Base building meets cadre development: the alternative to socialist opportunism
The path of rebuilding the socialist movement in the US is at an urgent crossroads. Zack Frailey Escobar takes up an important debate over the methods needed to move forward.
The subterranean forces of capitalist development have begun to produce ruptures. The economic growth of the neoliberal period stalled as early as 2007-08, leading to the Occupy movement and the nascent class politics of the 99%. The phony post-racialism of the early Obama period has been exposed as a fraud again and again, most significantly by the Ferguson riots and the nationwide uprising following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Covid-19 exposed the inability of our capitalistic health infrastructure to even keep the economy running, let alone care for peoples' basic needs. As both the ecological and economic situation continue to deteriorate, these crises will only compound. Without an organizational framework that can capture the inevitable rage of the exploited and oppressed and bind it to a vision for revolutionary transformation, the potential power of the working class-the only class which can overthrow capitalism-will not be realized. It will remain a “class-in-itself” but not a “class-for-itself”.
In the midst of this crucial moment, some on the left are calling for socialists to throw ourselves into Democratic Party politics. The outcome of this approach will be catastrophic, but without a viable alternative method of organization, the same old electoral approach will win out by default. The emerging “base building” perspective is a promising development in this direction, but it can only be successful if combined with a strategy of cadre development borrowed from the smaller revolutionary organizations.
Butchering Marxism and Social Science in the Service of Opportunism
My experience has been that those who seek new and quick ways out of Marxism, while unwilling to declare their break with it, usually become the bitterest and most unscrupulous enemies of former comrades… with all those who still accept the foundations of Marxism and of our movement I continue to be not only a comrade (which, with all that it implies, counts first with me), hoping that nothing will ever make me depart from that comradely collaboration and personal sympathy I have always associated with the practice of Marxism… the world around us is in social and spiritual torment precisely because of the abandonment of the idea that the proletariat is the only part of society which can give the impetus to the reorganization of society… to all who adhere to that cause, we are comrades, missing no opportunity to advance it. To those who do not know this but are drawn towards resistance to capitalism, we are friends. But to those who, having for years accepted it, are now determined to depart from it, we are enemies, outspoken and relentless.
-CLR James
The rightwing of the DSA wants to further deepen the ties of the socialist movement to the Democratic Party. Chris Maisano’s essay “A Left that Matters” attempts to sketch a theoretical framework for this perspective. Maisano says that he is concerned with leveraging electoral politics as a platform for socialism to become a meaningful political reference point for working class people in the US. But at every opportunity, he reframes politics as being synonymous with elections. In a sneaky maneuver, Maisano concedes that “the US Left is probably not capable of hegemonizing the Democratic Party,” but immediately adds “because it is not likely that leftists would be able to win the majority of Democratic legislative seats in Congress or state legislatures.” This framing of the problem presumes that electing a majority of left-wing Democrats (Maisano doesn't even specify that they should be nominally socialist!) would be tantamount to socialists taking control of the party.
In order to overcome the acknowledged electoral obstacles, Maisano calls for a two-pronged approach: first, primaries against “moderate and establishment Democrats” (who defines “moderate” and “establishment”?); second, electoral college abolition and other electoral reform measures. Maisano accuses the revolutionary left of being prone to “catastrophizing”, but this framing blithely ignores the fact that the reforms necessary to actually democratize the United States would require a massive social crisis that takes politics outside the bounds of constitutionalism. Abolishing the reactionary roadblocks to majoritarian democracy (the electoral college, the Senate, and the Supreme Court), will never happen by the ordinary mechanisms of constitutional reform. Maisano himself spells out the reasons for this: the constitutional framework itself gives outsized weight to the less populated rural and exurban regions which are consistently the most conservative, and requires an impossible supermajority for constitutional reforms. “Marxist reformism” doesn’t predict a catastrophe, but it does presuppose one. It demands that socialists tell workers to support candidates who openly oppose these necessary reforms, as part of a process which can never lead to the promised result.
Of course, it is not surprising that Maisano calls on socialists to run and support candidates on the Democratic ballot line – this has been the position of advocates of the “Dirty Break Strategy” for a long time. What is striking is the rhetorical shift away from rupture with the Democratic party, or even the socialist character of the campaigns (Maisano uses “progressive” or “anti-establishment” interchangeably). Among its advocates the dirty break has gone from a concrete strategic orientation to an empty slogan to be put off indefinitely into the future. Maisano is not alone. Eric Blanc, who coined the “dirty break” terminology, now argues that “socialists should “Focus on Scaling up Working-Class Power, Not Debating the Dirty Break.” Half the Bread and Roses Caucus, which was organized more or less to push for the dirty break approach, voted against an amendment at the last DSA convention which would have called on DSA to “reject a strategy of capturing the capitalist controlled Democratic Party” and create Democratic Socialist caucuses in legislative bodies. This represents a rightward shift, which opponents of the strategy have long predicted.
Maisano and Blanc’s electoralist arguments form the underpinnings of Jacobin Magazine’s attempt to give an empirical justification for their support of “left-populism” (read: nationalist social democracy) in opposition to “woke” progressivism. In a recent collaboration with YouGov and the Center for Working-Class Politics, Jacobin conducted a “first of its kind” experimental study of working-class voter preferences. They claim that the study yields the following takeaways:
- Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal terms.
- Populist, class-based progressive campaign messaging appeals to working-class voters at least as well as mainstream Democratic messaging.
- Progressives do not need to surrender questions of social justice to win working-class voters, but certain identity-focused rhetoric is a liability.
- Working-class voters prefer working-class candidates.
- Working-class nonvoters are not automatic progressives.
- Blue-collar workers are especially sensitive to candidate messaging — and respond even more acutely to the differences between populist and “woke” language.
While some of these conclusions are inoffensive, a close examination of the methodology and conclusions together shows that the data was cultivated in order to support Jacobin’s national-social-democratic agenda, rather than according to an honest commitment to objective social science.
Tucked away in a footnote of the report is the following admission: “For the purposes of this study, we generally measure the working class as individuals without a four-year college degree. We use this standard because non-college-educated voters represent a common shorthand for the working class in media discussions [!], as well as much academic writing [!!], and because it offers us a clear and simple baseline for assessing working-class attitudes.” The “working class” in this study excludes millions of people with college degrees performing waged labor (like nurses and teachers, who happen to be at the cutting edge of the labor movement!), and includes large swaths of the petty bourgeois who have no college degree. It is astonishing that a purportedly Marxist publication would make such a basic error, but their rationale is even more absurd. They adopted this standard because it is used in media and academia. In other words, they took their concept of the working class whole cloth from the factories of bourgeois ideology!
Footnote 13 contains another sociological gem: “We opted not to include an option ‘Independent’ without a disclaimer that the candidate is running on the Democratic Party ballot line, as we assumed voters’ overwhelming preference for a candidate capable of winning in a general election would bias respondents’ opinions of Independents not running on a major party’s ballot line.” In other words, the study excludes in advance a challenge from the left of the Democratic ballot line perspective, precisely the audience that their argument is purportedly targeting. Instead, they mark “independent” candidates as “independent, but running as a Democrat.” It is not at all clear what this means. Does “independent” mean that they are accountable to a party or organization outside the organization? If so, what is the mechanism for this? Or does it simply mean that they rhetorically oppose “Corporate Democrats”? The study’s respondents, as well as Jacobin’s readers, are left to fill in the blanks with their own imagination.
Most egregious of all is their reckless use of the terminology of “wokeness.” The word “woke” is used 163 times in the 76 page report. The closest the authors come to actually defining the term is in footnote 11:
Woke candidates share a political style more than a set of policy ideas. This style includes a particular emphasis on race and anti-racism and a specialized vocabulary (i.e., ‘systemic injustice,’ ‘cultural appropriation,’ ‘equity,’ ‘Latinx,’ and ‘BIPOC’). These phrases usually denote familiar concepts, but the specialized language has the effect of signaling a particular awareness of or attitudes toward certain group-specific issues or inequalities.
This definition, and the study as a whole, conflates two things: the use of academic or activist language by politicians, and addressing specific axes of oppression which are not obviously universal working class issues. This allows the authors to make the case that abandoning or downplaying the movements for police abolition, open borders, and anti-imperialism is good socialist strategy, while making it sound like they are just talking about more effective messaging.
More disturbing than the particular scientific errors of the study is the overall framework it relies on. The premise of the whole project is that working class voters have a certain set of more-or-less static preferences, and that the goal of socialists should be to appeal to these preferences in order to win elections. This represents a wholesale abandonment of Marxism and a capitulation to bourgeois anti-politics. It takes for granted a very specific subjectivity: not that of the proletariat as a class of producers, but that of the individual “voter”; not a class in motion, with a collective logic of its own, but a collection of individuals checking a box in much the same way one would pick out a certain cereal brand. Of course, the latter is in fact what passes for politics under capitalism. But the task of socialists has always been to transform politics from one to the other, not to adapt to the present state of things. It abandons in advance the idea that a transformation of political consciousness is even possible, and replaces it with a strategy of endlessly chasing after “working class opinion” like a dog chasing a car.
This is not a mistake. It is a necessary step in Jacobin’s ever-accelerating strategic shift away from a socialist “rupture” with capitalism and toward purely social-democratic reformism. Avowed liberals have no compunction about navigating electoral politics in such a cynical fashion. But the editors of Jacobin, self-identified socialists appealing to a socialist audience, find it necessary to justify their betrayals of basic socialist principles with pseudo-empirical arguments.
To overcome the cynical anti-politics of social democracy, socialists will need an organizational perspective capable of addressing the present crisis.
The trajectory of Jacobin and the erstwhile “dirty break” advocates ends up moving in only one direction: towards the incorporation of the socialist movement into the left wing of the ruling capitalist coalition. Let’s be clear. Jacobin’s editors are welcome to take that path without us (and good riddance, frankly), but they should stop their obfuscations about what it is they are doing. In the name of honest pragmatism, the conservative wing of the socialist movement commits the cardinal sin of Marxism: they lie to the working class. They lie about the nature of the Democratic Party and the capitalist state. To overcome the cynical anti-politics of social democracy, socialists will need an organizational perspective capable of addressing the present crisis.
Base Building: Starting From the Beginning
The brand of social democratic politics which seemingly exploded onto the scene with such force in 2016 have already begun to run out of steam, but no revolutionary current has yet managed to present a viable alternative. The International Socialist Organization collapsed entirely. Socialist Alternative joined DSA en masse, and even joined DSA’s right wing in their support for Sanders. The Party for Socialism and Liberation has never drawn a clear line on the question of opportunistic support for Democrats, and anyways has failed to see significant growth. The Socialist Equality Party is seemingly incapable of mustering any sort of politics beyond sectarian barbs and continues to alienate itself from workers’ movements with its noxious economistic attacks against Black Lives Matter and its downright sexist dismissal of the #MeToo movement. The inability of the revolutionary Left to present a viable alternative lends credibility to the otherwise flimsy arguments of the reformists.
At the core of the crisis of the revolutionary left is the propaganda-centric model. All of the organizations above to varying degrees prioritize(d) winning a narrow section of the working class to their ideological project over organizing broad masses of workers to fight for their own interests. The wager this approach makes is that the militant minority organized in revolutionary groups will be able to then successfully make interventions in the broader working class movements.
This model failed to come to grips with a fundamental truth: The socialist movement currently has no mass base of organized workers from which to recruit. In the context of a decimated labor movement and a working class that has been atomized by the gig economy and the breaking up of the welfare state, the very idea of collective politics outside the banal partisan spectacle becomes totally alien-let alone socialist revolution and an economy based on cooperation and democratic planning! It is little wonder that socialist propaganda is not naturally taken up by most workers. In these conditions, socialist organizations become not a cross-section of the working class, but are instead dominated by PhDs and college students. The larger strata of the working class that exists outside of narrow academic circles learn from their limited contact with actual socialist organizations that socialism isn’t relevant to them if they haven't attended college or don’t have the time or money to read all those books.
The “base building” strategy elaborated by the DSA Communist Caucus, the Marxist Center, and Philly Socialists, among other groups, attempts to come to grips with this problem. Base building is a strategic perspective which prioritizes building up broad institutions of working class power (labor unions, tenant associations, etc.) over propaganda work, single-issue pressure campaigns, or one-off electoral runs. Proponents of the base building strategy usually counterpose their approach with “activist networking”, a method that relies on a high level of activity by a band of highly committed activists who move from one issue or campaign to the next without ever growing their ranks.
The strengths of this approach are manifest. Across the country, socialists operating according to base-building principles have built a network of tenant organizations spanning Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Washington DC, Chicago and Philadelphia, with more organizations in formation. In San Diego, socialists have built a thriving labor history school that has already served as a launch pad for rank and file campaigns against a conservative union bureaucracy. Unlike one-off electoral campaigns, base building projects develop institutions through which workers exercise their own power, and get used to experiencing and practicing class solidarity. Rather than endlessly chasing recruits at protests or on college campuses, base building projects allow socialists to develop deep roots in working class communities. When people become an active and conscious part of the class struggle, socialism goes from a distant word to second nature. The tenant and labor unions being nurtured by socialists today will in turn nurture the growth of the socialist organizations and allow the radical left to break out of its silo.
Revolutionary Cadres: “Tribunes of the People”
In a word, every trade union secretary conducts and helps to conduct “the economic struggle against the employers and the government”. It cannot be too strongly maintained that this is still not Social-Democracy, that the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.
-Lenin
The original international socialist movement, the first ever truly global movement of the exploited and oppressed against the hegemonic order, arose out of the synthesis of the workers’ movement and the communist theoretical tradition. The accomplishment of Marx and the first International was not to elaborate a vision for a society free of economic class and private property (in this respect they had been preceded by centuries of utopian thinkers), but in their realization that only the working class had both a consistent interest in and the social power to deliver such a future.
The enormous political impact of European Social Democracy came about because communist ideas were merged with the trade union movement, a movement which had initially emerged not to fight for revolution, but as a bulwark against the brutal and destructive conditions faced by the first proletarians during capitalism’s early stages of development. The challenge for socialists today is to replicate and surpass this accomplishment.
The classical Marxists understood correctly that the labor movement alone is not enough: without a communist horizon, the workers’ movement has no waypoint from which to navigate. Only an organization of revolutionaries can provide a road map. The workers’ movement faces questions with no obvious solutions from the vantage point of any particular workers’ organization, such as a labor union or tenant association. It also continues to be divided along lines of race, gender, nationality, and religion. The broad organizations emphasized by the base building perspective cannot sufficiently address these questions. Because they must organize as many workers as possible (including the majority of workers who hold at least some reactionary ideas) to fight in their collective interests, these institutions cannot achieve ideological clarity on questions of oppression, or on the need for socialist revolution. The need to achieve clarity on these questions is too urgent to be put off indefinitely into the future. We need an organization that can bring together the most advanced workers to fight for a communist perspective within the bases that we are building.
We need an organization that can bring together the most advanced workers to fight for a communist perspective within the bases that we are building.
All over the United States, many of the most consistent fighters for a clear, revolutionary, anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist perspective are members, veterans, or fellow travelers of the small revolutionary organizations. This is a direct result of the emphasis these organizations almost universally placed on the cultivation of socialist cadres. Cadre comes from the French word meaning structure or framework. In a political context, cadres are highly trained activists, who are able to think through novel issues (whether logistical, strategic, or political) according to a coherent ideological perspective and come to a conclusion, and who can train others to do the same. In other words, the framework of a revolutionary organization.
Revolutionary cadres are essential for winning workers to a revolutionary perspective, but they can do more than this. Small as they are, the revolutionary organizations have far outstripped the DSA (in both its electoralist and base building iterations) in their ability to respond to rapidly emerging mass movements. The broad perspective of their trained cadres make their organizations more responsive to the day-to-day shifts in consciousness of the masses. This can sometimes be a liability, as they end up endlessly chasing protest movements. But if the base that we build is going to be worthy of the working class, it must absorb the sensitivity of the revolutionary organizations to “every manifestation of tyranny and oppression.”
The responsibility to develop revolutionary cadres falls on those of us organized in the left wing caucuses of DSA, the Tempest collective, and others who have grasped the need for revolution and are consciously working toward it. It is not enough to rely on the example of our work as we build broad working class institutions. Even as we leave the door to these projects open to everyone willing to do the work, we must be loud about our perspective and willing to make sharp arguments against the reformist currents. If we shy away from sharp debates with socialists to our right, our reach will be a mile wide and an inch deep. The army of organized proletarians will be marched off a cliff by the self-declared social democratic misleadership that dominates left politics today. Only communist organizations can build up the layers of proletarian leadership required to avert this fate.
Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.
