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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next couple of sentences are the famous ones about how "the Germans" in the United States treat Marxism as a dogma instead of a guide to action. And then he presents the following approach to tactics. At the heart of it is how to deal with the contradiction between workers realizing they need to come together as a political force but beginning to do so around "a colossal mass of fraud."

The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first programme of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement--no matter in what form so long as it is only their own movement--in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.

Comrades will object that in no way can the Sanders campaign or Ocasio's be equated with Henry George's, there are no ongoing institutions, no mechanisms for discussion and decision making etc. But I think here it is very important to not project our understanding of "party" to what Marx and Engels were talking about in the 1840s when they first laid out their views.

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

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

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

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

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

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

About a month after the letter to Sorge, Engels returns to the subject in a letter to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky. Writing about a preface to a U.S. reprinting of The Condition of the Working Class in England, he says:

 My preface will of course turn entirely on the immense stride made by the American working man in the last ten months, and naturally also touch H.G. [Henry George] and his land scheme. But it cannot pretend to deal exhaustively with it. Nor do I think the time has come for that. It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than "durch Schaden klug werden" [to learn by one's own mistakes].

Note he again talks about it as a movement even though focused in the electoral arena. That, among other reasons, because there were no structures, mostly just local candidates sponsored by labor councils.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The passage I already quoted from the second letter reflects that. But later on in that letter Engels expresses himself even more clearly;

What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level.... But above all give the movement time to consolidate, do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn.... The very first attempt--soon to be made if the movement progresses--to consolidate the moving masses on a national basis will bring them all face to face, Georgites, K. of L., Trade Unionists, and all; and if our German friends by that time have learnt enough of the language of the country to go in for a discussion, then will be the time for them to criticise the views of the others.

It is striking that Engels calls for subordinating programmatic clarity to the development of the actual movement. He says fighting around those things now will only get in the way.

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

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

 From my point of view, the real questions to be discussed are:

•  whether there is really a radicalization of the working class, developing class consciousness; 
• whether this found expression in Bernie's campaign (however mistakenly) simply because he stressed the class character of his candidacy so much. 
• whether this then transferred over into the growth of the DSA, in other words, whether the DSA is pulling people in by its efforts or whether they are being pushed in, so to speak, by the growing desire for activity and political organization that is a product of the radicalization. 
• and finally, whether it is also finding expression in campaigns like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's.

I want to make clear that to the degree what I wrote could be taken to imply that I think that Bernie's campaign, the DSA, and Ocasio-Cortez's campaign were fake, frauds, etc., I did so only for arguments sake. I was saying that even if they were as bad as some comrades claim or as what Engels said about the Henry George movement, I would still insist that this is the right approach. But in reality I do not believe any of those terms or phrases apply.

Joaquín