A base building primer for the socialist movement

Millions of people are coming to radical conclusions over the nature of the social problems they face. The deceptive promises of the free market to rationally organize social life is falling apart in the neoliberal wasteland people find themselves in. This is powering the resurgence of interest in socialist politics and the growth of a new, if still modest socialist movement. 

The growth of interest in socialism and the number socialist activists has raised a series of questions over the strategic paths towards reconnecting the politics of socialism with the working class. This is necessary because if one were to survey the current socialist movement they would notice the predominance of academics in its leadership and a high number of white-collar, white workers in its ranks. The need to root the socialist movement in the multi-racial and multi-national working class remains the litmus test for the movement’s continued growth and development. 

It’s against this background that socialist electoral strategy has dominated the discourse for how to reconnect with the working class. But as several socialist campaigns have shown, without a strong social base from which the socialist movement can exert power, socialists in office will struggle to overcome the bureaucratic obstacles and political pressure the state has thrown in the way of political movements intent on challenging the status quo. The low level of working class self-organization and dominance of non-profit organizations leave the movement without a way to make that connection immediately. 

This wouldn’t be the first time socialists grapple with this question.

Socialist ideas were brought into the US by immigrants whose experience back home were shaped by capitalist social relations. But socialism also has an organic root in the US. Before 1860, labor unions were incapable of laying the foundation for socialist politics. It took the abolitionist movement to destroy slavery in the South so that workers could fight their struggles unencumbered by the threat of slave labor replacing them. 

Thereafter, working class people in the US, particularly immigrants, helped bring and ground socialism in the US working class as a real political force. The turn of the 20th century was the heyday of socialism in the US. Fifty years later the anti-socialist “Red Scare” of the 1950’s combined with the beginning of the neoliberal assault in the 1970’s to cleave the working class movement from its socialist and radical roots. 

This truncated history is crucial to understand the reasons for the current far-left’s micro-party models that struggled to engage with working people in a two generation cycle of retreat by the working class. Revolutionary socialists found themselves cut off from the actually existing socialist movement, the working class, and remained ideologically under siege. Given such conditions, many of these types of organizations made it their mission to keep revolutionary socialist politics alive until a later upsurge.

But as organizations develop their own internal existential logic, a danger can arise of a micro-party turning into a closed feedback loop where its members engage in hyperactivity relegated to organizing themselves while recruiting in the ones and twos with turn over erasing their gains every few years. What gets sacrificed on the altar of “maintaining” a revolutionary socialist political tradition is the consistent engagement with working people in their daily struggles. 

This is where the concept of “base-building” comes in as a necessary corrective to the socialist electoral strategy’s weakness in developing a coherent social base. But debate has arisen in the movement, with attempts to explain what base building means and why it matters. The following set of questions attempts to concisely address some of them.

What does it mean to “base build”?

Base building is about a sustained political-organizational engagement with a specific community/demographic/sector of the working class over certain issues at the site of the struggle or discontent. Capitalism reproduces itself and its social relations of workers/employer, exploited/exploiter at most sites of social life. In tenement buildings the relationship is between tenants and their landlord, in workplaces its employees against management and the employer, on university campuses it’s between students and the administration, in neighborhoods this can manifest as residents against real estate developers and local politicians. 

What is important to understand here is that so long as the arena of struggle encompasses more and more aspects of social life, the relationship between exploited and exploiter can begin to blur. The more indirectly the oppression and exploitation is administered, the more abstractly it will be felt by working people. Exposing this relationship of exploitation and the use of exposure to initiate political action becomes more difficult because it doesn’t feel as immediate or obvious to those impacted. 

Even when you’re able to illustrate this, apathy and pessimism can be a tough obstacle to overcome for any campaign whose target is perceived to be too large or powerful. For example, without having established a powerful enough base in immigrant working class communities, any campaign to oppose and overturn repressive federal immigration policies will find it difficut to bring working people impacted by these policies into the movement. The severe repression from both Republican and Democrat administrations, as well as the vigilantism and attacks of the xenophobic right, discourages working class immigrant families from taking action.

If working class people aren’t involved in socialist campaigns, socialists are gradually drawn into advocacy/lobbying/pressure projects to operate “on behalf of” these communities, but not with them.

What is the purpose of base building?

The purpose of base building is to develop long term relationships with working class people at the site of struggle or discontent. Furthermore, it is to create the spaces or networks for working people to engage in collective self-activity directed at their exploiters/oppressors, and to lay the foundations for independent institutions of struggle from which electoral campaigns can be based. Examples of effective strategies can be drawn out from this practice and lessons encouraging self-activity of working people on a militant basis can develop in order to create a point for working people to shape their political identity, voice their politics, and propagandize.

Is base building the only strategy for socialists?

No, base building is not the only strategy. It is a means from which the socialist movement can root itself in working class communities, communities of color, and bring working class people into struggle through community organizations, labor unions, and issue-based unions (ex: “users” unions such as homeless peoples’ unions, student unions, tenant unions, cultural formations and united fronts).

Base building is tactic in a strategy of developing working class organizational and political power. A means towards the creation of independent political parties of the class. 

Political parties arise, more often than not, from the connections created between networks, organizations, political clubs, tenant unions, labor unions, student groups, etc. Political parties are the result of a qualitative step in self-organization of the working class. Political parties cannot simply be called into existence – they must have some sort of social base from which to mobilize, further politicize, and mediate political struggle with their exploiters/oppressors.

Why is base building necessary? 

Decades of working class retreat under a capitalist neoliberal offensive has decimated institutions and the organizational strength of working people, atomizing it across society. In its place has grown a deferential sentiment among the class which at times manifests politically as extreme individualism. 

This restructuring and ideological process has devastated working class institutions and organizations. The working class vanguard, a militant and organized layer, capable of leading the rest of the class in struggle at the point of production, was also dismantled.

Base building is especially necessary in light of the two-party electoral system and the historic role the Democratic Party has played in filtering out and moderating working class demands while being a vehicle for cooptation and pacification.

An independent working class base provides a place from which the socialist movement can agitate for political independence, self-activity and militancy. It is also a school of praxis for the socialist movement which desperately needs to develop organizational skills and institutional capacity more broadly within the class and its movements. This may be a necessary first step in a long journey towards developing a working class vanguard in localities where base building tactics are deployed.

Given the state of the US socialist movement, largely white, white-collar, in non-profits or labor bureaucracies, and one situated within a terrain where bourgeois civil society is dominant, base building provides a necessary corrective. It provides an alternative approach to the singular focus on organizing electoral campaigns within the Democratic Party as a means to build a base and project socialist politics across the working class. Socialist electoral campaigns without base building do not effectively equip socialists to consolidate electoral wins nor to spring into the next fight by building out of organized, working class constituent-based movements. Without more intentional base building efforts and campaigns, electoral gains open the socialist movement’s flanks to reactionary backlash, bureaucratic coups and betrayals. 

How does one begin a base building project?

Socialists are more often than not working class people themselves who are at the nexus of issues they should turn into collective campaigns.

Socialists can begin this effort by seeking out other socialists who are interested in base building projects. This group would then do research into a site of class conflict to base build and engage with working people involved in those struggles. This second step is important because neoliberalism has radically restructured political economy in various ways. This includes the growth of the service economy, logistics corporations such as Amazon, the “gig-economy” contracting practices of which the biggest example is Uber, etc. Many young people are being funneled into these forms of employment. While much has been written about these new political economies, socialists need to truly understand how they are affecting working people in direct and intimate ways. 

More often than not, as members of the Marxist Center have written, it is crucial for socialists to begin seeking out the site of these struggles within their own social position. Socialists engaging with a neighborhood without organic links and understanding of the community and its issues, can end up burned out and frustrated when struggle on their own terms doesn’t materialize.

Once the research has been done and the initial relationships built with those directly impacted by the issue, socialists can organize town halls and launch campaigns along with workers whose relationships they’ve developed. 

Base building is a marathon in which relationships with working people are built on a deep trust of commitment to each other. It is not a sprint and if socialists intend to develop this trust with working people and demonstrate that socialist politics are a guide to action and victory, they have to lead with strategies informed by it. 

A socialist in a workplace can successfully recruit co-workers in the ones and twos to attending a political meeting or participating in a study group, but this does little towards building power and organizing co-workers to launch a unionizing campaign or wage a contract fight. Even then, interest in discussing socialist politics divorced from struggle can quickly dissipate as the value of these politics in action is missed because the politics remains abstract. However, campaigns that can alter the relationship of exploitation or oppression and improve the conditions of working people (and the socialists who are also affected by these issues) will result in deep trust with the campaign and those engaged in it.

This is important as working people, particularly Black and people of color communities have developed a deep suspicion of politics and politicians that exploit their issues without action and follow-through. 

The strength of a base building project is that it brings into these efforts the leadership of working people to the frontlines of these issues. The point of socialists isn’t to simply advocate on behalf of people but to encourage the self-organization and self-activity of working people into collective action in the hopes that the value of socialist politics will, in the process of struggle, demonstrate their indispensability in achieving social gains. When working people embrace socialist politics and become the main drivers of that political movement, socialism will have secured a foothold in US political life.

These are steps that can’t be leapt over. The urgency to root socialist politics becomes more clear after every election cycle, as the rhetoric of social change retreats back to status quo ante for working class people. At a time when working people are desperately looking into politics to make sense of the world and change their circumstances, the stakes are high for the socialist movement to fill that role. Without a socialist movement that is intimately intertwined in the lives of working people, we risk the luster of socialist electoralism waning. Demoralization and despondency may take hold, threatening our class’s willingness to fight for its issues, repeating the quick rise and rapid decline characteristic of social movements in the US. The absence of a positive alternative vision to capitalism opens up space for right-wing forces to fill. Their solutions will continue to place crosshairs on communities most crucial to the revival of socialist politics in this country. 

As earth approaches severe climate catastrophes and economists foretell another economic downturn, the need for intentional and meticulous engagement with working class people’s struggles is urgent. There are no shortcuts on the road to power.

Julian Guerrero was born and raised in Queens, NYC by his Colombian immigrant parents. An active socialist and writer, Julian has been active in several social movements since 2010, student activism, and work place organizing as a rank-and-file member of SEIU 1199. In 2014, Julian was the campaign manager for Brian Jones in the Green Party gubernatorial campaign, alongside Howie Hawkins, against Andrew Cuomo in 2014 and has frequently written articles on New York City politics, criminal justice and labor issues. He is a founding member of the socialist podcast, Working Class Heroes.