The marginalization and removal of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primary has once again proven that the party is inherently hostile to its working-class “base.” Thousands across the country are rightly concluding that we need our own independent socialist working class party. But how should we go about furthering this break? There are those who preach imprudent patience. There are comrades who argue that we have to wait for objective conditions to ripen further. There are those who argue against a “premature break” with the Democratic Party. And there are many more who are simply uncertain about how to proceed. Reaching this point during a devastating pandemic and economic crisis further complicates but underlines the urgency of this discussion. The following is in no way conclusive but is meant as a contribution against bleak passivity.
Patience from Below vs. (Imprudent) Patience from Above
This article will make a number of arguments against “patience.” Here we need to disentangle the patience that is designed to put off needed political action and organization -- patience from above -- from the patience we need to have with each other as rank and file comrades -- patience from below. To form a new party we will need as many militants and class fighters as possible. This will include long standing revolutionaries and comrades new to the socialist movement. It will take some time and effort. We will need to put aside certain disagreements and comradely discuss others. This patience is necessary. It is, in fact, the opposite of the patience that will be preached by those who do not want us to form our own party. That patience is passivity. Patience from above is us waiting for other people to save us. Patience from below is about saving ourselves; and it will require active and urgent engagement from each and every one of us.
Reform, Revolution, DSA, Bernie
Over the past several years a new socialist movement formed in the United States, furthered by the experiences of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and the “election” of the revanchist semi-fascist Trump administration, among other things. The underlying material dynamics that produced this new socialist movement have been a four-decades long erosion of wages, social welfare, and working-class well-being. This slow-but-steady immiseration has been accompanied and furthered by mounting police racism, a nearly 20-year long “war on terror,” and other escalating barbarisms.
The largest beneficiary of the new socialist movement has been the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). In the wake of the Sanders 2016 campaign, DSA grew by tens of thousands, shed more conservative positions from its Harringtonite roots, and became a clearinghouse of socialists -- reformist, revolutionary, undecided, and in-between. This is important to note because some comrades outside of DSA continue to think of the organization as a competitor and/or monolithic. The former characterization is largely inaccurate and the latter completely untrue. There are legitimate criticisms to make of DSA -- and many of these are made by DSA comrades themselves. But the DSA of 2020 has more in common with the 1960s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) than it does the historic DSA of Michael Harrington. Indeed, SDS arose out of a similar “left anti-communist” formation, the League for Industrial Democracy. SDS went on to spawn several of the radical, socialist, and communist groups born of the 1960s student movement. Moreover, despite its uneven class composition, it is fair to argue that today’s DSA is more working-class than either the 1960s SDS or the Harringtonite DSA.
DSA has not been the only socialist organization to grow in the past several years. Several existing Marxist organizations have grown substantially and new organizations, networks, and publications have come into being. Moreover, an even larger milieu of working-class persons, largely younger, have come to self-identify as socialists.
This new socialist movement has come into being in dialectical relationship to the slow and steady immiseration of the US working-class. For forty years we saw what many have described as a one sided class war, with our side losing and steadily retreating and fragmenting; compounded by decades of war and occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. A whole generation has seen nothing but this steady decline. This has been a period of continuity and incremental decline (a bleed out); not rupture and discontinuity. Even episodic crises (such as 9.11 and the 2008 financial crisis) served to reinforce rather than disturb the trend.
In this context the de facto incrementalism of DSA -- and a certain strand of ideological Kautskyism among some socialist writers -- makes perfect sense. The erosion of working-class well-being has been -- despite periodic shocks -- more or less constant and incremental. The opposition, when it did arise, was marked by this reality. Generations have come into adulthood since the last radical explosion of struggle in the United States, which took organizational form in groups like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the Black Panthers, and the socialist and communist groups of the 1960s New Left. Even the memories of the 1970s wildcat strike wave have long faded. This fact, combined with neoliberalism’s incremental immiseration, also helps explain a tendency towards abstract propaganda among formally revolutionary organizations. A paucity of rapid dialectical shifts, particularly at the social level, inevitably abstracted the concept of revolution itself.
The democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders was also a logical response to this ongoing process of immiseration; an incremental solution to capital’s incremental attacks on labor. But the Bernie Sanders approach cannot, DNC machinations aside, survive the return of great shocks and disasters. Sanders could help, for example, by campaigning around the specific struggles of workers at the present moment. He took some good steps in this direction. Unfortunately, his endorsement of Joe Biden totally undermines these efforts. As a comrade in Chicago puts it, “Sanders could’ve weaponized our movement to organize strikes and fund other organizations doing vital work in our communities. We could've leveraged our movement and power of numbers to at least try and get actual worker relief…. What’s he doing? He’s telling us to vote for Joe Biden…. worse, Sanders is dissolving his campaign infrastructure into joint task forces and Biden’s campaign.”
Regardless, the impact of the current crises on the “normal” workings of capital and working-class lives is too immense for incremental approaches. This immensity requires us to start thinking in our own “leaps.” It begs us to rethink incrementalism, reform, revolution, the relationship of electoralism and direct action, mutual aid and state power, etc.
The question posed to the new socialist movement, therefore, is one of adaptation and survival -- the literal survival of massive numbers of working-class people, and the survival of our movement. Both require, we will argue, a reprioritization of working-class political and organizational independence. This logic is not lost on DSA comrades who already voted -- before the current crises -- not to endorse any Democratic candidate other than Bernie Sanders in the 2020 election.
There will be some comrades who try to stop us from breaking from the Democratic Party in the coming months. This will be predicated on the idea that we have established a “beachhead” in the party (AOC, etc.) and it would be a mistake to abandon it (or a similar argument). In our opinion this is wishful thinking (at best) that ignores the entire history of the party and the current political, economic, and social terrain.
The Democratic Party
Most immediately, the enormity of the current crises demands that the working-class stop outsourcing its political representation to a capitalist party.
Historically, the left has repeatedly tried to take over the Democratic Party and failed. In the 1970s and early 1980s the left had a much more significant beachhead than we have today. Over time this was metabolized. Progressive, activist, and even radical congressional representatives, city councilors, and mayors were compromised and pushed out. In the 1990s these “left-wing” Democrats, as well as some old school New Deal Democrats, were further marginalized by Bill Clinton’s rapprochement with neoliberal capital.
When the DNC united behind Joe Biden to stop Bernie Sanders in early March they told us, quite clearly, they cared more about stopping Sanders than beating Trump; that the party leadership was most concerned with maintaining its relationship with capital. They told us this by expediently uniting around the worst candidate in their primary field.
This is because the capitalist class controls the party. But the problem with the Democratic Party is not simply that the bourgeoisie controls it. There is a mass base of liberal middle-class landlords, small business people, and “professionals” that support the party and were glad to give Biden their votes over Sanders. Such a party resists reformation -- even in crude mathematical terms. The existence of this mass liberal petit-bourgeois layer puts the lie to the idea the party can be taken over. This also helps explain why some of our social democratic comrades have embraced a kind of “normie socialism” in futile searches for socialist versions of mythological “soccer moms.” As Jordy Cummings puts it, “there is no left-wing version of a swing vote.”
The Democratic Party’s historic role (before the neoliberal turn) was to ”get out in front” of radical demands, neutralize them, and provide a substitute more palatable to the ruling-class. During times of great turmoil and social unrest these reforms could be fairly substantial-if-insufficient (in the 1930s and 1960s in particular). But, beyond very minor reforms and occasional symbolism, today’s Democratic Party seems a pale version of even its historic self. Joe Biden’s meager paeans to Sanders supporters -- possible forgiveness of student debt and reducing the Medicare eligibility age to 60 -- reflect this devolution. The reasons for this institutional feebleness are rooted in the decline of US power, the evolution of the Democratic Party, and the enormity of the current crises.
The neoliberal Democratic Party abandoned its former role as the world’s “second most enthusiastic capitalist party” to became THE central party of neoliberal reform (even more so than the Republicans). It now combines a limited social liberalism with a ruthless neoliberal economics. This is why it has been unable (not just unwilling) to absorb substantial left-wing working-class economic demands as it did in the past. This is a critical aspect of why we need our own party – and why we cannot trust the Democrats to “bail out the people” or confront the party of extermination.
Out of Time
We must reject the arguments of imprudent patience:
We cannot break with the Democrats yet. Or, we cannot lose our beachhead in congress. Or, we should listen to Bernie. Or, sit this one out. Or, we need to discuss this over a very long period of time. Etc.
The two bourgeois parties are divided between the inertia of the (now largely lost) neoliberal status-quo (the Democrats) and a burgeoning exterminationism (the Republicans).
The latter party’s exterminationism does not need formal death camps. With pandemics and imminent ecological collapse, they can simply direct, or fail to direct, the forces of nature. Of course there are death camps too. What else can we call their prisons and ICE camps in the age of Covid 19?
Both the Democratic and Republican parties were always willing to cause mass casualties and deaths through their imperialist, anti-working-class, normative, sexist and racist policies. But something has changed in the past few years. The abject willingness to let hundreds of thousands of people die in the United States in a short period of time, with barely a pretense to stop it, is something new (or, more precisely, old enough that it predates all but the oldest of us -- in this sense we are seeing a return of the more rapid genocides the country was founded on).
We saw glimpses of this in Hurricane Katrina, in the AIDS crisis, the Flint water crisis, and so on. But what is new is the scale by which surplus labor is considered surplus population – even at the core of US imperialism. Of course it is still racialized and othered -- as will be the lion's share of the victims. This is already evident in the racial disparities in Covid 19 death rates, escalating police repression in Black communities, and racist deployment of testing facilities. At the same time, othering often conceals a parallel process of saming. We are now seeing conditions of working-class life common in communities of color and the global “periphery” partially generalized into the mainstream of US life. In this context, racism will also be used to obscure working-class suffering and death across race.
It is important for us to understand that the seeming incompetence of most bourgeois states dealing with the pandemic isn’t a bug, it’s a racist and anti-working-class feature.
We are also seeing, in another sense, the lessons of the past twenty years of war brought home. Our ruling class has learned that it is not truly necessary, for example, as with classical imperialism, to install friendly regimes in countries that pose a threat to US power. It is enough to effectively destroy them through bombs, sanctions, etc. To reduce their capacity for "civilization," i.e. their ability to organize independent of US power. Of course it is all imperialism. But it comes in a different form than the imperialism of the post-WW2 years. They don't need to create societies that mirror the US. They just need to create wastelands. They do not need to remake the current US working-class in their own image. They can create wastelands at home too.
Until recently, it would’ve been unthinkable, even in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic went unchecked, for the US government to allow a lethal mass respiratory pandemic like Covid 19 to go more or less unchallenged. There are several reasons for this (in addition to anti-gay bigotry).
First of all, the nature of labor before 2000, and its political expression in mainstream politics, was different. It was “on the way” to where it is now. But US society still bore the marks of the New Deal, the labor movement, Civil Rights, and structural Keynesian holdovers from the post-war boom. Moreover, our ruling-class was, while still the enemy, far less decadent and myopic, and far more concerned with its global political leadership role (as the world’s only capitalist “superpower.”) Remember that this is why a number of wealthy people supported the early phases of the Civil Rights movement (while trying to “reign it in” at the same time) -- because of how segregation and racism made the US look in imperial competition with the USSR. This logic still continued in some form well into the 1990s.
Lean production, the automation that came with the tech booms, and globalized regional production and distribution systems – which have facilitated the pandemic and fostered the ineffectual responses to it – were all still in development in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, our rulers couldn't let this kind of catastrophe happen without a challenge because the expanded reproduction of industrial capital still required a large army of industrial workers in the US and a certain kind of relationship to global markets.
To say this isn’t to minimize the importance of the ten percent or so of the US workforce still engaged in industrial production. It is to point out a shift in the balance of forces.
While US labor lost strike after strike in the 1980s the industrial unions had far more social power and sector penetration than the unions do now. Allowing an indiscriminate pandemic to run amok (as Trump has mostly done) would have risked provoking the then still large unions all at once. At the tactical level the US labor movement was defeated in the 1980s not because the unions were objectively weak but because they took each fight on separately and accepted the logic of productivity inherited from the post-war boom. The unions accepted a framework of mutual capital-labor gains because that was the “social contract” in place from WW2 until the early 1970s. That “social contract” was revoked by the capitalists. Organized labor, in part because of its ties to the Democratic Party, was unable to fully comprehend this fundamental shift.
The current health and economic crises further upends class collaborationist logic. Each and every day the crises demystify the conflict between use and exchange value. Moreover, again in Marxist terms, this exposes how the “post-human” ruling-class, always willing to destroy constant capital and dead labor (machines and material) to restore profitability, is once again willing to destroy large swaths of variable capital and living labor (workers and human beings).
George W. Bush famously cleared out the “responsible” wing of US imperialists throughout the war on terror. This produced, probably in part by accident, the imperial wasteland policy we see today. This was continued by Barack Obama. Trump cleared out the rest of the “responsible” Republicans when it came to US policy more generally. Therefore, the historic norms of US “democracy” – really the gentlemen’s agreements of the ruling class – have been substantially erased in the past few years. Not because of Russia or any such liberal bullshit but because of attenuation of US power. These norms were in many ways polite fictions -- which is why they were so fragile. But the norms did preclude things like allowing massive numbers of people in the US to be killed by government (in)action over a very short period of time, as those norms included the idea of projecting government legitimacy (in the eyes of both the US population and the global political scene). Sections of the US population could be targeted and destroyed. But this required pretext and had to unfold over time, as it did with the racist wars on crime and drugs that produced mass incarceration.
The developments of the past twenty years have left the Democratic Party as the primary representative of a craven, paralyzed, and uncertain (neo-)liberal bourgeoisie.
With politics polarized (due to the perceived failure of mainstream Republicans and Democrats, the slow immiseration of workers under “normal” neoliberalism, the economic crash of 2008, etc.) the “left” (working-class) base of the Democratic Party has been basically trapped, but the right-wing base (the fascist or near fascist petit-bourgeoisie) of the Republican Party has taken it over in collaboration with an increasingly exterminationist wing of capital.
Indeed, perhaps a third of the US population, approaching half the white population, is turning toward fascism. This is, to be clear, a new development. This was not the case in the 1990s and 1980s. Easily a third of the population (or far more) was racist, sexist, bigoted, conservative. But this was not a substantially organized (or even disorganized) fascist current. Over the past decade racist code-words have shed much of their coding. Mainstream implications that the poor (or Black, or gay, or persons who are disabled, or immigrant) deserve their individual fates have been increasingly replaced by mainstream declarations that the poor (or Black, or gay, or persons who are disabled, or immigrant) deserve a collective fate.
Recognizing this evolution of political violence does not minimize what came before in any way. What came before produced what is happening now. But it is important for us to prepare ourselves for things far worse than we could have imagined just a few years ago. This is why social democratic entreaties to an abstract patience – as well as old Trotskyist canards about waiting on objective conditions – are equally mistaken. The time to act is now because time is literally running out.
Covid 19 is just the beginning. The economic crisis that is developing as well as the crises that will be caused by climate change will create many more existential threats to large swaths of the population in the US and internationally. Especially as our bourgeoisie adapts itself further to the capitalist death cult it has created. A large section of our ruling-class (and middle-class) is fine with us dying – in a sharp escalation of the political and social violence we’ve grown accustomed to in recent decades. We're looking at the prospect of hundreds of thousands of people dying in a very short time en masse (in the US alone). And that is just the start.
What should we do?
DSA -- and the broader socialist movement -- needs to simultaneously move toward left unity and independence from the capitalist Democratic Party. This will move us from the sidelines to the center of our own politics. It means taking uncontested ownership over OUR response to the current crises. There are two questions we need to answer here. 1) What do we do in the immediate to foster the break with the Democrats and create an independent socialist working-class party? And 2) What should that party be / look like / do? I will try to sketch some rough ideas but this must be more definitively answered by the movement itself. In this sense we must be patient with each other.
Getting Started
To start, all those in the US who believe in working-class political independence should immediately begin networking in our DSA chapters and other socialist groups, organizing debates, lobbying comrades, etc., proposing resolutions on this question. We should do this without interrupting or sacrificing the important community, labor, and mutual aid work that is now going on. In fact, we should underline the importance of this work. We should see it as part of the basis for organizing a new party. At the same time we can't put off political independence for two, four, or six more years. We have run out of time. The Covid 19 crisis is just the beginning. There will be more crises, as noted, particularly the growing economic crisis, multiple looming crises around climate change, and the threat of inter-imperialist conflict.
That said, simply making the aforementioned political points is woefully insufficient.
We have to do the practical work: counting heads and making very concrete arguments and plans for actualizing a hard political break -- in our organizations, in DSA chapters, in Socialist Alternative, Marxist Center and its affiliates, Left Voice, Solidarity, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, in the pages of Spectre and Rampant and other socialist journals, among independent comrades, and among other socialists who reject the Democratic Party. As the pandemic eventually wanes, we need to have already built the networks and connections and be ready to meet “in real life” and found a party. We want leaders in our organizations to act. But we should not wait for them to do so.
In this process, we should avoid, among other things, raising tactical disagreements to polemical levels -- as in the recent debate between comrades in the DSA Reform and Revolution (R&R) caucus and comrades in SA, largely about the timetable of moving forward with party foundation. One could argue that the SA position is too optimistic and the R&R position is somewhat pessimistic. But these are, in part, secondary matters. And on these secondary matters we should compromise in order to build the largest force possible.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that we can form a party and impact the elections this year -- in no small part because half of us are being worked (possibly to death) in “essential” jobs, and the other half are quarantined and/or unemployed. If we rush the formation of a party in order to collectively run or endorse independent candidates this year we may fail in building a solid organizational foundation. Elections are important. But more important is making sure a new party includes as many class-conscious militants as possible. And many of those comrades are currently either on the front lines or trapped inside decayed bungalows, trailers, and tenements.
Adam Turl: For the record I will most likely be voting for Howie Hawkins.
At the same time, SA is correct in its sense of urgency. We need to be laying the groundwork now for the formation of a party; and that is not unrelated to the 2020 election. But such a party must be woven together through thousands of discussions in hundreds of local groups. One way to handle this particular debate could be for SA to go ahead with its allies and run a “Democratic Socialist” political campaign in 2020 but remain clearly open to the formation of a broader party with many other comrades in the months after the November election. In this way we could all learn from SA’s experience without sabotaging the need for a wider and larger formation after the immediate pandemic crisis wanes.
There are, of course, many obstacles to forming a political party in the US -- and we can expect the ruling-class to use those obstacles to their full advantage. But that is no reason for undue delay. In fact, quite the opposite.
What Kind of Party?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with running socialists for office. But that cannot be the sole, or even the main, purpose of our party. We must be independent of the Democrats but we must emphasize, above all, the importance of our party as a base of militant organizing within the class. That means the labor, strike, strike-support, direct action, anti-racist, housing, and other work that we are doing in DSA, and in other socialist and activist groups, needs to be AT THE CENTER of our project. This also means that the party must actively oppose all forms of oppression and US imperialism. The electoral work must be subordinated to, and flow from, that organizing. Moreover, we should reject false and misleading counter-positioning of mass politics and movement work. This counter-positioning poses as “radical” when it is actually very conservative. For example, there has been some effort to counter the urgent socialist mutual aid work to “mass electoral work” that deals with “state power.” This misunderstands the nature of mutual aid work in organizing the class – particularly in times of crisis when millions are facing homelessness and hunger. It also fails to understand that there is mutually reinforcing dynamic between our movement, labor, and community work, and our more national and global aspirations. One of the last bastions of defense against the fascists during Pinochet’s coup in Chile were the Cordones and their affiliated neighborhood "mutual aid" organizations.
A note on Trot bashing
One obstacle to the project of forming an independent socialist labor party is some recent “anti-Trot” sentiment among some layers of the US left. Personally, We may longer describe ourselves as Trotskyists because we think our movement needs to move beyond ossified categories from lost centuries. But there is a problem here, a problem exacerbated by the implosion of the US International Socialist Organization (ISO) last year.
Leon Trotsky, of course, and even more so Trotskyist organizations, made any number of mistakes. Some of these were particular to Trotskyism. Most of these mistakes, however, were made by ALL the socialist currents that aimed to build revolutionary parties over the past several decades. We all failed -- at least in the states of the economic core -- and we mostly produced toy Bolshevik sects (Trot, Maoist, or otherwise). There are a number of objective and subjective reasons for these failures. Going over these is not the point of this article.
The main problem here is that some of the current anti-Trotskyism short-circuits discussion of the need for political class independence. This anti-Trotskyism is often pushed by those most reluctant to break with the Democratic Party, those most reluctant to break with corrupt trade union leaders, and those most likely to see workers as subjects rather than actors in struggle. It is pushed as anti-Trotskyism, in part, because the largest US socialist organizations demanding this independence in recent years were formally Trotskyist. Until last year the ISO and SA -- and now SA and Left Voice, among others.
Moreover, a genuine working-class socialist party must be open to all socialist tendencies willing to make working-class unity and political independence a top priority.
Our Own Party: No Capitalists Allowed
We do not have time to wait. The new socialist movement must take its lead from our siblings striking Amazon warehouses and organizing rent strikes. These are rapidly generalizing struggles for literal survival. We cannot trust a capitalist party to give them political expression. We cannot trust a capitalist party to resist looming threats of authoritarianism, exterminationism, and fascism. We are facing the gravest health crisis since the Spanish Flu Pandemic and an economic crisis possibly worse than the Great Depression. We now have more organized socialists (in DSA and other organizations) than at any time since the early 1970s. Millions of workers who supported the social democratic campaign of Bernie Sanders are furious or despondent and looking for answers. Our siblings have lost their incomes. They are getting sick. They are delivering food surrounded by invisible monsters. They are being sent into hospital rooms to care for the plague’s victims without protective gear. Our political voice needs to be our own. Forming our own party will not be easy. But we need to transition from discussing it as an abstract possibility to discussing how to accomplish it as fact.
No one is coming to save us but ourselves.
Adam Turl is an editor at Red Wedge and a member of DSA in Las Vegas. Saman Sepehri is a member of DSA in Chicago. Several comrades commented on earlier drafts of this article. Their feedback was extremely useful. The authors are solely responsible, however, for the final content of this piece, particularly on any errors of fact or political strategy.