity in electoral campaigns as well as encouraging labor organizing. It’s been pointed out over and over again that the number of strikers in 2019 was the largest it’s been since 1988, and that’s pushed the organizing strategy a lot. DSA is trying to encourage people to join the big unions and gain experience there. Furthermore there is the influential social-democratic Socialist Majority Caucus, CPN and a whole slew of smaller caucuses. Then there’s another communist/spontaneist wing that’s smaller but also has some presence and advocates for small grassroots organizations at the local level, like tenant unions. The issue of tenant unions is very current right now. There are as of now some proposals already for the August conference asking that DSA also commit to help build local chapters around the country. That would be very good if that goes through.
Jakob: You’ve recently launched the Marxist Unity Slate, which you’re using to influence the strategic direction of the DSA. What exactly is this Marxist Unity Slate, how long has it been around, and what are your goals with it?
Alexander: With the Marxist Unity Slate we are trying to establish our concrete ideas about socialism and a communist strategy. We organize ourselves through a newsletter and through a chat server that we talk through. We don’t have hundreds of people in our group now, but already a few dozen. What we want to do is to start a debate in the convention in August about our strategic ideas and get people involved.
Katja: And how are your strategic ideas different from Bread and Roses? What is your critique of their policies?
Alexander: Our critique of the DSA and Bread and Roses in particular is that while they do work in the unions, they don’t actually have a precise strategy about what the goal of that work in the unions is. I’m not saying that all the work that people do there is pointless. But I think there would need to be much more clarity about the strategy, and that clarity is not there right now. What do we want to achieve within the unions anyway? At the moment, the motto of the DSA is that we should gain experience within the unions. I think that we should do what Lenin and other socialists in history have done, that we fight for our politics within the unions and that we intervene in the places and struggles where the workers feel that they are not supported at all by the bureaucratic trade unionists up there. This is the case in many places. It’s no accident that hundreds of thousands of workers have gone on wildcat strikes in recent years and left the unions on the sidelines. Sure labor is overall in a weak position, but it’s quite a sign of the poverty of the established trade union movement that these strikes have simply all happened without the support of the unions.
Katja: So your criticism is that they lack a clear strategy when they work in the unions?
Alexander: Exactly, I would say there is not enough strategic thinking in general. Bread and Roses do have relatively concrete ideas already. Mainly their strategy is to improve the situation of workers in America, for example, fighting for Medicare for All or the $15 minimum wage. Right now they are trying to get a ProAct bill through the Senate. That’s a bill that would allow solidarity strikes. It wouldn’t be a bad bill, it would be a win for the union movement. But so much energy goes into campaigns like this and in the end for nothing, because the venal Democrat Senators have already said they’re not going to vote for it.
Katja: Then why are they doing it?
Alexander: The strategic idea of the hegemonic wing of the DSA and the dominant politics of the organization is to strengthen the working class and reduce its suffering. And that’s an important political starting point: we have fifty thousand people dying every year in this country because they don’t have health insurance. But that’s not a clear strategy about what we actually want, that we want a completely different society and a revolution and how to get there. Of course things would get better if there was a $15 minimum wage. But we need more than that. That vision doesn’t go far enough. The view through the Overton window is looking more and more like there’s a brick wall behind it.
That’s why we’re trying to make a strong case that we need a revolutionary program. Right now we’re in the process of talking to other groups and making the case that we need a minimum-maximum program. That was also often received positively. Of course, there were also concerns and many questions: Why do we want to have a program at all, what would it mean anyway, that it would then be a right-wing or a social democratic program. We then always said, well, if it is social democratic, then we have to fight to change it. Besides the program idea, we have two other motions for which we already have enough signatures. First, that DSA members who are in Congress commit to standing up for the program. Second, that DSA’s elected leadership meet with these members of Congress at least four times a year to talk about how they can best strengthen the organization’s strategy in the Senate. That’s also what we mean by mechanisms for Democratic Republicanism.
Katja: And why is the program so important? It’s only on paper for now. You could say that the strategy of Bread and Roses is more important because they actually achieve improvements, but paper is patient.
Alexander: The program is so important because all members would be obliged to accept it as our common ground. We would then have principles to which one can refer and say, look here, this is our program and this and what representatives have done, contradicts e.g. the program. And I think it’s important so that revolutionary labor can establish itself and representatives are bound by certain principles.
Jakob: That means you are a very small faction as Marxist Unity Slate, but you have a very clear programmatic idea and therefore you can currently set certain content points in the DSA. Is that a correct assessment?
Alexander: Actually, we don’t really see ourselves yet as a faction, there are already so many factions. We rather try to make certain ideas and points of view in the organization strong and also to give recommendations for the convention, what should happen and why. We try to create a dialogue. We say, ok we like this from you, and we present our ideas, because we think that exactly this exchange is very important for the organization. Currently it’s very confused as far as factions are concerned. Sometimes there are coalitions, which then break apart again for personal reasons or because the individual groups have leaders who try to push through ideas which other small groupings then don’t like, and so on. There is always a lot of friction.
Jakob: We would be interested to know what you think about the relationship between the DSA and the Democratic Party. Are you in favor of a break with the Democratic Party?
Alexander: Yes, we are definitely for a break. We published an article a few weeks ago called “Why Run Independents” that deals with this. The strategy of the Marxist Unity Slate is very close to Cosmonaut, the majority of the members are also involved in Cosmonaut, and our strategy is first of all very generally speaking that we want to have a mass party movement and fight for that explicitly in the program for the DSA. The question of independence is not so simple in America, of course. The electoral system in America makes it very difficult for independent parties, you are hardly electable if you don’t tie yourself to the Democrats or the Republicans. But it is possible. Bernie Sanders, for example, was an Independent in Vermont and back in the 90s he moved into Congress as an Independent. So it’s not completely impossible to get elected.
But it’s also not our priority to want to win elections everywhere. If you look historically, the majority of socialist election campaigns have not been successful. We see as the main goal of socialist campaigns rather that they enable platforms where we can say publicly that we are for a socialist society and we want to implement our party program to its maximum, communism. And that, in turn, is hardly possible within the Democratic Party, because if you win elections there, you are subject to the discipline of the Democratic Party and can no longer represent the interests of the working class.
Katja: One could reply that the idea of the mass party is rather outdated. The industrial proletariat has been replaced by a very heterogeneous, fragmented proletariat, which has tended to distance itself from the political party system in recent years. Where do you get your optimism that people could now flock to a socialist party?
Alexander: We get our optimism from the fact that we live in a two-party dictatorship. Actually, there have been efforts to form a third party, a Labor Party, for a very long time because the Democratic Party is no longer a labor party, and it has little ambition to want to be one. Why would people want a mass party? Well, for example, because 50,000 people die here every year, because they don’t have health insurance, because there are hundreds of thousands of homeless people, people are deeply in debt, and so on. There are so many things in America that create so much pressure for the working class and no relief is coming. The $15 minimum wage still doesn’t exist, people still have to work at McDonalds for $7.25 an hour.
Bread and Roses and the DSA are already getting a lot of response with their demands of Medicare For All, the $15 minimum wage, etc. that have been talked about but haven’t existed as laws for years. And that really sucks – it happened to me too that I suddenly owed $4000 because I had to go to the hospital once. Ok, but why do people want a party in the first place? A lot of people vote for Democrats or Republicans. But the problem is that there is not really a party system like in Europe. These Democratic and Republican parties, they’re really more like loose coalitions of rich people. So the idea of an Independent Workers Party, which is also dominant in the DSA, is already tempting. A lot of people want that. I think this idea of a mass party resonates so much because workers currently have no power in America. A mass party would allow it to be heard on a national level and really make a difference.
Jakob: I also understand that you believe that there needs to be an authentic expression of the political will of the working class and that you want to work on that. I would be interested to know what your perspective is on the class struggles of the last few years. They had a relatively unregulated, unorganized character. For example, we dealt a lot with the Yellow Vests movement in France, where there was the problem that the movement did not find a unified, political, socialist expression. But at the same time, we didn’t find the skeptical attitude toward the parties and unions so bad, because our experience is that these established organizations tend to tame such movements and fit them into the existing order. That’s what I find so ambivalent: on the one hand, the yellow vests have less power because of their rejection of representation, but on the other hand, their anti-attitude towards these existing structures can actually only be welcomed. I’d be interested to know how you see that and how you’d grasp the relationship between such unregulated struggles, such as the wildcat strikes or even the BLM protests, and your perspective of building a mass party.
Alexander: Yeah, a few years ago, I think it was 2019, for example, we had this big wave of wildcat strikes by teachers across America. I can only talk about the Bay Area now: in the end, the workers lost and they couldn’t get their demands through against the employers. I think that also has to do with the fact that the union movement in America is very very weak. The teachers didn’t have much support and it’s always been like that for the last 30 years. When there is a struggle, there is no solidarity from other sectors, from the general labor movement.
To your question of the BLM movement: Of course, we were all pleased that there were mass protests in the U.S. in the first place. The majority of us at Cosmonaut were also there and we tried to talk to people. However the dominant politics at the protests was not socialist, the dominant consciousness was shaped by liberal NGOs and similar organizations. At the end of the protest movement, we noticed that it was getting weaker and that the socialist forces were not organized enough to compete with the liberal organizations.
Katja: Maybe the question is how you act in movements or what role you intend to take in them. With regard to the unions, you said earlier that you would do it like Lenin. That is, go where something is happening and then agitate and fight for it with a clear political point of view. If I understand you correctly, you would advocate going into the movement with a clear political perspective and not just going along with it. The movement itself is good, but it is not spontaneously able to give itself an organized political expression. Our question then is, how do you respond, for example, to criticism from the spontaneist side, which says that when parties come into the movement, they always exert an inhibiting role on the movement and ultimately reintegrate it into the existing order.
Alexander: The big question is, of course, which party are we talking about? Well, we’ve already experienced something like that. The Occupy movement started in 2011, that was a huge movement, the majority of us were also carried away by it at that time. But what came out of it? Nothing, or hardly anything. Of course, a lot of people were radicalized, the conditions were also very bad after the 2008 crisis, millions of people lost their homes. I think the only way to intervene meaningfully in these spontaneous protests is first of all to educate people about the crises and their causes, and then to try to consolidate some of the spontaneous energy and institutionalize it in workers’ organizations, so that we can fight for a longer period of time, not just one summer and then it’s gone.
Katja: That’s a good transition to the topic of the draft program. You have been advocating in the DSA to have a program at the national level, which is then binding for all local branches and members. Now there is a draft that will be voted on in August, right?
Alexander: Exactly, at the party convention there will be a vote on whether it will be accepted or not.
Program
Jakob: Can you explain again what exactly the idea of the minimum-maximum program is. First of all, I think it’s a very clever solution not only to be reformist and not just to say communism now, but to try to relate the communist perspective to the current problems. Is that roughly the strategy of the Minimum-Maximum program?
Alexander: The idea of the minimum-maximum program actually comes from Marx. He had first formulated it when he co-authored the program of the Parti Ouvrier in France. The idea is that you set up primarily political demands that put power in the hands of the working class and at the same time weaken the rule of the capitalists. In general, the Second and Third Internationals also advocated this idea in slightly divergent ways and I think it is still highly relevant today. The fundamental idea is that the working class can actually only really rule through a democratic republic and that the capitalist class no longer has any power to break the working class through violence or the judicial apparatus. Kautsky furthermore writes about quelling the corrupt capitalist press.
Towards this end, a revolutionary party must be prepared to carry out both reforms as well as crucial revolutionary dictums if it is to form a government. Important demands of the minimum program are, for example, that the standing army be replaced by a people’s militia. If German Social Democracy had adhered to this, the 1918/19 revolution might have unfolded more positively. Another point would be to weaken the power of the bourgeois media. After all, the media in capitalist countries function primarily through corruption. The judiciary would also have to be fundamentally reformed so that, for example, judges are elected by workers. The maximum program formulates the goal that a party sets for itself, and that, simply put, is communism.
Jakob: And how do you imagine the implementation of the minimum program? If I understand it correctly, it’s not a matter of forming coalitions with bourgeois parties in order to push through points of the minimum program. Do you then participate in the government and try to implement the program, or do you stay in opposition to be seen as an authentic political expression of the working class, and then implement this program when you are the strongest force?
Alexander: Yes exactly, something like that. The principle of Marxism is historically-politically not to enter into coalitions with bourgeois parties, because such a policy would no longer have anything to do with the interests of the working class. The ruling parties would not want that either, they have no interest in the implementation of a minimum socialist program. One can also see in history that every time a left-wing party forms a coalition with more conservative, bourgeois parties, it is pulled to the right. This is not just a principle of left-wing parties, but of parties in general. When liberal parties govern together with conservative parties, the conservative position becomes hegemonic and the party that was to the left of it is tendentially pushed to the right. So we are definitely against coalitions.
Jakob: Is there then a notion that you achieve socialism through a majority of votes? You’re in coalition until the socialist party has gained enough majorities and you can introduce socialism from the top of the state ranks?
Alexander: No, our idea is not that one will bring socialism through the bourgeois state. Rather, it’s about gaining a majority for our views in the working class and society. Nowadays it’s actually easier for us than it was then, although it doesn’t seem so because the bourgeois media exerts very strong control and the state has established itself strongly through many mechanisms in the last century; but it’s about gaining a majority in the working class and the working class is the majority today. So the majority of society – in the U.S., in Germany – are wage earners and have no capital to speak of.
Katja: These demands, which you have now mentioned, are aimed at political rule and want to deprive the bourgeoisie of power and also prevent it from regaining power. But there is still little talk of a different mode of production, a free association of producers. Will that come later and first the political revolution?
Alexander: I think, as long as there is capitalism and as long as you have a capitalist state, there will also be the capitalist forms of private property etc. and that there will not be a free association of producers meanwhile. So yes – first a political revolution is needed as a condition for a different mode of production. First it is necessary to conquer political power.
