What kind of party do we need?

This is a crucial moment for the socialist movement. There has been substantial growth of socialist organization in the last four years and the highest point of public support for socialism since the 1970s. But it would be a mistake to believe that socialism’s popularity will simply continue along this trajectory indefinitely, or that this necessarily translates to a fundamental shift towards class struggle. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), largest U.S. socialist group in the US, has recently plateaued. The second largest group, the International Socialist Organization, collapsed 2 years ago. To make matters worse, the trend within DSA which had been moving toward a break with the Democrats and the formation of an independent party has undergone a reversal. If this trend becomes dominant within the socialist movement, the trajectory towards socialist party building will become stunted, and a new generation of potential revolutionaries will be funneled back into the Democratic Party like so many before them

Given this set of circumstances, it is essential to think through the question of how to establish an independent mass socialist party. While no one can predict exactly how a socialist party will come about, we must arrive at some broad conclusions which can guide our steps in that direction. To that end, the following will sketch out the two main perspectives presented on this question; and then propose a third approach.

Realignment 

Some on the left argue that we don’t need our own party at all. There is a long history in the United States of attempts to politically realign the Democratic Party. Proponents of this strategy argue that it is possible to shift Democratic politics to the left through primary campaigns and sustained grassroots pressure from Democratic voters. The end goal of realignment is to restructure the Democratic Party into a socialist party.

The roots of the DSA can be traced back to this approach. Michael Harrington, the founding leader and theoretician of DSA, was the premiere advocate of realignment among American socialists from the 1950s until his death in 1989. Harrington’s perspective was expressed in his book The Other America, a searing expose of poverty in the United States. But it was his lesser-known theoretical works which had a more lasting impact on the socialist movement.

His theoretical framework of “democratic Marxism” mimicked the Stalinist “popular front” strategy of downplaying revolutionary politics in order to ally with liberals in the Democratic Party, but added in an unabashed embrace of Cold War anticommunism. In addition to supporting Democrats, this meant that Harrington tacitly supported U.S. imperialism and opposed third world liberation movements which threatened to taint the respectability of socialism in the eyes of potential liberal allies. These politics have cast a long shadow over the U.S. Left; only more so since DSA’s explosive growth began in 2016.

The politics of realignment have inspired numerous efforts to transform the Democratic party into a social democratic party over the course of decades.

The politics of realignment have inspired numerous efforts to transform the Democratic party into a social democratic party over the course of decades.  In the 1940’s the Communist Party—then at the height of its influence—threw its support behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in the hopes that associating communism with American patriotism and the war effort against fascism would increase the party’s influence. When the war was over, the state ramped up its repression against the party again and by the 1950s it was smothered into irrelevance. The remnants of the party today continue to support the Democrats.

In 1972, the presidential campaign of liberal Democrat George McGovern drew support from many socialists and social democrats, including Michael Harrington. McGovern won the Democratic nomination, but was annihilated in the general election by Richard Nixon. His defeat has been weaponized by the right wing of the party to combat the left and stifle class politics in favor of empty platitudes about defending a fictitious “middle class”. 

In the 1980’s, Jesse Jackson ran in the Democratic Primary with the support of the antiracist Rainbow Coalition. The Rainbow Coalition borrowed its name from Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but its politics were not the same. It was conceived of as a leftwing alternative to the emerging neoliberalism of the Reagan era and promised to expand social programs, voting rights, and affirmative action. But after the campaign was defeated, it aligned itself with the Democratic Party mainstream and many of its activists became Democratic Party surrogates.

In 2016 and 2020, many socialists were convinced that the presidential campaigns of “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders could initiate a “political revolution.” Through this vision of revolution, the Democrats would not only take the White House, but overthrow the stranglehold of neoliberalism on the Democratic Party and transform it into a real force for social democracy. Despite his defeats at the hands of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the entire Democratic Party establishment, Sanders’ campaigns did help inspire the election of several progressive Democrats that included Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) and the rest of the “squad”. But the record of these “democratic socialists” is hardly distinguishable from a run of the mill democrat. Since being elected, AOC has: voted for conservative Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House (twice), voted against withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, praised Republican warmonger John McCain, voted for billions in military spending, and supported U.S. interference in Venezuela. The rest of the squad have nearly identical track records. Proponents of realignment will inevitably argue that this is a “lesser evil”, but without a party of our own, the “lesser” of the evils on offer will only get worse and worse.

Some of the DSA have attempted to dress this old approach in new clothes, arguing that socialists should run as and support Democratic candidates in preparation for a future “dirty break” break from the party. But the candidates they point to, including Sanders and Ocasio Cortez, don’t seem to be in on the strategy. Instead, they consistently vote along with the Democratic establishment, encourage their supporters to vote for other Democrats, and fundraise for the Democratic Party. Recently, Jamal Bowman’s shameful betrayal of Palestinian human rights and the DSA leadership’s subsequent refusal to expel him put into stark relief the results of this approach: it has not brought democratic voters closer to independent socialist politics; but it has brought more socialists into the Democratic Party’s orbit.

The Left-Liberal Bloc

Given these problems, many socialists argue that we should strive for some version of the mass labor parties that appeared in Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, and which persist in various forms to the present. These parties are nominally anti-capitalist, but not revolutionary. Revolutionaries who favor the labor party approach point out that most revolutionary parties—including the Bolsheviks—began as factions within larger social-democratic formations (or nationalist formations in the third world), and later split.

Based on this example, they argue that building a revolutionary current within a broader labor party, rather than from scratch, is a more viable approach. In principle, the pluralism and openness of these “big tent” parties address the major flaws of the vanguard party model. Nevertheless, this approach also ignores the concrete realities of the United States in the 21st century, which is at a fundamentally different social and political juncture than Europe was when these parties formed.

Unlike in the countries where labor parties, the United States does not possess a multiparty system with proportional representation. We might enjoy a marginally higher degree of political freedom than that of 19th century England or Germany, but the stranglehold of the two capitalist parties on the state is even more powerful in our country. Given the institutional barriers in the United States, it is much more difficult for a new party to break through electorally.

A separate but related issue is that of the labor unions. In Europe, labor unions formed the nucleus of the various national social-democratic parties. In the United States, a mass, organized labor movement was built only after the solidification of the Democratic-Republican two-party duopoly. With the notable exception of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 20th century, the major unions have consistently maintained a transactional relationship with one or both of the capitalist parties rather than taking up independent political action.

We cannot realistically expect that a critical mass of labor unions will break from their relationship with the Democrats, which has been entrenched since at least the 1940s, in advance of an already existing alternative. Generations of socialists have lived and died toiling under this aspiration, but to no avail. Contrary to the point of view of the “pragmatists” who argue that some sort of progressive electoral bloc is more realistic than a communist party, the appearance of such a coalition in the United States is actually less likely than an authentic vanguard party.

Even in cases where a broad left-labor party is able to form a government, their track record is not as exemplary as the proponents of this approach would like to admit. The European social-democratic parties were ideologically broader than the vanguard parties which followed the Bolshevik model, but at their inception they were still inherently revolutionary. They universally called for the abolition of the monarchies and of the aristocratic class which still ruled Europe at that time. Revolutionary republicanism and the demand for universal (male, shamefully) suffrage was the sin qua non of all of these parties. No such common revolutionary aspiration unites the social democrats of today with communists, and this necessarily colors the nature of contemporary parties which attempt to mimic the structure of First and Second International-era socialist parties.

Across Europe, the birthplace of classical social democracy, there have been two major breakthroughs for left wing parties in government since the Reagan-Thatcher era. In 1981, the Socialist Party administration of Francois Mitterrand initiated an ambitious program of social spending and nationalizations in coalition with the Communist Party and the Radical Left Party. But two years later, after massive capital strikes and problems with inflation, Mitterrand reversed these policies. The Socialist Party in France has never returned to a left-wing course, and today it has been superseded by the far-right Rassemblement National party and the neoliberal and centrist La République En Marche.

In January of 2015, the Coalition of the Radical Left – Progressive Alliance (better known as Syriza) became the largest party in the Greek parliament and formed a government. Syriza won the election on promises to end the crippling austerity policies which had been imposed on Greece by the European Union. But they came up against the classical problem of Left-liberal governments, especially in periods of crisis: in order to achieve even their minimal social-democratic demands, they would have to provoke a conflict with capital that went far beyond their program or the scale of confrontation or which the party was ill-prepared. By 2015, the dominant reformist leadership of the party had utterly capitulated to the demands of the international banks and abandoned its program altogether. The party split, with the radical left leaving the party and the left-wing ministers resigning or being fired. The socialist formations which had participated in the party are now tainted by this experiment, having associated themselves with a party of betrayal and austerity in the eyes of the Greek masses.

The only social-democratic formation to face the same contradictions and, instead of turning back, to go beyond its reformist program was that of the July 26th movement which led the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Throughout the movement's period in opposition, its demands focused on limited redistribution of land and wealth, democratic reform, greater independence from the U.S., and opposition to rampant government corruption.

After taking power, leader Fidel Castro continued to insist that he was not a communist, and that he wanted peace with the U.S. But the logic of events had other ideas. The Cuban peasants would not accept anything less than full expropriation of the landlord class, and the landlord class would not accept any left-wing government at all. Above all, the United States would not accept any truly independent government in Cuba specifically, or in Latin America in general. This meant that the revolutionary government’s choice was not between a transition to socialism or capitalism with a human face, but between socialism and its own obliteration. These concrete realities, combined with the influence of Marxist leaders within the movement such as Raul Castro and Che Guevara, and the aid and support from the USSR as a counter-hegemonic benefactor; pushed Fidel and the movement towards the Soviet state model amid the Cold War.

There are important lessons to be drawn from these experiments. For many on the left, the story of 21st century social democracy is only a story of betrayal. This is not a wrong interpretation, but it leaves a great deal out. In each of these instances, objective conditions supersede subjective attitudes. Mitterrand and Tsipras were, at least at some point, sincere social democrats. They did not betray their program out of greed and ambition, but because they were not prepared to take the leap into the dark that any revolution ultimately constitutes; as a result, they saw themselves as making regrettable but necessary choices in order to “govern responsibly.” Socialists should not have been surprised at this. The social-democrats had signed on to a program of managing capitalism with a human face—and not to lead a social revolution.

Nor can the Cuban example make the case for a reformist social-democratic bloc in the U.S. To begin, any positive reference to the Cuban revolutionary project is off limits for proponents of such a strategy because of its failure to live up to the norms of liberal democracy. More importantly, the material conditions facing socialists in Cuba and the United States are entirely different. It was the combined force of the geopolitical struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union and the class struggle within Cuba which pushed Cuba toward social revolution. This is not our situation today. In the United States, the epicenter of global imperialism, the pressure on social democratic parties is always in the direction of concession and compromise, and never in the direction of rupture. The trajectory of the DSA toward a complete embrace of Democratic Party politics shows this in practice.

The Vanguard Party

The failures of the realignment strategy and of the various left-liberal parties in practice has led revolutionaries to correctly place a high value on the political independence of socialist parties. For many communists, the vanguard party is the answer to this problem. The vanguard party has been the favored model of communists since the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Based on the model of the Bolshevik Party, the vanguard party is centralized, sometimes secretive, and more ideologically rigid than traditional mass parties. It is based on the idea that the most important thing is to unify and organize the political vanguard (the most politically class-conscious and radical sections; literally, the advance guard in a military formation) of the working classes and of the oppressed, which can lead the working class through the process of social revolution.

Vanguard parties typically operate according to the principle of democratic centralism. There are varying interpretations of this concept, which place different levels of emphasis on democracy and centralism, respectively, but it can be distilled into the idea that discussion and debate are open, but once a decision has been arrived at according to a genuine democratic process, it is binding call to action for all members of the group.

The success of the Bolshevik party operating on this model has led to imitations all over the world. In colonized and formerly colonized countries, parties operating according to some version of the vanguard party model have led successful revolutions. This success has led some to believe that the vanguard party is the model for socialist organization, and there are multiple organizations in the U.S. who either claim to be “the vanguard party” or who base their activity on the future formation of one.

Socialists in the United States are operating at a very different historical and political juncture than the Bolshevik Party. Despite our undemocratic constitution, most people have a relatively higher degree of political freedom. Specially oppressed populations and those on the left, especially those that have engaged in resisting or opposing settler-colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and state violence are constantly targeted for repression. The cases of Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Chelsea Manning, and Reality Winner; and most recently for numerous Black Lives Matter and undocumented activists illustrate this.

Within this contradictory array of experiences and allocation of differentiated “rights” in bourgeois US politics, the basic “freedom” to agitate against capitalism and the state continues to exist (in the abstract) for most people and groups on the US left. This was not the case for the members of the Bolshevik party, who were regularly subjected to prison or labor camps for political speech-crimes, and it is certainly not the case for communists in colonized and under-developed parts of the world. At the same time, the level of political and social polarization in those societies was and is much higher, making it a more fruitful terrain for revolutionary propaganda.

These two differences, less repression and less polarization, mean that the problem of communist agitation is different in the United States and requires different solutions. Under conditions of relatively free expression (recognizing still the need to deprive the bourgeoisies of its ownership of the press), the difficulty faced by socialists consists not in publishing our ideas, but in getting anyone to listen to them over the cacophony of the mass production of bourgeois ideology. A socialist press which only represents a very narrow ideological current can have no hope of reaching a sufficiently wide audience.

When communists are being hunted by the political police, it is essential to act in lockstep to ensure that any action taken does not endanger the party or its members. But in legal conditions, uniformity in action can limit the flexibility of party members and chapters to experiment with different tactics in different contexts. The scientific basis of Marxism, the constant repetition of action and evaluation, the unity of theory and practice, is disrupted when experimentation and debate are curtailed. Already in 1903, Leon Trotsky observed this problem with respect to the activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party:

The work which in every European party, socialist parties included, of course, is carried out in the backrooms of the Party (printing, distribution, postering etc) is in our case projected to the foreground, uses up an enormous quantity of materials and personnel, and, as a result, has concentrated on it the greater and better part of our attention and our creative capacities. In so far as we are permanently fighting against the police repression… the technical conditions of political work tend to cover the whole field of the Party’s political tasks… in our Party tasks of organisational technique are substituted for tasks of proletarian politics, that the problems of clandestine struggle with the political police are substituted for the problem of struggle against the autocracy. [emphasis added]

In the United States, we must not impose this problem on ourselves if we can avoid it.

…the possibility exists to unify around a set of demands which can concretely reshape the political terrain facing socialists today.

Most of all, insisting on unity on every ideological question can lead to organizational divides that would be better expressed as factional differences within a broader formation. Analyses of the class nature of the Soviet Union or of the People’s Republic of China can have important implications for how we approach socialist organization in our own context, and should therefore continue to be the subject of in-depth debate and polemics. Such an approach to these debates would be consistent with the spirit of democratic centralism, but vanguardist organizations in the United States have always taken a much more rigid approach. This cannot continue, when the possibility exists to unify around a set of demands which can concretely reshape the political terrain facing socialists today.

A Transitional Program for the 21st Century

This analysis might give the impression that the situation in the United States is hopeless. Indeed, it is almost inconceivably difficult. Nevertheless, there is some possibility and hope for a hybrid party model which combines elements of the labor party and the vanguard party. Those living in the US in the 21st century have no real experience with mass parties. Unlike political parties in most European countries, which have members who vote on the party platform and the party leader, the Democrats and Republicans are not really parties at all. They have no members and no elected leaders.

They are more like top-down brands, with a loyal customer base and massive fundraising operations. This is an obstacle for the labor party model, which would have to win the unions and many progressive democratic voters to a completely foreign concept. But for a party of socialists, this is an asset. A party of a “new” kind in the United States would have a massively outsized political impact in spite of a relatively small size because of its ability to mobilize people both inside and outside of the electoral arena. If DSA, for example, were to become a political party, just its 100,000 members would make it the largest membership party in the United States since the Socialist Party peaked at 113.000 members in 1913.

For the first time in decades, socialism is a large enough political current that unity among socialists would be a meaningful political event. The question is, what kind of unity should we aim for? What kind of unity is possible? The track record of reformist social democracy shows that unity with the “progressive” wing of capital is lethal. Given the need to break with the Democrats, we also cannot expect to be able to build unity with the established labor unions in the short to medium term, given their attachment to that party. At the same time, the rigidity of the vanguard model has led it to break rather than bend in the context of advanced capitalist democracy.

Our conditions call instead for programmatic unity around a set of basic socialist demands. The precedent for such an approach goes all the way back to the publication of the Communist Manifesto. In addition to an elaboration of the overall political perspective of the first International, the Manifesto included a list of “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany.” While the main document explained the need to abolish private property and all bourgeois relations in toto, the demands are not as far reaching. They include demands for a democratic republic with universal suffrage, abolition of feudal titles and privileges, free public education, “universal arming of the people”, nationalization of feudal lands and of transportation infrastructure, the creation of a central bank and paper money, separation of church and state, universal employment, progressive taxation and the abolition of inheritance.

These demands were constructed in order to break the back of the aristocracy, the major reactionary force in Germany at the time, and shift the balance of power decisively in favor of the working class. In the same way, a transitional program for the United States must account for the power of the financial institutions, the imperialist military apparatus, and the centrality of capital’s monopoly over the media, while also appealing to the organic aspirations of the exploited and oppressed. These could include the following transitional demands:

1. Create a real democratic republic – abolish the senate, supreme court, presidency, and electoral college.
2. Open borders – meaning also abolish ICE and CBP.
3. Abolish the standing army and intelligence agencies.
4. Create a free, universal national health system (including abortion provision), free universal college, and universal public food and housing provision.
5. Set a $20 minimum wage tied to inflation, and a 4 day, 6 hour per day work week.
6. Immediately nationalize the fossil fuel industry (with the goal of abolishing it), major financial firms, and communications infrastructure.
7. Free all political prisoners, open all records of military and intelligence agency crimes; punish the perpetrators.
8. Immediately restore and honor all indigenous treaty rights; pay reparations to Black and indigenous North Americans.

These demands are transitional because, while they do not constitute a complete social revolution, they cannot be accomplished without a break from the existing political and social order. This is what distinguishes a transitional program from the reformist agenda of the various “post-neoliberal” parties.

Elements similar to these demands exist in the current DSA platform. Yet, even if all of them were present, the actions of DSA electeds and the recent controversy over Jamal Bowman’s violation of DSA’s position on Palestine show that the platform is non-binding. Real programmatic unity would require that the program is enforceable upon elected officials which represent the party. This is the element we have to borrow from democratic centralism. Our context demands that we be more strategically flexible and experimental than vanguard parties in the US have been, but we cannot compromise on principles—especially for those comrades navigating the swamp of the bourgeois state.

At the same time, unity around a transitional program represents an important break with the rigid interpretations of democratic centralism embraced by most vanguard parties. It has the advantage of being proscriptive rather than prescriptive. It lays out principles which party members cannot contradict (i.e., a platform item on abolishing the standing army would obviously preclude any vote for military funding), but it does not dictate what their day-to-day organizing activity must consist of. While a transitional program would distinguish a future party from left reformism, it would not bind the party to any particular socialist ideological tendency, or demand that every member act in lockstep. It thus overcomes both the catastrophic laissez-faire approach adopted by the DSA in regard to its platform, and the stifling rigidity of the various vanguard parties.

At least 100,000 socialists in this country, including the left wing of DSA and very many of those outside it, would sign on to a program like this today. Over a longer period, it’s not unreasonable to think that some labor unions, many of which already have socialists in (official and unofficial) leadership positions, could be won over to aligning with a more established project which already has a mass membership.

Unity around this kind of program would have to be undertaken with the understanding that the party’s representatives in government would be playing a fundamentally different role than those of capitalist parties. These demands cannot be met short of an upheaval which would do away with the constitution and the state as we know it. This means that the role of party members within the current state is to consistently expose the hypocrisy and criminality of the capitalist state and its two parties while fighting tooth and nail for pro-worker reforms—and not to engage in backroom deals or horse trading. They will not have their names on many bills, but they will shift the terrain of politics by standing upon the platform of the bourgeois state only in order to denounce it.

There is not a sufficient basis right now to declare a founding congress for such a party. A majority of DSA is either not prepared to break with the Democrats, or is ideologically opposed to any kind of party discipline. No group outside the DSA has the political capital to attract sufficient membership to make such a party a genuine mass party. But this kind of party should be the goal of socialists today—in a matter of years, not decades. In order to lay the groundwork, we must build a maximum amount of collaboration and dialog between all socialists who earnestly want an independent party. Only through shared work and long-term close contact and discussion (not just online debates) can a critical mass take shape in support of a party program.

Those socialists coming from various vanguardist groups should not try to silence debates. Important differences remain about how to achieve socialism, and even about what socialism means. The theoretical heritage we carry with us will be important for clarifying these debates as we move forward, and it is natural that factional formations will arise around these ideas. But these differences cannot continue to form the basis of absolute organizational separation. For socialists who have been valiantly struggling to build some sort of US-based labor party, it is time to recognize the new moment that has arrived. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of self-conscious socialists are looking for an alternative, which the unions are unwilling to provide. We have to do it ourselves.

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.