Lenin was not a 'Leninist': Critical Comments on Democratic Centralism

This article dates from 2005. It is a polemic against just a few sentences of a document put out by a current in the socialist organization Solidarity that I had been part of. But it was the result of three and a half decades of experience, including 15 years when I was a member of a  "democratic-centralist" group, the Socialist Workers Party. For almost all of that time I functioned as part of the national offices of that movement, and for a majority of the time as part of its national leadership,  including several years as the editor of its Spanish-language magazine. 

I am republishing the article because I believe the issues it addresses are relevant to the upcoming convention in August of the Democratic Socialists of America, and in particular to the functioning of a grouping called the Spring Caucus. Some of its leaders recently announced its formal dissolution, but in fact, it seems to have split more than dissolved. 

I am more convinced than ever of the political conclusions of this article even though in some details it is inaccurate. In particular I refer repeatedly to a "Bolshevik Party." I think the writings of Lars T. Lih have shown very convincingly that Lenin and his friends never considered themselves to be a separate party, but rather a wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. This, however, only strengthen my argument. 

The article originally appeared under the pen-name "Joaquín Bustelo" in Solidarity's discussion bulletin and the Marxism email list moderated by "The Unrepentant Marxist" Louis Proyect. I have added in 2019 a few comments to clarify or correct the original text, always [in brackets]. In addition, I have supplied links to the writings I refer to where available. 

There are several things that I disagree with in the “Draft Call for Refounding Solidarity'” platform that has been presented by 21 comrades. For the moment, however, I want to focus on just one aspect of their document, their organizational proposal, and in reality, only a few sentences, their general motivation.

And I am going to draw this out quite a bit because I think it is a very important subject that has been a focus of much informal discussion in Solidarity as long as I’ve been a member and it deserves a thorough airing.

My thesis is, quite simply, that Lenin wasn’t a “Leninist.” The pre-1917 Bolsheviks were not, as far as he understood things “a party of a new type” in the sense-that this phrase has been used on the left for decades.

Instead, the “Leninist Party” model arose after the revolution and had two main drivers, the first, trying to spread the revolution by copying the Russians, and the second being the need of the emerging Soviet bureaucracy to silence criticism and shut down independent political organization. The end result was a harmful cult of the organization that Lenin never shared.

I have held views roughly similar to what I outline here since the mid-1980s, when I resigned from the SWP. Many years later with the Internet I became acquainted with others who held similar or parallel views, and undoubtedly that influenced what I say about these questions today.

I would recommend two articles especially, “The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party,’” by Hal Draper and Peter Camejo’s "Return to Materialism.” Both can be found by Googling the names, and in Draper’s case, it is useful to also read his earlier writings on sects, which are in the same archives as the article I mention above. [I've now provided the links.]

The comrades write in their “Draft Call for Refounding Solidarity”:

The Solidarity Founding Statement correctly affirms the need to build an organization that is democratic both in making and in implementing decisions. In the tradition of the communist and Trotskyist movements from which Solidarity derives, democratically making and implementing decisions is called democratic-centralism. Many Solidarity comrades, put off by caricatures of democratic-centralism they experienced, saw or heard about, now reject the term. What matters is not the term but the concept: a collective commitment to carrying out the decisions that we make as a group.

I think the comrades are creating confusion with this. “Democratic centralism” as it has been understood and practiced on the left for nearly 90 years should be rejected. I understand this would be unacceptable to the paleo-Trotskyist component of this grouping, and of Solidarity as a whole, but nevertheless, it is the important to reject it and say so openly.

Peter Camejo

It is true that Solidarity “derives” “from” “the tradition of the communist and Trotskyist movements,” but it does so in a specific way. It is a break from that tradition, a negation of significant aspects of it, especially on the organization question.

I disagree with the comrades in trying to differentiate between “caricatures of democratic-centralism” and the democratic centralism “of the communist and Trotskyist movements from which Solidarity derives,” the former being bad, the latter good.

I do not think it is possible to just cleave off democratic centralism from this tradition as an organizational mechanism (and in reality a whole series of organization concepts that have to do with a group’s concept of its relationship to other groups, mass movements and its class) and not bring with it its bosom buddy, the “Leninist” party.

I hold that the entire tradition that starts with the Comintern is off-base. And especially as it applies to advanced capitalist countries today, the central concept of “building a Leninist Party” is wrong. It is wrong because it starts off on the wrong foot, viewing the party as the embodiment of an idea instead of as an expression of the actual movement of a class. In our case, we do not have now and have not had the requisite conscious class movement on a mass scale for many, many decades. [That was in 2005. I believe that now a genuine class movement is emerging.]

Cominternist party building was an attempt to replicate the experience of the Russian Revolution just as the countless guerrilla groups in Latin America in the 1960’s were an attempt to replicate the Cuban Revolution. Both were undertaken with very immediate, short term expectations of results. Both attempts failed, both in the years immediately following the Russian and Cuban revolution and on a larger time scale.

By now, after nearly nine decades, we must draw the conclusion that if it were possible to make a revolution by following any variant of the “classic” Russian model, it would have happened. This has been a nearly century-long experiment, a test of practice under all conceivable conditions and with thousands of attempts and more variations on the theme than even a Mozart could compose.

We should not be afraid to draw the conclusions. If The Cubans could conclude after a decade or less of experience that guerrilla warfare as a strategy or “method” (as Che called it) had proved wrong, then we should also have the courage to state the plain conclusion that has been demonstrated by nearly a century of experience: the Zinovievist strategy of building “democratic-centralist” “Leninist parties” has also shown itself to be wrong.

To those who would say “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” I would respond this isn’t a baby. There’s no such thing as an 80-some-year-old baby. This is a corpse. It is time to bury it.

To keep on doing the same tiling in the expectation of getting a different result, I read somewhere once, is a definition of insanity.

It may be objected that the Leninism the comrades want (or the “democratic centralism”) is the one originally practiced by Lenin and his friends, and not the one that came afterwards with Zinoviev and the Comintern.

But during the entire time he was building the Bolshevik current and then party, Lenin never once claimed he was doing anything particularly significant or different or innovative on the organizational front. And for most of that time he identified with the “left” (in reality, as it turned out, centrist) wing of German social democracy led by Kautsky. And even as late as 1915 or 1916 he was defending the “centralism” (his word) of the German Social Democracy, and whether and to what degree he later differentiated Bolshevik centralism from reformist and Kautskyite German Social Democratic centralism is unclear to me.

At any rate, what is clear from this record is that Lenin did not view himself as having a separate, distinctive, counterpoised “theory of organization” from the rest of the European socialist movement and specifically its flagship party. This was true for the entire period before the Bolshevik party was in power, or at the very least, for the big majority of that period, until well into World War I.

[Actually, he never changed his mind. See Chapter IV of his last major work, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, where he says:

History, incidentally, has now confirmed on a vast and world-wide scale the opinion we have always advocated, namely, that German revolutionary Social-Democracy ... came closest to being the party the revolutionary proletariat needs in order to achieve victory. Today, in 1920, after all the ignominious failures and crises of the war period and the early post-war years, it can be plainly seen that, of all the Western parties, the German revolutionary Social-Democrats produced the finest leaders, and recovered and gained new strength more rapidly than the others did.] 

Even his famous dispute with the other Russian current closest to Bolshevism, the (pre-1917) Trotskyists, focused not on the organizational norms or functioning of the party, but on whether a common workers party could be built together with the Mensheviks. And, to bring that sort of differentiation to our days, it would be the same as a dispute on whether we could build a common organization with those, like the CPUSA, who have a strategic orientation to reforming the Democratic Party or organizing within it. [Given the experience of Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign and subsequent ones, while I continue to reject strategies like "reforming the Democratic Party," I think experience shows that "organizing within it" is a different matter, and worth pursuing.]

There have been efforts to depict this Lenin-Trotsky pre-1917 dispute about being in essence a dispute on the party, that Trotsky didn’t “get” Lenin’s concept of what kind of party to build. I think this is wrong.

It was about the politics, specifically, political independence from the bourgeoisie. Trotsky was mushy-soft on this being a core principle of the party, a line of demarcation between those who fit and those who didn’t.

The “principle” of “Democratic Centralism” is easy enough to define: democracy in decision making, unity in action. The difficulty lies in defining just what “unity in action” consists of for microscopic propaganda groups that are not really organically rooted in the working class, i.e. are not composed of the leaders or advanced elements that have emerged out of the actual class and social movements.

Typically, an attempt to “apply” democratic centralism to propaganda groups leads to everyone being forced to defend the common line “in public,” because in reality propaganda is the “action” that such groups engage in, mostly. Even the “actions” of their members inside unions and so on have mostly a propagandist’s significance at this stage. They seek to model a different approach to union leadership and activism.

For a mass workers party such as the RSDLP and later the Bolsheviks, democratic centralism means something quite different. For one thing, it has real feedback from its organic relationship to its class. A propaganda league and a mass party are qualitatively different kinds of organizations.

And if you read the actual debates and polemics where the issue of democracy and centralism in party functioning come up, you will see they have little applicability to our situation. The RSDLP was a mass parry from its foundation, a party recognized by a broad advanced layer of its class as its political expression. Many of the disputes have to do with election tactics and Lenin’s insistence that the RSDLP and later the Bolsheviks act as one force in the electoral arena, that to allow organizing and agitation by party members against the chosen tactic would completely undercut the effectiveness of the party among the masses that it sought to win over.

We don’t have those kinds of problems. We don’t have an advanced layer of working class fighters because we have no conscious class movement from which such a layer would arise. We are not a party, we are at best partly a propaganda league partly, partly an association of circles of activists, and the idea that we can obviate the distinction and function as if we were a party is wrong. Scale does matter, quantity does change into quality, an embryo of a few hundred cells looks nothing like a fully grown human being. And if it did look like a human at that stage, what would emerge in nine months would be a monster, not anything recognizably human at all.

One can, of course, say that “democratic centralism,” or at least the centralism part of it, is a necessary part of the functioning of any voluntary group, and to the degree the group is democratic, then it is “democratic centralist.” For example, union members vote on a contract and if the majority approves, then the contract is accepted, and it applies to all. A girl scout troop sells cookies and if the majority votes to use the money to travel to some event, rather than buy new uniforms, that’s the way it is.

But if this is all that is involved in what is being put to us by the “Refounding Solidarity” comrades, then it is bizarre to appeal to the Communist and Trotskyist tradition.

That tradition has associated with it a plethora of intellectual strait-jackets, gag rules, norms about when freedom of speech is in order (for a couple of months even’ couple of years, at least in theory!) and not in order (the rest of the time), and demonstrated inability to contain even minor differences within an organization.

The specifically Trotskyist side of it has been plagued by splits, expulsions and the multiplication of sects, things which have degenerated more than once into spying on comrades, using other police-state tactics, goon squads and in the case of the Stalinists even murder.

And there is no basis for separating the specifically Trotskyist tradition from the rest of it. History has shown that there is as little room even in the “healthiest” Trotskyist Leninist Party for a diversity of views as there is among the pro-Moscow Stalinists or Maoists, or as close to as makes no serious difference.

I always remember one recurring type of incident from my days in the SWP leadership that symbolizes for me one of the biggest problems with what’s come to be called Leninism. And that is when some big development would take place, and younger comrades —and disproportionately women comrades— would ask me what “we” thought of it. It happened time and again, around the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the overthrow of the Grenadian revolutionary government by the Coard faction (yes, in the name of “democratic centralism”) the Peruvian embassy “crisis” in Cuba and the subsequent Mariel boatlift, the Iranian Revolution. What do “we” think of it. That was the question. Acceptance of whatever truth was about to be revealed was assumed, automatic, unquestioned.

Moreover, left groups —especially, it seems, from the Trotskyist tradition, but not just— seem to have analyzed just about every conceivable political and social phenomenon save one: the marked tendency of “Leninism” as it has been handed down to us to produce splinters, sects and cults which rival even the most bizarre religions in their outlandishness.

Where does this come from? I believe it comes from the cult of the organization, of “The Leninist Party,” which is not just a question of how a group describes itself but of its social and political practice, how it relates to the political environment around it.

Even organizations that specifically and consciously disclaim being “the vanguard” and so on display in their interactions with other groups on the left and social/mass movement organizations, as well as through their obsessive self-absorption and in-groupishness, that they are infected with the vanguardist virus. Theirs is a Copernican system with —oh happy coincidence— their particular group as the sun at the center of it. And it becomes especially comical when you hear the comrades maintain that theirs is a really good group because they don’t have vanguardist pretensions.

However, the reality is that they may have recognized, in theory, that they’re not “the” vanguard but their practice continues to be infused with a vanguardist spirit, and especially in their relations to social movement-type organizations.

That these relationships are in fact hierarchical, conceived of as between “higher” or “more advanced” forms or levels of organization and the rest, rather than horizontal, can be easily demonstrated.

The (in this case) supposedly “non vanguardist” democratic-centralist group accesses in an unrestricted way the internal affairs of other organizations. For the “democratic centralist” group, every intimate detail of the life and discussions of other organizations is an open book to it, but any inquiry, sometimes even for the most trivial detail of the life of the democratic centralist group will be rebuffed. That is what I mean by a hierarchical relationship and that is at the heart of the Comintern-Zinovievist “democratic centralist” tradition, that is what makes it different from the “democratic centralism” of, for example, a chess club.

(I want to point out that obviously this has a relation with my idea posted to the NC list a few months back for an open preconvention discussion, and report, that I’ve sent the convention planning committee a proposal along these lines, and will send it or whatever variant emerges from the process to the whole NC at least a couple of weeks before our upcoming meeting so comrades have a chance to think about it before possibly being asked to vote on it.)

One of the surprising and pleasant discoveries I’ve made about Solidarity in the few years that I have been a member is that it respects the autonomy and organizational integrity of the other groups its members participate in. In the year I was assigned to the Political Committee, not once did we receive a report from Chris K. about the internal affairs of a publication he works with, nor David F. about discussions or divisions in the ATC editorial Board, nor from (in the months she was on the PC with me), from Theresa on the board meetings of an antiracist network she helps to organize.

I say I was surprised not because I had any conscious expectation in this regard when I joined Solidarity, I’m pretty sure I hadn’t focused on it on that level of organization functioning. But it is an important thing to keep in mind, for it is the antitheses of the specifically Zinovievist or Cominternist “democratic centralism,” what the “Refounding Solidarity” group calls “the tradition of the communist and Trotskyist movements.”

As some comrades can probably tell, the “refounding solidarity” grouping is essentially the “Twenty is Enough” caucus that came together around the time of the last convention and whose members started functioning as an organized caucus in the NC and perhaps other places (the summer school planning?) following that, convention.

I withdrew from it when it turned out that I had a sharply different idea of how the caucus should function in relation to Solidarity as a whole in terms of openness and transparency than the other comrades did. And I believe this question of Zinovievist “democratic centralism” and the hierarchy of relations implicit in it was part of that differentiation.

I call it “Zinovievist” because Zinoviev was the Bolshevik leader most identified with codifying it and spreading the model on the “party of a new type” around the world as head of the Communist International, and also because it is baby-simple to demonstrate that, whatever it is that made the Bolsheviks a distinctive or unique party, it was not that it was built with a conscious model of a party of a new type in mind and in this sense Lenin’s party wasn’t a “Leninist” party.

As an experiment, I googled “party of a new type” (the catch phrase is often attributed to Lenin) on marxists.org to try to find when he had said it and how-he used it. I found dozens of references, especially in the prefaces and footnotes to Lenin’s Collected Works, asserting that this or that passage was an example of Lenin explaining his original contribution of a “party of a new type” and also among a wide array of latter-day “Leninists,” (in the U.S., for example, encompassing a spectrum from James P. Cannon to Carl Davidson.)

Yet Google found only one place where Lenin himself used the expression, in a letter to Alexandra Kollontai from mid-March 1917 as she was about to return to Russia. The main body of the letter is an outline of some of the main ideas of the April Theses, and a request that she acquaint several comrades with a draft of a set of theses about the political situation in Russia (which I assume was a draft of the April theses). The phrase occurs in a PS, which I quote in full:

P.S. I am afraid that there will now be an epidemic in Petersburg “simply” of excitement, without systematic work on a party of a new type. It must not be a la ‘”Second International”. Wider! Raise up new elements! Awaken a new initiative, new organisations in all sections, and prove to them that peace will be brought only by an armed Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, if it takes power.

Lenin is talking about the situation in Russia a few days after the victory of the February Revolution and the removal of the monarchy. What is striking here is that the main things we associate with “a party of a new type” simply aren’t part of Lenin’s use of the phrase, his only use of it that I could find. Here clearly the contrast is with the party of the “old” type, and the text suggests to me what he means is one based on a narrow aristocracy of labor, an issue which Lenin had written on in previous months (see, for example, his article on “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism” written in October of 1916). He wanted the Bolsheviks to go out and organize and draw into the organization much broader layers of working people than previously. That’s how I read it.

In the Collected Works preface to “What is to be done?” the phrase “party of a new type” appears in quotation marks, as if it had been drawn from the text that follows. But it isn’t there in Lenin’s text. To make extra sure that some typo or trivial word change hadn’t kept me from finding the reference, I downloaded and searched the PDF version from marxists.org for the phrases “new type” “new kind” and a couple of other variants. Still nothing, but it did lead me to read what the introduction says, which is that Lenin’s spiel about a “party of a new type” in WITBD “is the origin of Lenin’s famous theory of the Party as ‘vanguard of the proletariat.'” So I searched the PDF for that phrase. Yep, you guessed it. Despite the use of quotation marks by the authors of the introduction, I couldn’t find that phrase or any similar one with the word “vanguard” in it in the pamphlet.

Googling “vanguard of the proletariat” on Marxists.org produced strikingly different results. There are a number of references by Lenin to the RSDLP or social democrats as the vanguard of the proletariat. As there are by Luxembourg, Kautskv, and others, from around the same time (1904-1908 in the references I saw, but I checked only a small fraction, only enough to satisfy myself that I could reliably and factually report that the idea that the revolutionary workers party is the “vanguard of the proletariat” was not at all an original one of Lenin’s).

And actually I knew this would be the result before doing the search, because I know where Lenin got it, which is the same place where Kautsky and everyone else found it, and that is in the second chapter of the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

The Communists … are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The idea of this special role of the communists in the broader working class movement comes, not from Lenin originally, but from Marx and Engels, and they were only modifying and updating concepts that were current among revolutionaries of their time and before them. But I must confess that my most favorite way of expressing the idea is the “from below” way that Marx and Engels chose — “that section which pushes forward all others.”

It is simply not true that Lenin set out with some plan for a “party of a new type,” just as it is not true that Fidel in 1956 carried out the Granma expedition based on the idea that a guerrilla foco would gradually change subjective conditions in Cuba to make revolution possible, which is the theses Regis Debray presents in Revolution in the Revolution. The development of the Bolshevik Party and the July 26 Movement and their roles in the political lives of the two countries were very complex, multidimensional processes which were later reduced to two-dimensional caricatures.

I engage in this historical digression for a reason. And that is to demonstrate how little foundation there is for the claim that Lenin set about building a “party of a new type” after realizing there was a need for a “vanguard of the proletariat.” Lenin’s idea was pretty much for a standard-issue Social Democratic party adapted to Russian conditions, which, like social democratic parties everywhere, would draw together the most advanced and conscious layers of the proletariat.

Now one very important thing to note about Marx and Engel’s conception of the Communist Party as a leading force in the working class struggle is that this did not in the slightest cause them to hesitate in dissolving the organized expression of that party, the Communist League, only a few weeks after having written those lines in the Manifesto, when a revolution broke out in Germany.

Engels explains it very straightforwardly in his article “On the History of the Communist League,” simply as a function of political tasks. The old propaganda league was not suitable for the new conditions of Germany in revolution, a newspaper was a much better political instrument, so they wound up the underground League and founded the daily Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Let me repeat the central concept again, because this “Leninist Party” and “democratic centralism” thing has become a religious fetish: organizational forms flow from concrete political tasks; they are not something that can be derived from first principles or adapted from some ideal model. That is the materialist, Marxist way to approach the question. That is the way Marx and Engels approached it and Lenin, too, despite everything that was written after 1917.

And if you look at “What is to be Done” and other writings of Lenin around that time on the organization question, you will see that rather than an almost-impenetrable exposition of a “party of a new type” which he never makes explicit, what you find there is a very straightforward discussion of how to organize as a function of political tasks. Organization as a function of concrete tasks, and not as the embodiment of some ideal form, is precisely how Lenin approached the question.

Many of us among the older generations of Soli members were part of “Leninist” organizations previously. I’m sure I’m not the only one who read What Is To Be Done and other writings trying to decipher just what the essence of “the Leninist Strategy of Party Building” consisted of and being befuddled and somewhat chagrined that I could not understand or really see what all these other comrades said was in these writings by Lenin, the master plan for the perfect party.

As for Lenin’s “democratic centralism” as it was actually understood and practiced, remember that Zinoviev and Kamenev on the eve of October published an article opposing the insurrectionary course the Bolsheviks were on, and in fact breaking discipline outrageously by “outing” a Central Committee resolution winch had not been published, the resolution to prepare and carry out an insurrection. Lenin denounced them as scabs, and demanded that they be expelled, especially because they had done this in the non-party press.

Lenin’s arguments are striking because he doesn’t motivate the expulsion on the basis that a higher or special or different or “new type” of discipline is required in a revolutionary workers party: quite the contrary, his basic argument is that this is a violation of the discipline required in any workers organization, and rests his case almost exclusively on an analogy with a union that decides to prepare for a strike but keeps the exact nature of the action and its timing secret for tactical reasons.

He says a member of the union leadership who then “outs” the confidential decision by criticizing it in the bourgeois press is a scab, and that Zinoviev and Kamenev should be expelled for scabbing. It wasn’t the special discipline of a “party of a new type” but the quite ordinary discipline of a workers organization preparing a surprise blow against the bosses that Lenin insisted was applicable.

But also notable is this: Lenin couldn’t get a single other member of the Central Committee to support him on this, as far as I can determine. So ingrained was the individual freedom of comrades to write and say what they thought that Lenin simply had to drop it, stop referring to “Mr. Zinoviev” and “Mr. Kamenev” as ex-comrades, and resume normal party and leadership collaboration with them.

All this stuff about a distinctive Bolshevik “discipline” and “centralism” and so on that Lenin supposedly invented, and which all of us of a certain age were taught when we were young, were ex-post-facto attempts to turn the experience of the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution into a template for other parties, just as Che’s and then a little later Debray’s writings on guerrilla warfare as a strategy represented an attempt to do the same sort of thing with the Cuban experience.

That this would happen makes perfect sense. If you see a really successful strike, the first thing the practical trade-union militant is going to say is, “let’s talk to those sisters and brothers to see how they put it together and do the same thing here.” Of course. It is only natural for that to happen.

And all the more so in the situation in Europe as World War I was ending and just afterwards. Germany and other countries were rotten-ripe for revolution. All that was needed as a proletarian party that actually had the courage of its convictions, and Lenin and his friends did everything they could to turn the Comintern into a hothouse to force the maturation of such parties. Of course they did. If they had succeeded our historical discussions about that period today would include how Debs did as chairman of the first U.S. soviet government. They’d have to have been crazy not to try it.

All the comrades in the Russian leadership were involved, but the one most directly engaged wasn’t Lenin, who was a little busy what with the civil war and the situation in Russia, and whose health was not good, but by, ironically, the “scab” Zinoviev.

That’s where the “21 conditions” and all the rest of it come from. They bear roughly the same relation to the Russian Revolution as Regis Debray’s little book, Revolution in the Revolution —which systematically presents the foquista variant of the guerrilla strategy, the one Che tried to apply in Bolivia— did to the Cuban Revolution.

Except that the impact of what the Russians said and did was a thousand times greater, at the very least, than the impact of the Cubans. It was the dawn of the proletarian revolution, the beginning of the final conflict, and the guys who had actually done it were saying this was how to do it. The need for a Leninist Party became as unquestioned an article of faith as the class struggle itself for that generation of revolutionists and most of the succeeding ones.

The one Bolshevik leader who seemed to have a problem with at least the way this was being done was Lenin, In his next to last major public speech, having already suffered one stroke, with his health rapidly declining, he apologized to the delegates for only being able to take up a small part of what he had been assigned and would have wanted to discuss. Nevertheless, he considered the mistaken organizational norms being imposed on the parties of the Communist International important enough to include them in his report to the Fourth Congress in November of 1922, even though they had little relation to the immediate subject, which was “Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution.”

This is part of what he said:

At the Third Congress, in 1921, we adopted a resolution on the organisational structure of the Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their activities. The resolution is an excellent one, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point, but it is also its failing. It is its failing because I am sure that no foreigner can read it. I have read it again before saying this. In the first place, it is too long, containing fifty or more points. Foreigners are not usually able to read such things. Secondly, even if they read it, they will not understand it because it is too Russian. Not because it is written in Russian-it has been excellently translated into all languages—but because it is thoroughly imbued with the Russian spirit. And thirdly, if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out. This is its third defect. I have talked with a few of the foreign delegates and hope to discuss matters in detail with a large number of delegates from different countries during the Congress, although I shall not take part in its proceedings, for unfortunately it is impossible for me to do that. I have the impression that we made a big mistake with this resolution….

What exactly Lenin meant and how he intended to follow up on this we will never know, he was silenced before he ever had an opportunity to return to the subject. But the passage is certainly suggestive. And perhaps the most suggestive sentence is that even if the comrades from other countries could understand perfectly what they ought to do under the resolution, actually doing it was impossible.

We also know other things that were central concerns of Lenin in those waning days of his active political life, and may well have been related to his concerns about the Comintern’s national parties.

One was the nationalities policy which was chauvinist, what we would call in U.S. terms ‘”racist.” Another and very much related to it was the state apparatus, which he described in this way in the very last article he ever wrote:

Our state apparatus is so deplorable, not to say wretched, that we must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, bearing in mind that these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not yet been overcome, has not yet reached the stage of a culture, that has receded into the distant past. I say culture deliberately, because in these matters we can only regard as achieved what has become part and parcel of our culture, of our social life, our habits….

Let it be said in parentheses that we have bureaucrats in our Party offices as well as in Soviet offices.

This was not the first time that Lenin had addressed this subject. A few months earlier he had told the 11th party congress:

If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed.

This is a factor that is generally not taken into account in considering the political legacy of the early Comintern. We think of it as this institution that was being led by the party of luminaries like Lenin and Trotsky. But it was also a party that at that very moment, according to its central leader, was succumbing to a vastly superior culture, the monstrously backward feudal-bureaucratic culture of tsarism.

That this is precisely what was involved is proved beyond any doubt by the medieval barbarism and obscurantism of this emerging bureaucratic regime once it became fully consolidated. And that this was the very antithesis of Bolshevism is quite materially demonstrated by the bureaucracy’s felt need to murder the entire “old Bolshevik” layer in the mid-1930s.

So that almost from the first, what people like James P. Cannon, Max Schactman and other founding leaders of the specifically Trotskyist movement learned wasn’t the “pure” oversimplification of the Russian experience, but one already corrupted by what was in essence the tendency of the consolidating bureaucratic caste (although in this case it matters little to this argument whether you consider it a caste, class or something else) to shut down all independent political thought, freedom of speech and organization, etc., so that its usurpation would not be challenged.

That is why the appeal to return to the real, good, true “democratic centralism” of the Communist and Trotskyist tradition is mistaken. There is no such from the Comintern forward, in part because it was, from the outset, a two-dimensional caricature of a multidimensional process, and in part because from very early on, and increasingly in the very early 20’s, it was already combined with problems emerging from the growing bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet revolutionary’ process and how these then found expression even within the Bolshevik Party and its leadership.

You can see that clearly enough if you read Lenin’s Testament, dictated a few weeks after the report to the Comintern Congress that I quoted from, and his slamming Trotsky for being arrogant and too concerned with purely administrative matters and Stalin for his rudeness (in separate notes. Lenin also takes up the Georgian’s Great Russian chauvinism).

What this means is you have to go straight back to the source, to the original Bolshevik experience before the seizure of power to find the “pure,” uncontaminated and un-oversimplified “Leninism” and “Democratic Centralism.”

But when you try, you find things like a letter in English by Lenin to the secretary of the U.S. Socialist Propaganda League:

We defend always in our press the democracy in the party. But we never speak against the centralization of the party. We are for the democratic centralism. We say that the centralization of the German Labor movement is not a feeble but a strong and good feature of it. The vice of the present Social-Democratic Party of Germany consists not in the centralization but in the preponderance of the opportunists, which should be excluded from the party especially now after their treacherous conduct in the war.

The LCW says the letter was written no later than November, 1915, but apparently this is a mistake, as the group he addresses had not yet been organized and it is from a year later. No matter. Either way, it shows that at this late date Lenin drew no sharp differentiation (never mind proclaiming a “party of a new type”) between Bolshevism and the parties of the second international on the forms or principles of organization. The differentiation was about the politics.

The idea that the Bolsheviks and the Internationalists should construct parties “of a new type” isn’t just absent, it is inconsistent with what Lenin writes. Lenin did not believe he had a special theory of organization at all before the seizure of power.

Contrast that with what we have been taught, for example, SWP (US) founder James P. Cannon’s article commemorating the 50th anniversary of the October revolution:

The greatest contribution to the arsenal of Marxism since the death of Engels in 1895 was Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party as the organiser and director of the proletarian revolution. That celebrated theory of organisation was not, as some contend, simply a product of the special Russian conditions of his time and restricted to them. It is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the 20th century: the actuality of the workers’ struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end.

So unquestioned was it that this is what Lenin did that Cannon doesn’t even try to make this case. He takes it for granted that, in his audience, everyone understands at least this much, that this is really what Lenin was about, and goes from there.

But you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere in Lenin’s writings before October (and perhaps even afterwards) where he makes any such claim or any statements that can reasonably be interpreted to say he had a specific organizational theory that he viewed as new or unique.

The differences between him and the central leaders of German Social Democracy as far as he was concerned were political: he was interested in making a revolution and they were not. There are organizational implications that flow from this, of course, because organization is a function of concrete political tasks.

That is why also it is incorrect to point to the post-1917 Bolsheviks as the “real” Leninist model. The political tasks and demands placed on a party with state power, especially in the midst of a civil war, are very, very far removed from our situation, although in fact this is largely what happened, it was the post-1917 party that Comintern sections were modeled on, not the pre-1917 party.

Thus, for example, the tradition of “internal” discussion bulletins, large central committees with politburos above them. Until 1917 there was no Bolshevik DB, political questions were debated openly in the press (which is why Kamenev and Zinoviev got away with what they did in October 1917), and the central committee varied from a half dozen to a dozen people until shortly before October, with no smaller body delegated its powers.

So, there is no magic bullet, there is no secret sauce, there is no ritual incantation, there is no patented ingredient, there is no special formula from which answers to “the organization question” can be derived. The “Leninist Party” as a distinctive contribution that Lenin made to Marxism is a myth, and the specifically “Leninist” democratic centralism is what caused immense problems and proved wanting in the XXth Century.

What we can say is that how revolutionaries organize themselves is a function of the concrete political tasks and the circumstances that they find themselves in.

And, lest we forget, perhaps the most extraordinarily successful form of revolutionary organization that the world has ever been seen, judging by its impact was not the Bolshevik Party.

It was … a friendship. That between Marx and Engels.

Atlanta, November 7, 2005

On the now-dissolved Spring Caucus: Latinos, the DSA and intersectionality

This post was written looking forward to the DSA convention. Although finished, I had not made it public, unsure as to whether it would further complicate an unfortunate situation where some caucuses had been formed prematurely, leading others to also form caucuses in response. Now with the just-announced dissolution of the Spring Caucus, the situation has changed.

I joined one of the counter-caucuses to Spring, the Socialist Majority caucus. And a related reason for not posting this article is that Socialist Majority had decided that, as a group, it would limit itself  to presenting our own vision for the DSA as a multi-tendency organization, and not a critique of other viewpoints. 

"The Call" announces the dissolution of the Spring Caucus

So it had not discussed a lot of the ideas presented in this article, and, frankly, I would have been against the caucus or the DSA adopting them as such; at this stage of its development, the DSA should remain open and inclusive of many currents, including those of comrades who disagree with me, such as the authors of the two documents I criticize below.

How to achieve the unity necessary to maintain an organization? Striving to come to agreement on a concrete program of actions against the exploiters of working and oppressed peoples who rule this society. And these actions don't all necessarily have to be cast from the same mold. One of the fallacies of many groups in the 20th Century Left was a tendency to say that theirs was the one "correct" action or tactic in response to a given problem or situation. But on the contrary, I think what history shows is that a multiplicity of tactics is valid, and their impact can be not just additive but compounded. 

In their dissolution statement, "Setbacks and New Beginnings," several former Spring Caucus members say that among the "significant and unresolvable disagreements" among Spring's members was "how best to relate to anti-oppression mobilizations and demands," which was precisely the subject of my commentary. For that reason, I feel it is right to post my criticisms now, even though were I to write the article afresh, it would be different, as I hope it is now just a question of  discussion of strategic visions and not a subject of action by the organization. Below is the post written before this change.

*  *  *

[A Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America will be held in Atlanta at the beginning of August. As part of the lead up to the convention, I will be publishing some articles discussing issues before the convention. This article is in response to a current in the organization previously known as Momentum and Socialist Call and their official statements.]

I. The Latinx people disappear

An experiment: Take Spring’s “Where we Stand” and “Our strategy for 2019.”

Copy-paste those into a word processing program.

Search for “Latin” which will also pick up Latinx, Latino, Latina, latinoamericano. Follow up with Hispanic, Chicano, Spanish, Mexican, or any other term that refers to my community.

No mention: not a single one.

Officially, we are 18% of the U.S. population. We are 21% of the millennials. We are more than 25% of the post-millennials. People from Latinx communities make up 17% of the labor force.

This is not just about the Latinx community. Do the same sort of search for Blacks and you will come up with one mention in the two documents. Read the documents and you will see that women and other oppressed sectors are treated the same way.

For the Spring Caucus, racial, national and gendered oppression are mostly tricks by the ruling class.

Capitalism stokes racial, national, and gender oppression to keep working people divided and to justify exploitation. And by creating an intense competition for jobs, housing, and decent schools, the capitalist system pits workers against each other and makes prejudiced ideas seem plausible.

This is the most primitive sort of class reductionism. What does that term mean? It means that all other axis of oppression and exploitation are seen as springing from and being at the service of the extraction of surplus value from wage workers.

That is what is behind the caucus’s blindness to the working class as it really exists. The documents instead talk about an imaginary class made up of generic workers stripped of things like race, nationality, gender, age, legal status, etc.

II. Intersectionality

That sort of narrow, workerist vision affected various socialist groups in the 1960s and 1970s.

But against that view a new understanding began to emerge spurred by the actual movements of oppressed peoples and specific struggles: the Black movement as it developed out of and beyond the Civil Rights movement, the feminist movement, and so on.

In 1977, a group of Black feminists that had been working together for several years as the Combahee River Collective published a statement that presented an understanding of exploitation and oppression that today is now referred to as intersectionality.

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.

The Spring Caucus approach is a negation of intersectionality. As a result, they either reject the independent movements of specially oppressed people or consider them unimportant.

As part of our vision of winning a truly free society, socialists are committed to ending all forms of oppression. To reach this goal, we strive to build a united multiracial working-class movement.

This idea --that the instrument that is necessary for change is this "united multiracial working-class movement," is repeated time and again throughout their texts.

In the context of a document that does not even mention the word Latinx or any possible synonym or substitute, the inescapable conclusion is that the “united multiracial working-class movement” is counterpoised to existing Latinx movements and organizations.

III. The Latino Immigrant Rights Movement

One of the most advanced expressions of class (political) struggle in the United States has been the Latinx immigrant rights movement. It has a dual character because it is both a proletarian class movement and a Latinx national (“ethnic” or “racial”) movement. This video shows you at a glance that intersectional character of the movement. [The video has translations if you click the closed captioning button].

The video is from 2011 from a struggle we waged in Georgia against an anti-immigrant law. Five years earlier, in the spring of 2006, a mass movement of Latinos mobilized millions of people in cities all over the country against HB 4437, popularly known as the Sensenbrenner bill after its chief sponsor, which had passed the House and would have made it a felony to be an undocumented immigrant or associate with undocumented immigrants.

The Spring Caucus makes a passing mention of the 2006 protests as part of one of its token lists of causes it supports, oppressions it opposes, and issues it relates to:

The last dozen years, from the giant immigration marches of 2006 to the nationwide protests against police brutality in 2014 and 2015, have shown that hundreds of thousands of people can come together in the streets to fight oppression. These protests have opened Americans’ eyes about citizenship rights and police brutality. DSA should also support campaigns such as defending Roe v. Wade, to convict killer cops, and for immigration rights.

Notice that the protagonists of the immigration marches, the Latinx communities, are simply disappeared through the use of the passive voice. Also gone is an understanding of what the movement is about, substituting instead “citizenship rights” and “immigration rights.” I’ll let other comrades address the “police brutality” issue.

Close examination of these documents confirms that the Spring authors do not seem to understand the immigrant rights movement, because the central demand of the movement, legalization of the undocumented, is completely absent.

But that must be the central demand for a reason: The real policy on the ground of the U.S. Government is not to deport the “illegals” but to keep them here but illegal, bereft of rights, so they can be superexploited and used as a club to undermine the rights and drive down the wages of all workers.

So why the deportations if not to get rid of the “illegals”? To enforce the status of the undocumented as an inferior caste.

IV. The undocumented and classwide demands

The Spring comrades write:

[W]e prioritize the fight for broad classwide demands — such as healthcare, education, jobs, and housing — that benefit all working-class people and that can therefore galvanize the largest numbers of people to fight in their own self-interest. Demands such as Medicare for All would also disproportionately benefit oppressed groups and reduce the competition for resources that gives rise to prejudice among working people. Such demands, when achieved, would curtail the power of oppressors, including abusive bosses, despotic immigration agencies, profit-seeking insurance companies, and racist landlords.

But here’s what it would really mean for the undocumented:

Health care? Medicare for All is a great idea. Give them your social security number, get your Medicare card. Except the undocumented don’t have social security numbers, not that are any good, and the law prohibits giving public benefits of any kind to the undocumented. Yes, the principles do say including the undocumented, but that is cold comfort if you get deported because you were driving to the doctor's office without a license.

Free college tuition? Guess what. The undocumented are barred from the top five public universities in Georgia. And in all the rest, they have to pay the exorbitant rates international students are charged. And I don’t think anyone is proposing free tuition for students coming from China, India or Great Britain. So it wouldn't apply to undocumented students either.

We get the right to have a job? Wonderful! Too bad that it’s a crime to hire us.

Housing? OK, but what use is it if you are constantly threatened with arrest and deportation, even just for driving a car, or nothing at all? What good is your house then?

“Class wide demands” don’t have the same meaning for the undocumented nor for the Latinx community as a whole, which is intimately intertwined with its undocumented sector.

If “won” without the legalization of the undocumented first, they would reinforce the status of the undocumented as an inferior caste by broadening the privileges of the “legals,” which in that context are more correctly seen as privileges not “rights” because they are denied to a whole class of people.

V. A caste system of legalized discrimination

But even if each demand has an “including the undocumented” rider, the fundamental problem remains which is the caste system that has now been incorporated into the U.S. white supremacist social, political, economic and legal structure.

It might be true that a movement powerful enough to win these class-wide demands would be powerful enough to win legalization for all. But it will not happen unless the legalization of the undocumented becomes a major demand of the entire movement.

This means directly confronting and defeating racist and xenophobic sentiments in some sectors of the working class. The logic of the Spring Caucus approach seems to be to avoid this fight as much as possible.

"Equal” treatment of communities that have been treated unequally is not equality; it is the continuation of inequality. That’s why affirmative action (the Brits have an even better name for it: positive discrimination), is absolutely essential to really begin reversing inequality.

But in the case of the Latinx community, we don’t yet have even formal equality. And that affects not just the undocumented, because even if you’re “legal,” your wife, children, lover, cousins, parents, coworkers and neighbors might not be.

Especially alarming in the passage I quoted above is the prettification of racism by making excuses like, “the competition for resources … gives rise to prejudice among working people.”

White supremacy is not a “prejudice.” It is a system that creates that reality on the ground. People don’t think Latinos are inferior because we compete for resources. They think so because this white supremacist society in fact keeps Latinos in an inferior position.

“Prejudice among working people” is the ideological reflection of the material facts on the ground and an essential component in enforcing the inferior status of the Latinx communities.

VI. The DSA and the real world

It is unfortunate that the Spring Caucus does not even try to present a cursory analysis of what is going on in the United States. If they had done so, they could not possibly have missed that the issue of immigration and the legalization of the undocumented is a central political issue. It even frequently overshadows all others in the mass media's daily news cycle. And it certainly is so for Trump.

The DSA has to relate to politics and live in the real world.

In that real world, immigration is a topmost political issue and the Latinx community is at the center of it.

The United States has created a new, Jim Crow-like system of legal discrimination and denial of basic human, civil and political rights. It has been mostly implanted over the two decades since Bill Clinton’s “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.” That law, in addition to authorizing what is now often called Trump’s Wall, set up the current legal regime of systematic discrimination and persecution.

Talking about working class unity in the United States is pure fantasy unless that system of legal discrimination is smashed. The Spring Caucus betrays no understanding of this political imperative.

--José G. Pérez

[José G. Pérez @JG_Perez is a long-time activist in the Latinx immigrant rights and socialist movements. His primary focus has been journalism. He is currently producer and co-host of a daily two-hour news, analysis and call-in show on the progressive Atlanta-based, Spanish-language Internet broadcaster Radio Información, and a member of the Atlanta DSA.]

For Bernie, but against a DSA 'independent expenditure campaign'

[A Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America will be held in Atlanta at the beginning of August. As part of the lead up to the convention, I will be publishing some articles discussing issues before the convention. And although I was a signer of the initial Socialist Majority Caucus statement, this article represents only my own views.]

What does it mean "for" Bernie but "against" an independent DSA campaign for him?

• I am for DSA members (and all working and progressive people) supporting Bernie's candidacy and joining his campaign.
• I am against the DSA having our own "Democratic Socialists for Bernie" effort separate from Bernie's campaign, which is the approach outlined by the DSA's National Political Committee in "Part 2. Initial Bernie 2020 Campaign Plan Proposal" of the endorsement procedure it adopted.

The problem is that DSA insisting on having "an independent political identity" that is "centered around core demands of Sanders’s platform — not merely the candidate himself" contradicts the most important, core message of "the candidate himself" which he communicates by having just three words in the headline of the home page of his website: "Not me. Us."

You might think: that's just a tag line to recruit volunteers: the sign-up form is right there. But I think it has much greater political significance.

Bernie stressed in his campaign launch, as he did in 2015-2016, that his is a class campaign: it defends the interests of working people. That's why he wouldn't accept backing from corporate PACs or lobbyists four years ago, and why he kept emphasizing his average donation was $27. And he adds that should he win, he cannot make the changes, only we can through our own movement of working people to carry out a "political revolution." In other words: "Not me. Us."

The central message, which should be our central message as well, is that working people need to come together into a united class movement. 

Saying, "our message is: come together as a class. And that is why we are running a separate campaign and urging people to join our splinter pro-Bernie campaign" makes absolutely no sense.

DSA members who were part of leadership discussions and the NPC campaign proposal itself present the reason for having our own "independent expenditure campaign" as mostly a legal question, and even the use of that term reflects the approach.

I think the issue should be examined first exclusively as a political question. We should decide what approach makes sense politically, and then figure out implementation, including legal technicalities. That is completely missing from the NPC's document.

For me, the main consideration is what has been happening in  this country over the last decade. I maintain that it is an elemental movement by working people to cohere as a political force, as the "class for itself" that Marxist literature refers to. 

This tendency among working people to come together politically is a qualitative change from the situation that had prevailed since the 1950s McCarthy era until this decade, when the Occupy movement raised the slogan: "We are the 99%!" Occupy was the first time in many decades that there was a clear expression of class political consciousness by millions of working people and moreover coming strictly from below.

Since Trump lost the election and became president, the DSA's growth has been one of the main visible signs of this gathering subterranean force that is transforming American politics. People who were moved to do something would Google "socialism" or "democratic socialism," get directed to our web site, and the most conscious and committed would join.

Almost certainly, that has stopped for the time being. As things stand, people are going to go to Bernie's web site to sign up for and contribute to his campaign instead. I want to be with them, not in our separate more-socialist-than-thou effort.

And look at the practical side. By doing our own independent canvassing, we contact the same people the official campaign has already talked to, which is not just wasted effort but counterproductive. And it creates an impression of disorganization that rubs off on the candidate.

There is also the issue of message discipline. We can say whatever we want as an individual or a DSA member, but not when you're knocking on doors for Bernie. Because you will be perceived as part of Bernie's campaign, and if that's the way you're going to be perceived, then you also have to speak and act on that basis. 

Using a different name like "democratic socialists for Bernie" doesn't solve the problem. Most people will see that as a branch of Bernie's campaign, and therefore, we have no right to step beyond the usual latitude other Bernie canvassers have. 

And that being the case, the "independent political identity" of "our" Bernie campaign is going to come across as simply an opportunist use of Bernie's campaign to promote our group.

Then there's the idea that the DSA is going to "take it to a higher level" because we're going to tie the Bernie campaign to local housing justice efforts or many other issues. But the most important way to do that is to take these  issues to the other Bernie activists as we rub shoulders with them doing campaign work. If we have our own canvassing, tabling, etc., that means we have to stay away from Bernie's people doing the same thing, and then we're not going to be in contact with those other activists.

It is a sectarian blunder to insist on having our own "independent political identity" by having an "independent expenditure" pro-Bernie campaign. It isn't a legal question. It is a political question. Our DSA political message is for working people to come together in a class movement, and Bernie's campaign is the immediate vehicle for doing it.

Again, splitting from the main campaign structures to promote uniting in Bernie's campaign makes no fucking sense.

"Independent" of Bernie's campaign is the wrong political message. Our political message should we that we want all working people to join together in Bernie's campaign.

The "political identity" we want to promote is not the ideological one of "democratic socialism" but the class-based movement to carry out a "political revolution" that Bernie is projecting. That is the next step towards creation of a working class party.

But isn't it a contradiction to have a workers party gestating in the oldest bourgeois party in the world, the Democrats?  Absolutely. It is a total mess. Especially in the most important point: establishing a clear and universally recognized distinct identity as a political force.

But we don't get to choose whether politics should have evolved in this way. The fact is, it has. And it is not the role of Marxists to simply denounce the contradiction, but instead to work in and through it to a resolution.

The DSA's National Political Committee majority should suspend implementation of its national campaign proposal, and instead prepare a discussion for the convention. It needs to prepare a document motivating its idea of an "independent political identity" and an explanation of what this entails.

It should also organize  to bring other views, especially those of other comrades in the leadership who oppose the majority proposal, to the membership.

Whether and how to relate to Bernie 2020 will be the most important practical political question before the convention.

Discussing and deciding this democratically is not something that will just happen. It has to be thought through and organized, beginning with bringing out the different viewpoints and options; finding the ways to bring them to the membership as a whole; and getting as many DSA members as possible engaged in discussing and choosing among these options. That is the National Political Committee's real job right now.

Using a favorable vote for a Bernie endorsement as authorization for what I and other Bernie supporters reject as a sectarian approach, and one that was never discussed beyond the NPC, would be an undemocratic usurpation of decisions that properly belong to the membership and the convention, and a tremendous disservice to the task of figuring out how to organize a mass, democratic, socialist political movement for the 21st Century in the United States.

--José G. Pérez

The question facing the Democratic Socialists of America: What Are We?

[A Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America will be held in Atlanta at the beginning of August. As part of the lead up to the convention, I will be publishing some discussion articles here. This is the first.]

What is the DSA? That is the key issue for our upcoming convention.

No it is not a joke, or a trick question. I am totally serious: what is the DSA?

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 socialist group that goes from 5,000 to 60,000 members in three years is a qualitatively different phenomenon. We didn't "recruit" (convince to join) even a few percent of the new members. They came to us. It is not as simple as saying that we are growing: we are being grown.

In the last three years, the DSA has been completely transformed, but from the outside. It was done to us. And there is every indication that this is continuing and will continue.

The standard explanation is that Bernie popularized the democratic socialist brand and when Trump won the Electoral College it was like, "oh shit -- I better do something."

It's as if Bernie was the pipe pointing in the DSA's direction and Trump's gaming of the Electoral College inherited from slavery was the opening of the valve. But that's not enough. You've got to have water, and not a trickle. It has to be a lot of water under a lot of pressure to give somebody a soaking like the one we’ve gotten.

I believe what has been going on in this country is that working people are developing class political consciousness, groping their way towards cohering as a political force. We are both a part of that movement and a product of it.

I’ve been active politically since the late 1960s. And until this decade, there had never been a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States.

By that I mean a grass-roots movement of working people who identify as such, 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 a 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.

The next big national development was Bernie’s campaign.

In a few weeks in the summer of 2015, Bernie went from being dismissed with a patronizing smile to becoming a serious candidate and then a rock star that filled to overflowing the largest venues holding many thousands of people.

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 spectacular growth of the DSA is a third moment in this evolution, after Occupy and Bernie. It is built on what Bernie accomplished but could be viewed as even better, because it is an ongoing organization that is not focused exclusively on elections, but participates in all sorts of political struggles to change the government and its policies.

But despite that, we are clearly qualitatively inferior and it is not simply a numerical issue of members but of being rooted in our class. We are not even in the same universe as what Bernie accomplished.

This elemental, almost subterranean motion toward working people cohering as a class is the underlying force that powered Bernie's campaign, transformed the DSA and is continuing to do so.

We have to stop thinking simplistically that we are going to act on the process, to shape and mold it any way we want. We are in it and of it and it is going to do a lot more to us than we are going to do to it. And the nature of the process also tells us where it is taking us: towards a mass party of the working class.

So what comes next? First, understand. We cannot make the DSA other than what it is.

I had just turned 18 and graduated high school in the first week of June of 1969 when a couple of weeks later, the 100,000-member Students for a Democratic Society blew itself up in a fight between three factions at a convention in Chicago. Each had different plans to transform SDS into something new: nobody thought it was adequate as it was

Three months later, in September 1969 when I started college, there was nothing left but scattered chapters that tried to keep on functioning (but failed) and a couple of rump national groups fighting over the name.

As it turned out, SDS could not be other than it was, because it was an expression, an outgrowth of a social movement, a radicalization among young people that was sweeping the world.

The same is true of the DSA. We are the product of a much broader process. We cannot radically change what the DSA is today nor stop it from being pushed further in the same direction. Trying will certainly destroy it, and for the same reason SDS was destroyed.

Those SDS factions were trying to transform SDS from a broad expression of a social movement --the student movement-- into a sect.

I don’t use the word “sect” as an insult, but as Marx used it, to describe a certain type of group, one defined by an ideology; with the analogy being to religious denominations, with the term applicable to all denominations, not just especially outlandish ones, which is the more common, everyday use of the word “sect.”

A party is not a sect but an expression of the political motion of a social sector (like a class). Generally, its ideology -- program-- is defined by the movement that it springs from.

And there can be no doubt that DSA has now been transformed into a party-type organization in this sense. We are growing because we are part of a much broader movement that pushes people our way. And for every person that's gone to our web site and signed up there are probably three or four that have thought to themselves, "I should do that," but somehow never got around to it yet.

And this socialist sector is but a small part of the much broader class movement.

Thus we need to think differently about the DSA.

While our growth is being propelled by outside forces, only we can organize it. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not contradict the way we are growing.

DSA today is a push by the most advanced, already socialist members of the working class to come together as the most solid contingent of the working class political movement that is emerging.

Consolidation of the DSA as a political instrument of our class should be the central focus of our convention.

--José G. Pérez

The Latino Immigrant Rights Movement and the Revolutionary Left (2006)

I wrote this on April 11, 2006, right after the massive wave of immigrant rights protests all over the country the day before. Although in form it is a polemic against socialist groups that consider themselves to be the "vanguard" of working people, the main reason to republish it now is the analysis of the class forces and dynamics of the March-May movement. Like everything else I wrote at the time, it was under the pen-name "Joaquin Bustelo." 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2006

It's very interesting seeing that comrades who often seem to have all the answers for Latinos everywhere else in this continent have so little of substance to say in analyzing the biggest mass movement in many decades when it explodes onto the political stage of their home turf.

I say the biggest in many decades, but just by demonstration size alone, you'd have to say the biggest mass movement the United States has seen. EVER.

When was there ever a demonstration of a million people in Los Angeles? One of half a million in Dallas? Of nearly 100,000 in Atlanta? When was there ever a series of scores of protests in one month like we have seen since mid-March when Chicago broke the dam?

One would have hoped that it would have provoked a more thoughtful response than whipping up leaflets calling for a $15 minimum wage that one of the non-Latino sectarians on the Marxism list proudly boasted about having distributed at a Los Angeles demonstration. (That's what I love about ultralefts: millions of immigrants stage marches for dignity and these comrades immediately reduce things to bourgeois economist trade-unionism, imagining that by adding one or two zeros to be bureaucracy's nickel-and-dime demands, that have somehow taken it to a higher level and imbued it with revolutionary content).

Because the situation cries out for applying the tools of Marxist analysis to orient ourselves. And this is what I believe flows from such an analysis:

There is no task more urgent than drawing together WITHIN the Latino movement a militant, uncompromising, legalization for all left wing. And on the terms of the issues posed by this movement itself, not with demands parachuted in via ultraleft leafletters, whether of the $15/hour minimum wage or the "drive out the Bush regime" variety, which I saw here in Atlanta huddled at the edge of the Monday rally intensely discussing whether or not they should hand out their leaflets and circulate their petitions, because a couple of the younger women comrades were telling an older male that they just didn't feel comfortable doing that there.

Trying to recruit to overwhelmingly white, or even strongly multinational left groups can easily become a DIVERSION from and an obstacle to the immediate, urgent task of cohering a left wing within this movement. It is a secondary priority that should take a back seat, and if you're unsure on just how to do it right, wait. Because seeing a movement like this develop and immediately trying to recruit out of it, without being able to offer those you seem to attract any real analysis, understanding or perspective for this concrete struggle is, in my view, opportunism.

And even the groups that have tried to engage with the movement on its own terms seem unable to really understand even fairly basic things. For example, I saw at one of the protests on TV that there were quite a few printed placards calling for "Amnesty" signed by, if I remember right, ANSWER.

Amnesty is not a word much of the movement is putting forward, it hasn't caught on, and for a very simple reason. Amnesty implies you've done something wrong. And Latino immigrants don't feel they've done anything wrong. It isn't something that's been a big discussion in the movement, it's just a word that hasn't caught on because it doesn't express the sentiments people have. It doesn't "feel" quite right. Legalization, full rights, that's the sort of way people in the movement tend to speak about this.

The enemies of the immigrant rights movement have tried to frame the issue in terms of "amnesty," and if for no other reason it is sometimes also used. But for them, it is a part of their very conscious campaign to frame the issue in terms of what to do with these millions of "criminals," these "illegals."

So while I appreciate the sentiments of the radical group that put out the amnesty placards, I would urge them to stop. I suspect they don't understand the character of the movement or the feelings of its participants.

Why is "Sí se puede" the most commonly heard chant on these demonstrations? It isn't a demand, and on its face, it could mean anything. Yet it obviously means something very important to the MILLIONS that have now awakened to political life and struggle. Try to *understand* the actual movement just as it is.

Then there's the Troops Out Now Coalition, which appears to have unilaterally issued a call for a May 1 rally in Union Square in New York. If that is the case, then this must be rejected as rank opportunism. This is the sort of arrogance that has had such disastrous results in the antiwar movement. And when dealing with a Latino movement, this idea that a non-Latino group should be calling rallies and controlling the stage undermines the very core character of the movement itself. Whatever the intentions, it is a direct attack and challenge to the integrity of the movement.

I'm sure there are all sorts of problems in the Latino immigrant rights movement in New York. We have them here in Atlanta, despite having had a better start in cohering a genuine left wing of the movement than many other areas. Mostly white or even strongly multinational left groups should get it out of their heads that they can somehow "intervene" and solve the problems of leadership of this movement. They can't. And their trying to do so will only complicate things further. The movement as a whole, and especially its radical wing, needs solid reliable allies, not attempts by outside forces to substitute themselves for the leadership that must emerge from within the community. All such attempts are not only doomed to fail, but run the risk of undercutting the process of the formation of a leadership from within the movement itself.

These sorts of issues highlight the importance of having a solid, grounded class analysis and Marxist understanding of what is going on. An understanding especially of the *national* character of the movement and the *nationalist* sentiments that drive it is essential--and there seems to be a fair bit of NOT even seeing this going around--, but that is not enough. You have to understand the actualsocial forces, class forces that find expression in and through this upsurge in the community and how they interact with broader forces.

The absolutely all-encompassing character of this movement in the Latino communities is the result of a confluence of class forces that is not likely to last.

You have the overall neoliberal drive for world domination, redoubled with a vengeance after 9/11, which breeds and emboldens white supremacist forces; and from that, the aggressiveness and inroads and victories scored by the nativist wing of the Republican Party, the offensiveness of racist hatemongers like CNN's Lou Dobbs and so on.

But you also have the divisions within the Republicans between the more mainstream corporatists (Bush-Cheney) and right wing demagogues (Sensenbrenner-Dobbs-Tancredo), the pusillanimous continuous caving in by the "liberal" democrats and the stampede for cover from the "mainstream" DLC Democrats (with honorable exceptions, and more from the Congressional Black Caucus than the "Hispanic" Caucus, it must be admitted); and within it all the ACTUAL ruling class expressing its class interests by hiring and sheltering undocumented workers by the MILLIONS.

And you have this mass of Latino immigrants, both documented and un-, but especially the undocumented, pushed out of their own countries by the same neoliberal offensive that is attacking them here, who for years have been beat up and denigrated as "illegals," as job-stealing, welfare-cheating, diseased-carrying, school-budget-busting, terrorist sub-humans. Who are hired to build roads and then denied the right to have drivers licenses. Who prepare the food served on airplane but are not allowed to board them.

But within the Latino community, you have something else, you have middle-class and even some small capitalist layers. Usually subservient to their master's voice, THIS layer has moved, partly as a result from their own status as Latinos --including having been undocumented (in Atlanta we have a couple of ex-"illegal" millionaires), partly from the pressure from below, from their own workers, friends, and family, but also and very importantly from their own *class* interests.

Stalin says in the famous 1913 Bolshevik pamphlet on the national question that the heart and soul of the nationalism of the bourgeoisie is their home market. That is the same here, even though it manifests in ways which the Bolsheviks couldn't have imagined (and even though I disagree with the Bolshevik 1913 position of reducing the national question to just the interests of the bourgeois forces).

What has made this a MASS movement is the media, and most of all the radio. And what made it possible for all these DJ's and radio personalities to go all-out for the movement is that despite their middle class status, they are also, almost to a person, immigrants, and immigrants who came here as adults (very few people can work in Spanish-language media at a professional level, just from a language point of view, unless they were educated in Latin America: otherwise their Spanish is too "foreign," too corrupted by English). But also, because their bosses did NOT tell them to lay off, on the contrary, they egged them on. And their advertisers ALSO didn't complain, but said "right on" to the brothers. (And overwhelmingly they are "brothers" -- there are very few women DJ's).

Frankly, what Nativo Lopez of MAPA told Lou Dobbs is the God's honest truth: if you had to name one person who was responsible for uniting the Latino community, that would be Sensenbrenner. The vicious, racist "Latinos have no rights the white man is bound to respect" bill he pushed through the House in December convinced bourgeois Latinos and middle layers that their trust in the fundamental capitalist rationality of U.S. politics was misplaced in this case. And if youlook at the bill, it is simply the legal framework for a pogrom.

In desperation, these traditionally "moderate" forces have turned to the Latino working class, and to the tactics associated historically with the working class movement, marches and rallies, economic boycotts and –in essence-- strikes.

And in doing so they have unleashed a proletariat worthy of the name. One that realizes that it must not "permit itself to be treated as rabble," one that instinctively feels that it "needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread." One that calls its events marches for dignity, not marches for amnesty.

The interactions of this Latino proletariat with the other social classes isn't as straightforward as people might think. This is not exactly "class against class," it is much more *complicated.*

One of the untold stories --there must be thousands of them by now nationwide-- of the Latino movement here in Atlanta is that when we held the day without immigrants protest here on March 24, a lot of the union members at a big commercial laundry walked out from the plant and crippled production. I know the head of that plant's local. She is undocumented, a mother who is supporting children she left with their grandparents back in Mexico that she hasn't seen for years because the

border crossing has become too dangerous and she can't risk her job.

A higher up in her union went to bat for the workers, and got them all off with a verbal warning. They were also negotiating significant participation by workers from that plant in the Monday protest, although I don't know the outcome of that.

You would think the reaction of the plant management would have been to immediately fire everyone involved in what was in essence a wildcat but you would be wrong. The plant management and company involved have been more lenient because, of course it's in their interests not just to keep their workers relatively happy, but more fundamentally, because it's in their interests to keep their workers period. And what the laundry capitalists see as their right to exploit this labor is under attack, and from their point of view the action of these workers in defending their staying in this country is a defense also of the right of the laundry bosses to exploit them.

I suspect the compañeras who led and took part this action did not necessarily think this through in such explicit terms to figure out whether they could get away with it. They acted on instinct but mostly driven by the attacks against them from the politicians, which as they see it, leave them no choice but to fight back, and now that the opportunity to do so has presented itself, they are willing to take risks to do so.

It is important to *understand* the various class forces and interests in play to orient yourself in this movement. There is on the organized socialist left very little understanding, and in what's being

reported, there is quite a bit of arrogance.

The movement that has erupted is clearly and beyond any possible confusion a *national* movement, a multi-class movement by oppressed people against their oppression as a people. Very significantly, it is a NEW movement. There has never been a generically Latino movement before. This is a product of the evolution of the last 30 or 40 years, the huge continuing immigration and the development of a "national" (meaning Latino, as opposed to nationwide) media in Spanish. I went over some of the factors leading to the development of a generically "Latino" (as distinct from a specifically Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican or Chicano) national identity several months ago in a paper I think I posted to this list (as well as others) and can send to anyone who is interested.

But this "Latino" movement is also an expression of the national movement of Latin America as a whole, of the collection of Balkanized nations that are slowly waking up to the reality that they must become a single nation because that is the only way to deal with the problem they all share, U.S. imperialism.

I don't mean to imply by this that there hasn't also been a rise in specifically Chicano (or Mexican, or Mexican-American) nationalist sentiment as a result. Quite the contrary, the signs are everywhere of

a big upsurge in nationalist sentiment of the main immigrant nationality groupings. But as comrade Evo Morales and the Bolivian indigenous movement teaches, the nationalism of the oppressed is fundamentally *different* from the nationalism of the oppressor in this regard. "No es excluyente" – it doesn't exclude. You can be indigenous, and Guatemalan, and Mesoamerican, and Latin American, and a part of the Third World, a person of color.

Being white (Anglo) in the "American" sense is completely different. That is an exclusive identity, that's the whole point to whiteness, white supremacy. As Malcolm X put it, in the United States "white means boss."

And because it IS a national movement, the right approach is to support the national-revolutionary forces, the coalescence of a left wing in the movement that can become over time a proletarian wing of the movement, especially as it vies for leadership with bourgeois and reformist forces.

Now, in a direct sense this is NOT a job for Anglo comrades, except insofar as it affects their general political stance in terms of propaganda and alliances. Comrades from other oppressed nationalities can perhaps play more of a role, but even then, overwhelmingly, this can only really be done by Latino militants and activists. That is the real challenge, to cohere the left wing that ALREADY exists as scattered activists in this movement, and especially the fresh forces coming forward.

It is a pressing, urgent task. The conditions of this upsurge cannot last for a long time. The *class* interests of the Latino proletariat and other forces coincide only in part, and most strongly in the negative: against criminalization of immigrants, against the Sensenbrenner bill.

But when it comes to what people are for, or at least willing to settle for, it is a different matter.

All sorts of forces were willing to support the phony "compromise" cooked up by that gusano Mel Martinez a week ago and accepted by Kennedy and the Democrats that would have divided the undocumented between those who could PROVE they'd been here more than five years and the rest that couldn't and had to go back to Mexico and get "legally" readmitted.

This is the most important dividing line between the emerging revolutionary-national forces, proletarian in all but name, and the bourgeois forces: legalization for all or for some.

Another very important issue intimately tied up with this is the guest worker program. The revolutionary national forces are all for letting "guest workers" into the United States -- provided they get the same rights everyone else gets when they move here, specifically, permanent residency and U.S. citizenship under the same conditions and timetables as, say, a Rupert Murdoch.

We *reject* a new Bracero program. Latino bourgeois forces especially are basically okay with a new bracero program, which is essentially an attempt at a continuation of what has been the real U.S. immigration policy --letting immigrants in, but with second class status, as "illegals"-- in a more controlled way and under a new name (what the Latino capitalists object to in the whole drive by the ultrarightists is moving Latino undocumented immigrants from second class status to no status whatsoever, and possibly driving them out of the country. Latino bourgeois forces object because it undercuts the markets many of them rely on as well as increases their legal risks for exploiting this labor).

I should make clear here that when referring to Latino capitalists, I'm referring mostly not to the odd individual like the Hispanic head of microprocessor company AMD, but rather to those whose businesses revolve around the community, at least to a large extent. This includes, in a sense, even some large Anglo-owned businesses, who, for example, own community media, but whose Latino executives in charge of a radio or newspaper have been given sufficient autonomy to respond to this situation. And those executives would be among those who I'm referring to).

Nor is this strictly speaking just small capitalists, it involves some significant forces in the bourgeois world, such as the Mexican and Venezuelan TV monopolies behind Univision.

From this it should be clear why grouping together a broad left current within the immigrant rights movement around a few essential points is the central strategic priority TODAY. Because the multi-class alliance with these bourgeois forces is unlikely to last. There will either be a new rotten compromise cooked up when Congress reconvenes in a couple of weeks, OR the Democrats will decide this is a great club to beat the Republicans over the head with, reject all compromises, and seek to divert the movement into purely bourgeois electoralism, urging us to compromise our demands THAT way, by subordinating them to getting "friends" elected.

That electoralist line is one that *excludes* the overwhelming majority of participants in the movement, not just the undocumented but legal immigrants also who don't have the right to vote. On average, it takes about two decades for half of the immigrants admitted in a given year to become citizens, and many never do. So it will be harder to divert this movement into electoralism. But you could already see the effort being made, especially in the speeches at the Washington, D.C. rally.

The left instead will want to keep the heat on for legalization for everyone, and for expanded working class immigrants in the future being treated the same as bourgeois immigrants, in other words, for Latino immigrants being treated the same as white immigrants.

There is a need for the most conscious working class Latino fighters to IMMEDIATELY fuse with --not multinational revolutionary groups--but the most advanced and grass-roots-based and oriented wing of the ACTUAL movement in their localities, and to start coordinating and building ties between those forces in different localities.

Four points can serve as an initial platform or program for this left wing.

A) Legalization for all; a "road to citizenship" on the same conditions as all other immigrants.

B) Yes to massively expanded normal immigration from Latin America on the same conditions as all other immigrants; no to a new Bracero program;

C) The Latino community and especially the immigrants must own and run this movement; YES to support from Black and white and non-profit and trade union and political party (even Republican) allies, NO to non-Latino control over our destiny and our movement.

D) For continuing with the campaign of massive public protests.

In the medium term (in this case, months, not days or weeks) the revolutionary left needs to do a lot of hard thinking. Historically, the idea of recruitment to left groups out of these sorts of movements has not resulted in building strong revolutionary organizations in the United States but rather to isolate and fragment the leadership of the social movements. The kind of political movement that needs to be built is one that is more like the MAS, that serves to bring together the leading militant of the social movements rather than scattering them into a half dozen narrow sects.

There is a need for a new political space where leading activists can begin to discuss and think through the strategic challenges that are posed as the actual movements develop. There is no chance the currently existing organized socialist groups can be that space, there is no room in them, neither socially, culturally nor politically. The discussion (or lack of it) within this list and I believe also within the organized groups shows that the tendency of the socialist left is to have way too many answers and way too few questions.

Of particular importance is that this new space make possible the REAL leading participation of militants from the oppressed nationalities and especially women. If you go to myspace.com, and look at the videos of the student high school walkouts from all over the country that have been posted there, the very strong impression you get is that the majority of the leadership and participants in the movement are young women. And that is certainly true of the overall immigrant rights movement in my area, where women are the central core of leaders and activists.

The traditional Left has a very serious problem of reproducing the patterns of power and privilege from broader society. The forms of the meetings, the style of discourse and debate, the emphasis on the production of literature accessible really only to a very few in a movement like this, all of that needs to be re-examined in a self-critical spirit. And the practice of left groups that are overwhelmingly not Latino coming into this movement with their own sectarian leaflets and agendas with which to mold and shape the actual movement needs to be self-critically examined from this angle also.