Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, superstar: what Engels would have said about it

My mid-August post about the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the one a few days later called "Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, superstar," have drawn a number of responses, both in the comments here and also on Marxmail, an email list moderated by an old friend, the Unrepentant Marxist Louis Proyect. Marxmail has been ongoing for two decades and I must have posted hundreds of times to it, though not very much in recent years.

When I sent a link to my second post (the "superstar" one) I included an extensive and very Marxist-geeky comment trying to clarify and focus on a central point: there is something happening among working people, a change. That change is motion towards coming together as a class. 

Below is the comment I sent to Marxmail. It is more informal and profane than what I tend to post here, but I have kept it as I posted it, apart from fixing a few typos. It went out under the pen name "Joaquín Bustelo" which I used for pretty much anything I wrote on the Internet about politics for many years because of my job, but this is the "real" person behind both that pen name and this blog. The comment started started with the link to the "superstar" post. 

That's from my blog. And before you go apeshit, read it closely enough to understand that my point is that it is not about her, it is about us.

Honestly, I don't write this stuff to be provocative but I know many comrades profoundly disagree.

So what follows is an attempt to explain the main elements of my thinking about the course I have chosen, with special emphasis on how I believe it is fully in keeping with the way Marx and Engels approached these sorts of questions.

The core of my analysis is that Bernie's campaign, the DSA's growth, Ocasio's victory, etc., are all expressions of a movement in the working class, not a movement in the sense of a protest campaign but in the sense of a change or development in mass consciousness. This started with Occupy and was evidenced by its slogan we are the 99%, which tens of millions of people immediately identified with.

Both the Sanders and Ocasio campaigns were extremely aggressive and loud in identifying with the working class and emphasizing it through things like the contributions policy.

I know some comrades think that all this is a fake and a fraud, there is just an illusion of class identity. From my point of view that is really irrelevant in addressing the question of tactics. I think the clearest explanation of the right tactics is Engels's famous letter to Sorge about the Henry George candidacy for mayor of New York.

But you might object, what good is Engels's advise if we're dealing with a complete counterfeit? Well, here is how his letter starts: "The Henry George boom has of course brought to light a colossal mass of fraud and I am glad I was not there." He says it was not just a fraud but a colossal one so revolting that he was glad to be thousands of miles away.

So did he proclaim it a catastrophic setback for the class? Actually, quite the opposite. The next sentence after the one I just quoted says "But despite it all it has been an epoch-making day."

Not just a relative advance considering the nefarious circumstances but "epoch making." A "colossal mass of fraud" that was a world historic advance for the working class.

The next couple of sentences are the famous ones about how "the Germans" in the United States treat Marxism as a dogma instead of a guide to action. And then he presents the following approach to tactics. At the heart of it is how to deal with the contradiction between workers realizing they need to come together as a political force but beginning to do so around "a colossal mass of fraud."
The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first programme of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement--no matter in what form so long as it is only their own movement--in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.
Comrades will object that in no way can the Sanders campaign or Ocasio's be equated with Henry George's, there are no ongoing institutions, no mechanisms for discussion and decision making etc. But I think here it is very important to not project our understanding of "party" to what Marx and Engels were talking about in the 1840s when they first laid out their views.

If you re-read the Communist Manifesto which is where the whole concept of the centrality of the party in the worker's movement is first thoroughly dealt with, you will see there are references to concrete, existing parties in the last chapter. They mention two parties as worker's parties: the Chartists and the U.S. Agrarian Reformers. That last one is a somewhat mystifying reference because it is not exactly clear who they're referring to or what information they had that led them to call it a working class party.

But the Chartists Marx and Engels did know very well, and that was not a "party" as we would use the word today but a movement around a petition called the "People's Charter." There were various versions of the petition but the central and most important demands were all around elections: universal male suffrage, no property requirement to run for parliament, equal population in parliamentary districts, payment for MP's so workers could also be MP's, and other democratic reforms.

Chartism did not have a continuous national structure or leadership though there were a couple of national conferences. There were two big signature collecting campaigns and one or a couple big demonstrations. Some newspapers were associated with the movement but they belonged to individual publishers, not any collective body. I've not gone back to check the details, this is a recounting from memory, but the point is, this is something we would call a "movement" not "party." But it was generally recognized as representing the interests of the working class and presented an ambitious political program that was expected to shift the relationship of class forces greatly in favor of the workers.

The other "opposition parties" mentioned in Part IV seem to be mostly well defined and generally identified political trends but not structured organizations.

I think M&E's idea of "party" is a generalized, mass and cohered movement of the working class recognized as such, pushing for a broad, important series of policy changes or reforms in the political system. It does not necessarily imply a single national organization but it has to understand itself as a movement of the working class.

Notice in what I have quoted from very late (1886, almost four decades after the Manifesto), that Engels uses the terms movement and party interchangeably. Similarly, if you look at the Critique of the Gotha Programme, you'll see Marx referring to a program reflecting "the level of the party movement".

About a month after the letter to Sorge, Engels returns to the subject in a letter to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky. Writing about a preface to a U.S. reprinting of The Condition of the Working Class in England, he says:
 My preface will of course turn entirely on the immense stride made by the American working man in the last ten months, and naturally also touch H.G. [Henry George] and his land scheme. But it cannot pretend to deal exhaustively with it. Nor do I think the time has come for that. It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than "durch Schaden klug werden" [to learn by one's own mistakes].
Note he again talks about it as a movement even though focused in the electoral arena. That, among other reasons, because there were no structures, mostly just local candidates sponsored by labor councils.

I think the important thing in evaluating campaigns like Bernie's is not what ballot line they are using but how clearly they identify as a *different* current counterpoised to the neoliberal corporate democrats and how fully it breaks with the Democratic Party "machine" and instead helps create a parallel "countermachine."

There is an obvious disadvantage to this and that is that it is a fucking mess, where it is very difficult to establish a clear, distinct "brand identity." This is not due to people being wrong-headed about tactics but --to be brutally frank-- the extreme political backwardness of the working class. This problem can't be solved by preaching at the class. Many of us on Marxmail were involved in such efforts for many years, and the actual results were nil.

So for right now, this tactical approach isn't a choice, an option, but a fact. It's what people have responded to, identified with.

The alternative to what Bernie did would have been another Nader-style and Nader-size campaign. But if anything should have been learned from so many efforts like that over the years, is that people do not understand the need to break with the two party system. And we should take Engels's advice: "do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn."

I know some people have an almost religious bedrock opposition to having anything to do with anyone on a Democratic Party ballot line. It is unclean, a capitalist party, a bourgeois party, and we will catch leprosy if we touch it. We must break with bourgeois politics.

But all electoral politics are a bourgeois fraud, the anarchists are completely right about this, our disagreement with them is about tactics. And the biggest fraud of all is the United States, where the guy who lost the election is in the White House and the fewer that 600,000 people in Wyoming have the same weight in the Senate as the nearly 40 million in California.

We have more than a half million elected positions, but in reality most are not really elected, but in essence appointed by the dominant political mafia in the given area. And the few that are really elected are often sold to the highest bidder, although there is also the modality of the capitalists buying both candidates through a system of legalized bribery known as campaign financing and then letting the people choose which one is better at fooling them.

And when we get it all staffed, we have a multi-level government with overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities. You have a problem with your kids school but the principal says, you have to deal with the board of Education on that one. The Board of Education tells you really it's the state government that can solve that, and when you get there they'll say, not its the feds, who in turn tell you that it's a local problem, and send you back to the board of ed who shrug their shoulders and say, OK if you feel that way, sue us. Which you do, starting in the local state courts, fighting appeals and re-appeals, and then perhaps having to take it to a District (federal) court, Circuit court of appeals, and the Supreme Court.

Taken as a whole, this system is, to put it mildly, a complete bourgeois fraud, a total fake. There is not an ounce of democracy in it. So for those worried about dirtying their hands with the Democratic Party, I'd say don't worry, because when you get involved in electoral politics, you dive head first into a pool full of shit. And 99% of socialist and "independent" election campaigns don't say word one about this fraud. Nor should they go preaching about it, except in very specific and limited ways (like the Electoral College). Because people will only begin to get it when there is an alternative.

A closely related point that I want to highlight is program. I believe there is an error in the post WWII 20th Century American Marxist Left and especially the Trotskyists, of fetishizing the formal, written "program," making "programmatic clarity" a central concern. I think it is clear beyond question that Marx and Engels stressed that the working class coming together as a class, cohering, was way above program, or, if you prefer, that was the essence of their program. The demands and measures would be worked out over time through practice as the political class movement developed.

The passage I already quoted from the second letter reflects that. But later on in that letter Engels expresses himself even more clearly;
What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level.... But above all give the movement time to consolidate, do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn.... The very first attempt--soon to be made if the movement progresses--to consolidate the moving masses on a national basis will bring them all face to face, Georgites, K. of L., Trade Unionists, and all; and if our German friends by that time have learnt enough of the language of the country to go in for a discussion, then will be the time for them to criticise the views of the others.
It is striking that Engels calls for subordinating programmatic clarity to the development of the actual movement. He says fighting around those things now will only get in the way.

But I think the most important point for us right now is where he calls on the followers of M&E in the United States to "go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such."

You might object, that was then there barely was a working class in a very few countries, the movement was in diapers. We are way past that stage. But I believe we are exactly at that stage, in diapers. It is very important to understand that before this decade there has not been a working class movement worthy of the name in this country that anyone on Marxmail could have experienced. Unless you were born before World War II.

 From my point of view, the real questions to be discussed are:
  •  whether there is really a radicalization of the working class, developing class consciousness; 
  • whether this found expression in Bernie's campaign (however mistakenly) simply because he stressed the class character of his candidacy so much. 
  • whether this then transferred over into the growth of the DSA, in other words, whether the DSA is pulling people in by its efforts or whether they are being pushed in, so to speak, by the growing desire for activity and political organization that is a product of the radicalization. 
  • and finally, whether it is also finding expression in campaigns like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's.
I want to make clear that to the degree what I wrote could be taken to imply that I think that Bernie's campaign, the DSA, and Ocasio-Cortez's campaign were fake, frauds, etc., I did so only for arguments sake. I was saying that even if they were as bad as some comrades claim or as what Engels said about the Henry George movement, I would still insist that this is the right approach. But in reality I do not believe any of those terms or phrases apply.

Joaquín


Monday, August 20, 2018

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, superstar

Yes she's young, charismatic, boricua, bilingual, sharp as a scalpel and sassy as hell. But what's made her a superstar is not just that, but that she's got class. Working class.

"Una de las nuestras," one of ours, said a campaign button
Not her roots or her job, because it's not about her, it's about us. Occupy Wall Street was the first step, and perhaps the most important. "We are the 99%" showed that the working people are realizing that we are a "we," we have to defend our own interests against the very rich and their well-paid lackeys.

That realization has now led to an explicitly political movement  of working people determined to create our own political instrument, because both parties have been dominated by the interests of the 1%. Our working class political movement is what has made her a superstar.

Alexandria Ocasio may have contested a Democratic primary, but she refused to act like a mainstream Democratic candidate, begging for Corporate and Lobbyist money, or even hitting up her friends on Wall Street for that $2,700 maximum donation. But even if she had such friends it would not have done her any good once they saw her campaign based on a guaranteed job, a living wage of $15 an hour, Medicare for all and tuition-free access to higher education.

"Women like me aren't supposed to run for office. I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family: mother from Puerto Rico, father from the South Bronx." That's how her campaign video starts, and not because some consultant's idea played well with a focus group.

She wrote the script herself after two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Detroit that started a video production company heard about her and offered their help. The streets are the ones she's walked, the people campaigning aren't actors shot on carefully prepared sets, they just shot her and her supporters as they really are.

It is that honesty and transparency that found fertile soil among regular people who have realized we need our own people in Congress, not "friends" who spend hours every day dialing for dollars.

Columnist Kruta terrified by right to healthcare & living wage
And that response is scaring the shit out of the right. Daily Caller columnist and Fox News contributor Virginia Kruta was aghast in a piece she wrote a couple of weeks ago about an Ocasio speech in support of another candidate.

"I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be ... to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education," Kruta wrote.

Worse, "I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a 'living wage' was a human right." Fortunately, her faith in "our nation’s founding and its history" reminded her that in America, we still have the right to be ignorant, sick and impoverished.

Nevertheless, Kruta had her picture taken with the devil herself, "in part to remind myself of that time I crashed a rally headlined by a socialist, but also in part to remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, go I."
--José G. Pérez
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Monday, August 6, 2018

What's behind the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America?

On July 26, National Public Radio's website ran a story, "What You Need To Know About The Democratic Socialists Of America." A week earlier, Morning Edition had aired a substantial segment on the group, "Getting To Know The DSA." Two days earlier, CNN had taken its turn with "'We want to democratize everything': Inside DSA's rise with its leader."

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez
I think these and similar articles should lead socialists and activists in social movements to think about this: the DSA is closing in on 48,000 members. What's up with that?

Because a group with 4,000 members is double the size of one with 2,000 members, and one with 8,000 four times as large. But a group with 48,000 members is not just 24 times larger: it is a qualitatively different phenomenon.

DSA began to grow with the Bernie Sanders campaign, but membership really took off after November 2016. Responsible news organizations suggest it had started at around 5,000 and reached 32,000 by the end of 2017.

In 2018 it was 35,000 by April, then 39,000 on June 25, the day before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory. A month later, on July 25, the National Office tweeted that the number had reached 47,000, including the  more than 1,000 people had signed up the day after her victory.

That this was due to the extensive and very favorable coverage of a young, articulate and charismatic Latina woman who had just sent the fourth-ranking House Democrat packing is obvious. But it is only part of the story.

The other part is that there were tens of thousands of people who saw that coverage and thought to themselves, "I should join that group," and 8,000 who actually went to the web site or got a hold of someone and joined.

This is a social and political phenomenon, not just individual decisions. A new mass socialist movement is emerging in this country, and that is a clear sign of increasing class consciousness among working people.

For many decades until the economic crash of 2008, there was no working class movement worthy of the name in the United States. By that I mean a grass-roots movement of working people, comparable to the Black movement or women's movement. I specifically do not mean the (mostly ossified) "organized labor movement" inherited from the 1930s.

Think about it: for decades there has been mass consciousness about the need to fight sexism, racism, ableism, etc., but nobody talked about "classism." People got denounced for "playing the race card" but not for "playing the class card." Gays were accused of practicing "identity politics" but who ever heard criticism of workers as such for indulging in "identity politics"?

That absence of the working class as a self-and-other recognized political force changed in 2011. The Occupy movement with its central slogan, "we are the 99%," was the first time in decades that there was a mass expression of at least rudimentary class consciousness. And look at the polls from the fall of 2011 that asked about Occupy and its issues. The movement immediately had the sympathy and support of tens of millions of people, and all it had done was to raise the flag of the working class and copy that old movie Network by shouting, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

As soon as Occupy happened, mainstream political discourse got flipped on its head. Before, during the summer, there was much hand wringing about the deficit and the regretful suggestions that it would be necessary to reign in "entitlements" (cut Social Security and Medicare benefits).

A month afterwards (mostly empty) rhetoric about growing inequality was the talk of the town on the Potomac.

How could this happen so quickly? Because Occupy was a seed crystal dropped into a super-saturated solution of class grievance and resentment. Once it jelled,  it became a powerful political factor, even though the Occupy encampments themselves were dismantled in a couple of months.

Confirmation that working class consciousness is re-emerging in the United States and especially among younger workers came in the form of the Sanders campaign. He began very modestly on a quest to raise issues important for working people. People said he was a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, thinking they were giants.

And then the giants began to fall.

In a few weeks in the summer of 2015, Bernie went from being a crank to a serious candidate and then to a rock star who could fill  to overflowing the largest venues holding thousands of people.

That came overwhelmingly from below and from millennials. The Sanders campaign had an extremely sharp class edge, not just in "fight for $15" or "Medicare for all," but in the $27 shtick. That said this campaign is the property of the working people -- PAC money and the corporate control that comes with it not allowed.

And Sanders insisted in every speech that he could not change things. Only we could do so. This movement was of the working people, by the working people and for the working people.

The current DSA boom marks a third moment in this re-emergence of class consciousness. It is rooted in the change in the consciousness of masses of people captured in the slogan "we are the 99%." But it also marks a step forward over Occupy and even Sanders.

That because the DSA is an ongoing organization, one that is functioning at both the local and national levels, and one that is clearly a distinct political option, something like the tea party or its organized expression in Congress, the freedom caucus.

It is, in essence, the seedling of a worker's party, a class party, a self-and-other identified political expression or representation of a social force.

I know a lot of people, and especially long-time friends and comrades from the 20th Century left, will disagree violently with what I just said. They will be outraged that I could say a group that electorally operates almost exclusively within the Democratic Party is in any way, shape or form a workers party even in embryo. That the essence of a workers party is a break with bourgeois parties like the Democrats.

That deserves a very detailed discussion but for now, just three points:

First, lot of people misunderstand what Marx and Engels meant by the word "party." It was not necessarily and mostly not an electoral machine or identity, but rather a party in a more general sense, a side in a dispute or argument, like a party to a lawsuit. The Chartist Movement, which Marx said was the world's first working class party, resembled Occupy Wall Street much more than anything we would call a political party.

Second, you have to approach things dialectically. There is an obvious, blatant contradiction in a workers party gestating inside a bourgeois party. The role of socialists is not to denounce the existence of a contradiction but to work in and through it to a resolution.

Third, the mechanics of American elections are such that it is very difficult to break out of a two-party ballot line dynamic. But there is today a very clear recognition generally that there are different parties within the two major parties, for example the Tea Party and its associated "freedom caucus" in the House of Representatives. And there is a developing understanding of the two major "parties" as really alliances or blocs of different factions, and coverage of the different groups that are vying for domination of the alliance (and at this stage especially the republicans).

Past all that, there is something much more basic. We have to accept reality, that things have happened in  certain ways and forms and work from there, rather than insisting and demanding that they should have been some other way.

So never in a million years would I have arranged to have the beginnings of a reawakening of working class consciousness take the form of the Occupy movement, but that is what happened.

The same for Bernie. I would not have dreamed that a big step towards establishing the identity of the working class as a distinct political factor would be within the oldest bourgeois party in the world. But there it was.

And, finally, DSA. It does no good to insist it shouldn't have been what was regarded as a very mild and staid multi-tendency group with very loose organizational structures that would begin to grow into a real beginning of a mass socialist organization.

Yet IMHO, reality has already settled the question. This is the main form through which the process that began with Occupy is finding an outlet for right now.

This, in my view, also settles the question of the DSA's electoral tactics, at least at this point. Some 8,000 people joined in the last month, overwhelmingly because they identified with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory in New York and the approach that lay behind it. I feel safe in saying this is what they want to do: create two, three, many "Alexandrias."

And even if you think this is a bad idea, if you are a Marxist, a materialist and not an idealist, a preacher from some sect, you don't have a choice.

You have got to go through the experience with working people who are moving towards class political consciousness in this way, and then draw lessons on the basis of the common, lived experience. Engels once made the point that it is worse than useless to try to cram down people's throats things they can't possibly know for themselves right now, but will accept readily enough down the road. Worse than useless because you will only isolate yourself and not be heard when the time comes too draw the lessons.
--Jose G. Perez