Black and Latino "identity politics" are working class politics

[The Democratic Socialists of America are holding their national convention in  Atlanta in August, and in connection with the event I've been publishing on my blog various posts related to issues in the DSA.

[This one is from the DSA's national discussion forum. A comrade who described himself as unorthodox in the NYC DSA Afro-socialist caucus and in his branch noted that in a recent election Zephyr Teachout lost the race for attorney general of the state of New York to a less progressive candidate who was Black.

[He said he had posted in response to that outcome that Blacks and Latinos needed to be taught what progressive means. I think some people objected to the wording, but I put that aside to focus on what was behind that phenomenon of Blacks and Latinos preferring a Black candidate over a more progressive Anglo woman, and what it means for the political approach of socialists in the United States.]

I think all socialists and progressives need to wrap their heads around the democratic right of oppressed minorities to political inclusion and representation.

I was born in 1951 and the battles for the right to vote when I was a teenager are seared into my memory. And perhaps because I have lived in the Atlanta for more than 30 years, the blood that was shed and the lives that were lost are very much alive for me. And at bottom, the fight was not just for the right to vote but most of all it was about the right to vote for one of your own.

And I know this very well because my community, the Latino community, faces the same problem. We are 10 percent of the state population. We have two of the 180 members of the state House of Representatives. We have no Latinos in the state Senate. We have all-white apartheid regimes in places like Dalton, which are half Latino, more when you include Blacks and Asians, and in the world’s chicken processing capital Gainesville, just an hour from Atlanta. And two of the four large counties in the core Atlanta metro area with about a million people each are both majority-minority but have all-white governments and until 2018, white Republican-dominated legislative delegations (that changed in one of them, Gwinnett, in 2018).

The Latino adults in Georgia have been overwhelmingly undocumented and that has turned the Latino community as a whole into the victim of a new system of de jure discrimination, the same idea as Jim Crow although the details are different. For a quarter century we have been used as a punching bag and scapegoats by white politicians. Now the U.S.-born children of the undocumented are coming of age. And just like the Blacks vote Black, sometimes with an assist from us, Latinos are going to vote Latino, and get help from our African-American sisters and brothers.

And you might say, but your Black and Latino politicians are just as bad as the white ones. And I’d respond, first, so what? Our people have as much of a right to fuck things up as white people have done. And second, it’s not true. There are no whites getting lynched, no white churches getting bombed, no white people being deported back to Europe, not even are white people being disproportionately incarcerated. Nor are we going to exclude them from any political representation, like they did to us.

And suppose you were to run a white DSA member against one of the two Latinos in the state legislature, Pedro “Pete” Marín, a moderate democrat (he describes himself as pro-business and a fiscal conservative, although socially liberal). I’d vote for Pete Marín, and I don’t care if it was Eugene V. Debs himself who was the DSA candidate. Because Pedro stood up and fought for our community against every single anti-immigrant bill that has been proposed in our state legislature.

And when the big wave of Latino immigrant rights protests took place in 2006 Pedro was there – not just at the demonstration for the photo-op but at the planning meetings where no reporters were allowed (well, except for two: me and a Chicana sister who worked for the AJC).

And if endorsing Debs came up at my DSA chapter I’d oppose it, explaining his would be a racist campaign. – not because Debs was a racist, which he was not, but because politics is not about speeches or programs but about the clash of social forces. And in that District a white candidate running against Pedro would simply be a re-assertion of white supremacy. If Debs won, it would be a demoralizing blow to the Latino community and would encourage the racists.

You might say “you’re letting identity politics overwhelm class politics.” But what I’m telling you is this: the movements of Blacks and Latinos in the United States are the most acute expression of class politics.

You say you lived in France, then study Frantz Fanon; you’re in the Afro-socialist caucus in New York, learn from Malcolm X; you read Spanish, read Che and Fidel.

And if that doesn't convince you, find Engels’s fight with the English in defense of the rights of the Irish in the First International, or Lenin’s report to the Second Comintern Congress on the national and colonial question.

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

Bernie, AOC and the Chartist movement of British workers in the 1800s

What the founders of the modern socialist movement called the first working class party in history came together in Britain in the 1830s around a petition called the People's Charter. It demanded a series of democratic reforms, such as universal male suffrage, annual parliamentary elections, and a salary for the members of parliament so that regular working people, and not just the rich, could be legislators.

The recent and somewhat humorous spat around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's saying she couldn't afford to rent an apartment in DC until she started getting her regular salary as a Congresswoman in January reminded me of the Chartist movement and its demand for a paycheck for legislators.

Because if newly-elected members need to spend the two months between the election and the swearing-in ceremony on getting ready, then they should be paid.

I say somewhat humorous because the talking gasbags on Fox news tried to shame her for what they viewed as her pecuniary embarrassment.

They did not even suspect that in fact they were helping her to drive home a political point that's been at the center of all she's been doing: this is not "that government of the people, by the people, for the people," that Lincoln evoked in his Gettysburg Address, but rather one of the very rich..

So it was awesome to see her respond:

There is no reason to be ashamed or embarrassed.
Mocking lower incomes is exactly how those who benefit from + promote wealth inequality the most keep everyday people silent about 1 of the worst threats to American society: that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer.

That response denouncing the sense of shame and embarrassment that the rich and their media try to drill into us reminded me of an article by Marx where he says the uplifting of the working class wasn't mainly a question of money but of dignity: "the proletariat ... needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread."

Which brings us back to the Chartist movement, because Marx and Engels, the founder of the modern socialist movement, said the Chartists were the first working class party. But in fact they were nothing like what we think of a party. They had no ballot line and didn't run candidates, no real centralized national structure, etc. But the essence of a "political party" was there -- people that shared a common outlook and had organized themselves as a distinct group around demands for changing the government.

I believe that's what Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and a few others in Congress and state legislatures represent: the beginnings of a worker's party in the United States. The essence of it is a coalescence of politicians and groups that share an identification with the working class and a series of common immediate goals ($15 minimum wage, Medicare for all, legalization of the undocumented, etc.).

Right now they are allied with a broader progressive wing in Congress and throughout the Democratic Party.

But you can still tell which are the socialists and conscious working class representatives because they are the ones that tell you that they cannot change things, only we can do it, and place themselves at the service of the social movements.

There is a debate among many socialists, including in the Democratic Socialists of America, about this approach of running on the Democratic Party ballot lines and caucusing not just with the more progressive democrats but even with the traditional neoliberal hacks like Nancy Pelosi. Some turn their back on using Democrat ballot lines while others insist that is OK provided we proclaim that the Democratic Party cannot be reformed or refuse to have anything to do with the traditional democrats on the ticket.

But I think this system of alliances is dictated by the logic of the situation in Congress and most of all by the fact that most working people do not yet understand the difference between a Bernie Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez and a Pelosi or Schumer.

They seem to be differences about how far we can go or how hard we can push for certain reforms. But in reality, the real differences are about class.

And there lies the main problem: working class consciousness is barely being awakened.

So by and large, even as you explain the inadequacy of the moderate "liberal" proposals, in a showdown with the right you usually go along with the moderates. This is an approach known in the movement of a 100 years ago as "critical support." We want those who still follow the moderates to see we will not stand in the way of the more modest proposal, and, on the contrary, since we haven't yet convinced most people that is not a solution, we want it to be adopted so they can see for themselves that it falls short.

A good example of this logic is Obamacare. Because people have seen in practice its problems and limitations, support for Medicare for All has been growing.

Can these tactics work? They are derived from long experience of the socialist movement but there has never been a situation comparable to ours, where working class consciousness had been absent for about a half century. And tactics are concrete for a specific time, place and circumstance.

But we should remember that while ultimate success may very much depend on what we do, not so for ultimate failure. This incipient working class radicalization might be reversed if the ruling class decided to grant significant concessions. And with the huge super-profits they have been reaping, they have the resources to do it.

--José G. Pérez

The Democratic Socialists, the Democratic Party, and the tactic of critical support

In a previous post, I explained why I disagree with a statement put out by the New York City DSA criticizing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for saying that she would support all the Democrats in November. I think it was OK. She has made her differences with the establishment Democrats perfectly clear, and no one who pays the slightest attention to politics could possibly believe that she supports Cuomo's policies.

But unless she went out of her way to denounce Cuomo in the general election, her support for his candidacy will be taken for granted: she is his running mate. And her denouncing Cuomo would not have made any sense to the people socialists are trying to reach.

But is it true that her statement about “rallying behind all Democratic nominees” in effect “erases” the message of the insurgent candidates against the party establishment, as the criticism of her asserts?

I don't think so. I believe people who follow politics in the slightest understand Ocasio represents a very different political approach from Cuomo's, despite what she said.

I want to suggest that the way to analyze this situation, from a Marxist point of view, is as an application of the tactic of "critical support."

Lenin, writing about Britain right after the Russian Revolution, urged his British comrades to back Labour Party candidates. He explained that "I want to support [Labour Party Leader] Henderson in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man."

What does that mean? That the objective of your “support” is precisely to hasten the day when someone like that won’t be able to fool enough people to stay in office.

Does this mean you really secretly want Cuomo's Republican opponent to win? Absolutely not. You really do want Cuomo to win, to show, for example, that he has no solution for the health care insurance crisis.

You might think, after two terms Cuomo has already shown that plenty!

But the issue is not what you or I understand, but how millions of ordinary people see things. They have barely begun to think through ideas like single payer medicare for all, a living minimum wage of $15 an hour, free college tuition, driving big money out of politics and especially how those things can be achieved.

The idea is to tell working people that don't yet agree with your more radical program that you won't stand in the way of what they view as a lesser-evil candidate like Cuomo in a two-way confrontation with the more reactionary candidate. 

Can't this be confusing, running in opposition to what Cuomo stands for, supporting his socialist opponent in the primary and then turning around and saying "vote Cuomo on November 6"? Actually, that is pretty standard in American politics. And Bernie Sanders did the same thing in 2016, and both clarity about his program being different, and his reputation for integrity, did not suffer in the slightest.

But why do this at all? Why not simply run as independents, as Bernie had always done before 2016? It's just a tactic, isn't it?

Two reasons:

First, Bernie has been an exception, unique. There have been hundreds, possibly thousands of campaigns run as independents or third party candidates in the last few decades, and I can't remember one that had even a smidgin of the support Bernie has garnered locally in elections before 2016. There have been a few other "independents" who have made it to Congress, but these have been traditional politicians who for some reason were on the outs with their party machines, not politically independent.

Second, because Bernie's 2016 campaign, not as an independent, but within the Democratic Party, changed things. It set a new pattern, created a new model. Millions of people rallied to his banner to support not just a candidacy, but become part of a movement. The big jump in DSA membership after the June New York congressional primary confirms that this is the shape the movement is taking right now. What we need to do is understand what it means..

As I explained in this post, I think what is involved is working people trying to grope their way to uniting as a class, to fight for a program that defends our interests.

To really do that, what we need is our own party, a workers party, not necessarily in the form of a ballot line (which is what most people in this country think of when you say "party") but a national organization or movement that acts in a coherent way explicitly in the name of working people.

But isn't it a contradiction to try to do that within the oldest capitalist party in existence, the Democratic Party? Absolutely. But we can't simply reject the contradiction. It must be overcome, the movement has to work its way through it. And there really is no point complaining that things ought not to have developed this way. They did.

In there any historical precedent for this, a working class movement gestating within a capitalist party? Actually that is not so unusual. But there is one historical example that I think is worth delving into, and it comes from the founders of the modern socialist movement Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Frederick Engels in the 1840s

The experience was recounted in 1884 by Engels in the article, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung," dealing with events decades before, during the revolution of 1848.

The context was that towards the end of 1847, Marx and Engels  succeeded in convincing a group called The League of the Just to become the Communist League and adopt the Communist Manifesto as its program.

The Manifesto had just been published when a revolution broke out at the beginning of 1848 in France and soon spread to Germany. At Marx's initiative, the Communist League, composed mostly of Germans in exile, dissolved. The reason was that Germany was divided into many different states and principalities, making it impossible for a group to offer more than general guidance and ideas, but Marx believed a newspaper --the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-- was a better instrument to do that. Engels explains:

The proletariat [was] undeveloped ... having grown up in complete intellectual enslavement, being unorganised and still not even capable of independent organisation.... Hence, although in point of fact the mortal enemy of the [bourgeoisie], it remained, on the other hand, its political appendage.... Thus, the German proletariat at first appeared on the political stage as the extreme democratic party. 

In this way, when we founded a major newspaper in Germany, our banner was determined as a matter of course. It could only be that of democracy, but that of a democracy which everywhere emphasised in every point the specific proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe once for all on its banner.

I think the analogy with our days is in the extreme political underdevelopment of the American working class and what has been until now its "complete intellectual enslavement." Thus, now that the U.S. working class is beginning to come onto the political stage, it does so "as the extreme democratic party." The coincidence of the name "democratic party" is accidental, of course,  but the political similarity is not.

And note: this is not about a lesser evil strategy. Nor is the point to reform or transform the Democrats; it is about the working class being transformed through this and other experiences, cohering ever more clearly and consciously as an independent political force.  

What is most striking is that Engels says when Marx and his friends began their work in Germany, "our banner was determined as a matter of course." It could only be that of the working class movement that was beginning to emerge but was not recognized as such and instead viewed as the left of the bourgeois-democratic forces. Engels concludes:

If we did not want to do that, if we did not want to take up the movement, adhere to its already existing, most advanced, actually proletarian side and to advance it further, then there was nothing left for us to do but to preach communism in a little provincial sheet and to found a tiny sect instead of a great party of action.

That's the choice. We either accept the movement as it is as our starting point in order to help it go further, or we can stand on the sidelines shouting "correct" slogans at it.

And if we accept the movement as it is, it means accepting the tactic that Bernie pioneered in 2016, and that tactic of necessity implies going along with the results of the primary. We don't have to actively campaign for the likes of Cuomo, but we have to understand that from where Ocasio Cortez is now situated, it makes sense for her to have said what she did even if we as the DSA would not have put out a statement like that.

Socialists are getting a much broader and more sympathetic audience by running as Democrats given this new motion among working people, but offering "critical support" to traditional Democrats is an inescapable part of the tactic. It is built into the situation.

But we do so honestly, openly and transparently. We don't pretend differences with corporate Democrats have disappeared. We don't suggest the "lesser evil" is really OK after all. But we don't break with the working class people who are evolving towards political independence by trashing them for voting for Cuomo (which is the effect of denouncing him and opposing a vote for him).

--José G. Pérez