The DSA's AFROSOC Caucus channels Stalin

The official Afro-Socialist and People of Color caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America succeeded in forcing the cancellation of an online forum co-sponsored by the Lower Manhattan and Philadelphia units of the organization because it didn't like what the speaker was going to say.

That speaker was to be Adolph Reed, a Black Academic, holding forth on "Dangers of Disparity Ideology," which, as best as I understand it, is that the questions of the race (and unstated but implicit, ethnicity/nationality) of Covid-19 victims should be ignored so at to not to obscure the issue of class.

If I can be forgiven for being so old, Reed's theses is the sort of idiocy I've been hearing since I was in high school and sneaking into Students for a Democratic Society meetings at the University of Miami in 1969 where adherents of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party's "Workers-Student Alliance" Caucus sang the praises of the strategy, "Black and white, unite and fight," i.e., putting aside issues of race.

But the truth is that this idea --and especially grey versions of it, not quite so starkly Black-and-white as I painted it above-- have a huge amount of currency in the new socialist movement that has arisen in the United States in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and Sanders 2016 and 2020.

Yet the statement put out by AFROSOC demanding Reed's scheduled webinar be turned into a debate (with whom? we were never told!) says quite clearly that all the comrades who are inclined to agree with him should be driven out of the DSA: "It is a reactionary and class reductionist form of politics that should have no place in DSA."

Read it again: "should have no place in the DSA." In this way, the statement makes clear no debate was wanted or intended.

Inside the AFROSOC/POC Caucus, the trick that was used to impose this Stalinist notion was to present for a vote two options: demand that the event be cancelled or that it be turned into a debate.

The point was to make it seem like demanding the debate was something other than censoring Reed and preventing him from having his say.

But "demanding a debate" --especially under current Covid-19 circumstances-- the day before an event is not a serious demand.

The word "debate' was just a way of provoking enough of a ruckus so that the event would be cancelled. And the result was that the lead sponsor, a Lower Manhattan DSA branch committee, did cancel it, supposedly because Reed decided to withdraw, some said, but who knows.

So let's not bullshit each other: the effect was exactly what was intended. Reed's viewpoint is simply verboten, not allowed, beyond the pale: "a reactionary and class reductionist form of politics that should have no place in DSA."

This idealist, moralistic way of posing the question, a "form of politics that should have no place in DSA" brings out sharply what it wrong with it: right now, it does, in fact, have a place within the DSA. That is material reality. The actual truth of the DSA as it exists: not a statement of what I wish would be true, but, on the contrary, simply a statement of the facts on the ground.

Let me repeat: it is a fact the those ideas are in the DSA, shared to a greater or lesser degree by many members.  Hence the importance of a real discussion, and even debate, and thus the attraction of the debate demand. The Caucus rejected demanding that the event be cancelled but through the 11th-hour debate demand, in practice, on the ground, in the real world, it led exactly to that outcome: cancellation. That is what was wanted by the instigators: "should have no place in DSA."

But if you really think you can dictate that people abandon their erroneous opinion, you might want to check how far the Catholic Church got with its campaign against the heretical idea that the earth went around the sun instead of the other way around. You can force someone to recant. But it still moves.

It will take time, discussions, and most of all experience in further struggles for those current DSA members who hold ideas like Reed's to discard them. And some never will. Believe me. Been there. Done that. Despite that some --many-- will be excellent socialist militants, in real life, on the ground.

Yet there may come a time when people with such ideas and those of us who reject them might not be able to coexist in a common organization. But the Afrosoc position paper claims that the moment has already arrived:

Efforts like these have proven to be incapable of building a multiracial working class base for socialist politics. More importantly, events like these undermine the organizing work DSA is doing in Black, Indigenous and people of color communities. DSA already gets smeared for being too white (which it is) as if it’s irredeemably white and that only communicates to BIPOC folks that they shouldn’t join DSA. What do these DSA organizers think they’re saying to their BIPOC comrades by hosting this kind of event? How do they think this event is going to help in our efforts at recruiting a more diverse DSA?

This is preposterous. To think some Black or Latinx activist is going to be held back from joining the Metro Atlanta DSA, my chapter, because in New York a committee from one of a half dozen branches held an online forum that promoted supposedly bad ideas to literally handfuls, if not dozens or even a hundred people, is absurd.

On the contrary, I think a group really grappling with these issues both in theory and its activism would prove immensely attractive to young militants. Those are the sorts of issues that hooked me into getting involved in SDS way back when.

But the same can't be said of a group where you suddenly face peremptory demands coming out of the blue to brand as anathema certain ideas and shut down all discussion of them (and with the supposed moral authority of ALL the "people of color" in the organization, even though fewer than 30 actually voted, out of hundreds or perhaps thousands of POC members).

But the issue of why the DSA has not become a more diverse organization is an immediate and pressing one. And I wish I had a comprehensive formula for solving this, but all I have is a very modest grain of sand.

Delegates to our last DSA convention ratified by an overwhelming margin --the highest of any resolution by far-- a text saying the DSA should orient to Latinx communities beginning with establishing a Spanish-language web site with its own editorial board.

Given the weight that the Afrosoc/POC statement on Reed's forum gives to making sure even a local New York online event "is going to help in our efforts at recruiting a more diverse DSA," one would think a body that is supposed to be the primary expression of oppressed minorities in the DSA in general would have assiduously followed, step by step, the efforts made by the national staff and National Political Committee to implement this convention mandate.

Has the Caucus done that? No it has not. And how do I know that? With apologies to Bernie:

I wrote the damn resolution.

The tremendous concern of those who run this DSA grouping for getting people who are not white anglos to the DSA has been absent in this case even though the resolution specified a goal of 90 days, and we've already tripled that.

And this Caucus has not lifted a finger --nay, not even a toenail-- to push for the implementation of this resolution. Shutting down Adolph Reed from having his say under DSA auspices to literally several if not dozens of comrades who mostly would not agree with him anyways was of overriding importance.

Trying to get the DSA to address the tens of millions of people in this country whose primary language is Spanish ... that can wait. Forever.

What this suggests to me is that this DSA Caucus might be vulnerable to being accused of fraud. Despite the claim that it is representative both of Blacks and other "People of Color," in reality Latinos are officially 18% of the U.S. population, by far the largest nationally oppressed group in the United States, but it does not seem to strike the Caucus leaders that their priorities and actions should conform to that reality.

Which raises the obvious question: if this caucus doesn't work, why not organize a Latine caucus? And the answer is that the DSA has been such a catastrophic failure in attracting Latinx people, and in providing vehicles through which a message like this can reach a large percentage of the membership, that trying would likely be a waste of time.

But if that is so, can the DSA really become the organization so many members want it to be, the political expressions of the multinational/racial U.S. working class?