David Camfield: If you’re serious about socialist politics, you recognize that socialists need to work together. For a socialist not to be a member, or at least a supporter, of any socialist political organization is a sign that they’re either living somewhere where there’s no group that’s worth joining—which is sadly true in too many places today—or that they’re not serious about being politically active.
But does the need for socialists to be organized to be as effective as possible mean that socialist groups today should consider themselves to be parties or the beginnings of parties? How can we best work towards socialist political organizations that genuinely deserve to be called parties? These are the questions that this episode’s guest Charlie Post and I are going to discuss.
Charlie, would you introduce yourself and tell listeners about your political background, particularly with respect to these issues?
Charlie Post: Okay. I’ve been living in New York for about 40 years now. I’m originally from New York, and being that I’m a bit older than you, I’m actually part of the tail end of what was sometimes called the “Generation of 1968.”
I radicalized as a young teenager around Vietnam and the Black struggle in the U.S. and became a Marxist in the wake of the postal wildcat strike of 1970, where, for the first time, I saw the capacity of industrial workers to exercise much more social power than students and others. And I saw the effects of collective struggle on working-class consciousness.
That was around the time I was 16, and I started looking for a Marxist group to join. Shortly after I turned 17, I ended up in the youth group of what was then the largest Trotskyist organization in the United States, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which had very different politics than the British Socialist Workers Party, which most people are familiar with.
I was involved in a series of debates and was expelled in 1974. Afterwards, I was involved in various attempts to create groups and ended up coming around, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of comrades who were both coming out of my political tradition—which was the European-based Fourth International and the U.S. International Socialists—called Workers’ Power.
From there, Workers’ Power became involved in a regroupment of three small socialist groups in 1986 that formed Solidarity, of which I was a member until 2015. There was a period of time when I didn’t feel I could actually join a group and be a committed member, but I became one of the founding members of the Tempest Collective.
The attempts by various Trotskyist groups that were committed in one way or another to the politics of revolutionary socialism from below to transform small groups of former students into either the core of a revolutionary party or a revolutionary party with real influence among working people were failures.
But every other current on the Left was also unable to make that transition, including the much larger and more influential currents influenced by Maoism and Marxism-Leninism. Part of the foundation of Solidarity was a recognition that this model of building socialist groups was a dead end.
And over time, through discussions within Solidarity and our experimentations and practice, another comrade and I wrote a pamphlet for the organization called “Socialist Organization Today.” In the pamphlet, we try to explain why the various attempts of small groups to transform themselves into the core of or an actual revolutionary party failed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and why a different model of revolutionary socialist organization was necessary.
While I left Solidarity for very specific political reasons that had more to do with its political perspective than it did with its organizational perspective, I felt comfortable being part of the group of comrades who formed Tempest. Many of them came out of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the United States, and they, too, recognized the limits and failures of what they labeled the micro-sect model.
So, my thinking on this question of socialist parties has been shaped by a little over five decades of political activity and an attempt to understand why—despite the best efforts of very committed, very honest revolutionaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the effort of socialist formations to actually become significant organizations that were able to influence the course of working-class struggles failed so miserably. This is why we must ask what revolutionary socialists need to do today to prepare for that eventuality, without pretending to be it in miniature.
DC: Thanks for that. We’ll pick up on some of these things you’ve talked about as we go. I should mention that, for my part, the first socialist group I was in was the International Socialists, which I joined in 1988 and left early in 1996, along with a minority of other IS members who, with some other socialists, then formed the New Socialist Group, which formally dissolved in 2017.
In the early 1990s, the IS had become more aggressively self-promoting, declaring that it was beginning to build a revolutionary party. And this was a shift that was happening across the international network headed by the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, a network called the IS Tendency. The Canadian IS was its affiliate.
That shift led to changes in the group that a couple of years later led to the split that I was part of. The New Socialist Group, which I was in, rejected the idea that tiny socialist groups should try to organize as if they were socialist parties, but only smaller— the micro-party or micro-sect model. Some people also call that vanguardism.
So, to start, there’s some debate among socialists about whether socialist parties are even needed for the transformation of society. There’s more debate, though, about what kind of party would be needed. Then, there’s even more debate about how to work towards the creation of such parties.
Before we talk about those things, though, we need to clarify what exactly we mean by a revolutionary socialist party, since I think there are a lot of misunderstandings about that. What’s your take on that?
CP: A revolutionary socialist party is an organization that actually organizes a substantial portion of the most militant and radical working-class people in a given society and an organization that has the ability to influence the course of social and class struggles. I believe such a party is necessary. I believe organization is necessary because I believe that working-class consciousness always develops episodically and unevenly. And this comes from the basic tenet of socialism from below: It’s through the self activity of working people coming together—striking in a workplace, confronting a landlord, opposing an imperialist war, confronting the state and capital—that these people develop radical consciousness, a notion that their interests are fundamentally different and opposed to those of capital and the state, and that there is a need for a fundamentally different type of society now.
Working people in their vast majority cannot be always engaged in struggle, particularly strike activity, because as Marx tells us, we’re separated from the means of production and we need to sell our labor power and go to work for capitalists and be exploited in order to survive. This means that working people enter struggle episodically and that consciousness develops unevenly.
Without organizing those who’ve come to similar conclusions, these lessons and ideas dissipate. This is why a revolutionary socialist party is necessary, but it has to be a party that actually has real roots in a large layer of the working class that is actually radicalized. And it’s because that layer doesn’t exist, for very specific historical reasons, that I believe that many of the previous attempts to turn small groups into revolutionary parties have failed.
DC: So let’s dig into the history of socialist party-building and go back to its beginnings in the late 1800s. Do you want to start taking us through some of that history?
CP: You begin to see the emergence of independent working-class and socialist groupings as early as the 1860s and 1870s. Many of these get grouped together in what was called the International Workingman’s Association or First International. Many of these parties and organizations were relatively small, a few thousand members, but they had real roots among the more militant, the more radical layers of workers.
Most of them did not survive the economic downturn of the late 1870s-early 1880s. Now, the period of the 1880s and 1890s was a long period of relative capitalist stagnation—low profits, continuous recessions, etc. In this period there was also wave after wave of working-class struggles.Most of them were defensive in relation to wages, working conditions, and the like.
These struggles happened in a number of countries, particularly in capitalist Europe, with Germany being the most important. But we also see them, to some extent, in France, Italy, and the United States, where we see the emergence of small mass parties, with 20,000 to 50,000 members, and some ability to actually contest elections and elect working-class representatives to various legislative or parliamentary bodies.
These small mass parties, outside the U.S., were based on relatively small minority or non-majority unions, most of them organized along industrial lines, but generally whose members were radicalized skilled workers, machinists, etc. In other countries—France, Spain, Portugal, and other parts of the world—we also see the emergence of mass trade unions that present themselves as revolutionary. You see the growth of what’s sometimes called revolutionary syndicalism.
Capitalism entered a period of growth and high profitability between the mid 1890s and the First World War. In this period, we see the emergence of truly massive working-class parties and radical political organizations out of a wave of strikes, first in the 1890s, then around 1905-1907, the most visible manifestation being the Russian Revolution of 1905-1906. Then, there’s a wave of strikes between 1911 and 1914, which confronted issues of de-skilling.
Mass parties, the largest being the German Social Democratic Party, emerged from these strike waves. As hard as it will be for those who are familiar with German social democracy today to believe, the Party presented itself to the world as a revolutionary party, as a party intent upon the destruction of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. We see similarly sized parties to some extent in France and Italy, and smaller organizations in the underground in the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Canadian state.
These parties brought together two distinctive groups of workers. On the one hand, the activist core of these parties was a layer of militant workers—a real workers’ vanguard of shop floor and community leaders. These were the women and men who attempted to continue the struggle between mass upsurges and who actually could lead real working-class struggles. On the other hand, these social democratic parties also included a growing layer of full-time officials in the newly legalized trade unions and of elected officials, party functionaries, journalists, etc. whose livelihood depended on the growth and stability of the parties and unions.
Tensions emerged between a revolutionary left wing, based on the militant worker activists, and a more reformist right wing and center, based in the union and party officialdom. The first manifestation of this conflict emerged in German social democracy in the late 1890s, in the debates between the majority of the party and the revisionists around Eduard Bernstein. By 1910, 1911, we see a three-way differentiation between a right wing of trade union and party officials, who openly abandoned revolutionary politics; a center around Kautsky, which claimed to be Marxist and revolutionary; and a left wing that argued for a break with the reformists and for preparing the working class today for revolutionary struggle through mass strikes.
On the revolutionary Left, you start to see people like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Poland, Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga in Italy, and what becomes known as the Bolshevik faction of Russian social democracy. We also see in this period the growth in many countries of revolutionary syndicalism, of attempts to build unions that are not only trying to organize workers around their immediate interests—their wages, hours, and most importantly working conditions—but also that are explicitly revolutionary and anti-capitalist. The best known to people in North America is the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. Later in Canada, there was also the One Big Union.
The First World War creates a schism within the mass political and industrial organizations. The question of whether or not to support your capitalist government in imperialist war leads to splits in these mass organizations. This rupture crystallized in the years after the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were a unique formation in the pre-1914 period. Because Russia was an absolutist autocracy, there was no space to consolidate a layer of officials either in trade unions or parliament. Unions were illegal for the most part, and parliament was an empty shell in Russia. So, the Bolsheviks, I would argue, unintentionally built an organization of the most radical and revolutionary workers independent of the reformist officialdom. By 1913, they recruited most of the leaders of the big strike waves in the big factories in Moscow, Petrograd, and other Russian industrial centers.
The Russian Revolution forced socialists and radicals all over the world to make choices about their organizational affiliation. By 1921, the radical workers’ vanguard had formed independent parties in a number of countries. The largest was the Germany Communist Party, with some 400,000 members. I once did a calculation and found that that would be the equivalent of 1.2 million workers in the United States, and it was mostly made up of industrial workers and their family members, particularly in the metal working industries, longshoring, and mining. We see smaller mass parties in Italy and France, and smaller Communist Parties in countries like Britain, the United States, and Canada.
Even these smaller parties gathered together thousands of experienced working-class militants, both from the left wing of the socialist parties that existed in these countries and from the ranks of revolutionary syndicalists. Through the 1920s, these parties struggled with varying degrees of success to displace social democracy, reformism, as the main voice of the working class.
They had some degree of success depending on the pace of the class struggle, but they had through the 1920s, organized and consolidated a layer of radicalized, revolutionary-minded workers. So, just to give you an example on the smaller end of things: By 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression in the United States, the Communist Party had gone through several very damaging splits, but it still had a membership of 10,000 to 15,000 workers, which today would be a hundred thousand. It was the largest organization of radicalized revolutionary workers in the United States.
Now, the big problem was that these Communist Parties were grouped together in a new International, the Communist International, also known as the Third International, that was increasingly dominated by and eventually became subservient to the emerging new ruling class in Russia. As the Russian Revolution was isolated and council democracy and party democracy were strangled in the Soviet Union, a new ruling class emerged around the officialdom of the Party and the state. This officialdom justified itself as building socialism in one country and transformed the Communist Parties from instruments of world revolution, which needed to be rooted in their national realities to advance the class struggle, into what Trotsky called “border guards for the Soviet Union.” The role of revolutionaries outside the “socialist fatherland” was now preventing the capitalist powers from strangling the Stalinist ruling class’s attempt to build so-called socialism in one country. This led to tremendous distortions and errors in political orientation.
From 1928 to 1933, the Communist Parties proclaimed that capitalism in the West was entering its terminal crisis. And in this terminal crisis, the only thing that kept capitalism in power was social democracy. Communists around the world labeled the social democratic parties “social fascist” and argued that they were, in fact, the main enemy, not actually growing fascism in countries like Germany. This policy led to sharp divisions in the labor movement and the inability, particularly in Germany, to mount a united front in the streets—not in the ballot box, but in the streets—to stop the fascist gangs.
When Hitler took power, the German Communist Party firmly believed that he would last a few weeks and then they would come to power within a year. Hitler was able to demolish the oldest, largest, and best organized working-class movement in the world. The mass parties, both of social democracy and Communism, and the largest trade union movement in the world were completely destroyed. By 1934, the Communist International finally realized that it had a very potent threat practically on its borders in fascist Germany and fascist Italy and began to search for an alternative strategy to protect itself.
After a couple of years of experimentation, they hit upon what is known as the Popular Front strategy. The Popular Front saw the Communist Parties adapting the social democrats’ strategy for fighting fascism and reaction. Rather than organizing working-class unity in the streets and on the picket lines to confront fascist gangs and capital, they looked to electoral alliances, both with the reformist political parties like social democracy and with liberal capitalists.This strategy turned away from building rank and file movements in workplaces and unions, while Communists aligned with progressive trade union officials. In Spain, the Popular Front led to disaster—to the derailing and defeat of an actual workers’ and peasants’ revolution. In France, there were mass strikes and factory occupations in 1936, which the Communist Party actually disorganized.
The Popular Front strategy adopted in 1935-1936 shaped the political and sociological transformation of the Communist Parties for the next 70 years, particularly after the Second World War, when they grew to mass scale in countries like Italy and France because of their role in the anti-Nazi resistance, becoming essentially parties of left-wing reform, not revolution. They recruited and educated workers in the ideas that “revolution is somewhere off way in the distance. And what we need to do today is build a progressive alliance in one form or another,” which included not only reform socialists but also trade union officials and certain liberal capitalists—those who are willing to “defend democracy” and enter diplomatic alliances with the Soviet Union.
This changes both the political coloration of the Communist Parties and also their sociological character. Before the mid thirties, the Communist Party recruited the most militant working-class people who were intent upon finding every possible way to advance the struggle against the boss, the landlord, and the state, and who, particularly in the workplaces, saw themselves as independent of the full-time officialdom of the unions, which they saw, correctly in my opinion, as inherently conservative. After 1935-1936, the Communist Parties began to become integrated into that trade union officialdom— leading the left wing of the officialdom in Britain and the U.S. and becoming the officials of the largest trade union federations in France and Italy.
At that point, people who joined the Communist Parties were no longer the most uncompromising workplace militants who were willing to do anything possible to stop the boss, including confronting their union leaders. Instead, the Communist Party became a vehicle to be recruited into the labor officialdom. If you join the party, you can become a shop steward and get time off from work. If you follow the “line” you can move up and become a full-time official of a local or an international. Thus, the Communist Parties by the late 1950s, early 1960s, were no longer mass organizations of revolutionary-minded workers but organizations that primarily attracted workers who were attracted to a left-reformist politics. Many became left-leaning trade union officials.
Now this, in my opinion, poses a huge and unacknowledged problem for the layers of young people who radicalized from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. These are people who radicalized in the wake of the Cuban and Algerian Revolutions, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in opposition to the U.S. War in Vietnam, and in anti-racist struggles. By the late 1960s, these young radicals were orienting toward the growing wave of working-class militancy in the wake of the French May-June events and the strike waves that swept the Global North. Even in the U.S. and Canada, which have the more politically conservative labor movements, you see sharp increases in strike activity, much of it opposed by the official leaders of the unions. In this cauldron, thousands of young people, mostly college students and ex-college students but also some young workers who were increasingly alienated by the war, racism, and the incredibly alienated, degraded work they had to do in factories, began to move left.
And many of them correctly said, Okay, if we’re serious about revolutionary politics, we’ve got to form organizations, and we eventually have to build a party. Now, most of us at that point, and I will include myself as a somewhat naive late-teen, early-twenties person, believed that we were in a new epoch of world revolution equivalent to what swept across the world from 1917 to 1923. We were convinced that we were going to see, especially as the global economic crisis took hold through the early 1970s, growing class battles. The labor officials would be unable to deal with the capitalist offensive, and that this would create opportunities to build new mass revolutionary parties.
What we didn’t acknowledge was that there had been a break in the history of what we can actually call a workers’ vanguard, the layer of radical and revolutionary-minded workers that had been created and recreated in class battles from the late 1870s-1880s through the 1930s. That layer had been disorganized, both politically and ideologically, by Popular Front politics and sociologically by its increasing integration into the trade union officialdom.
So, what you see again in the late 1960s and early 1970s is dozens of groups throughout the capitalist world—whether they are leaning towards some variant of socialism from below or some version of Marxist-Leninism, usually inspired by Maoism and the Chinese Revolution— throw themselves into working-class struggles and “centralize” themselves. Others were inspired by variants of socialism from below. All of them “Bolshevized” their organizations, becoming really tough, clamping down on internal discussion, and building “authoritative,” actually authoritarian, leadership. They believe that if they just pursue their line and act as parties in miniature, as micro-sects, they’ll become mass parties. With very few exceptions, these end in disaster.
The two groups that were able to get through this period and have some cadre and some base among a much thinner layer of workers were the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire in France—which maintained 1000-2000 members, the equivalent of 5,000 to 10,000 in the U.S., before growing to over 3,000 in the wake of the 1995 mass strikes—and what becomes the British Socialist Workers Party, which also had several thousand members and some real influence in British society. Now, for a variety of reasons, these groups shrank radically in the early part of this century.
For the most part, most of my generation, people who had gone into party building activity, whether of a Trotskyist or a Maoist variant, ended up by the 1980s either leaving politics completely or simply becoming reformist socialists. By 1985, almost everyone I knew who had been a Maoist back in the 1960s and 1970s was eagerly supporting Jesse Jackson’s run in the Democratic primaries. People who had believed that every trade union official above a shop steward was automatically a sellout were now pursuing careers in the trade union officialdom, either as elected officers or as staffers.
The crisis of the revolutionary Left and the reformist Left’s embrace of neo-liberalism opened a period of experimentation from the 1990s onward, during which we see the emergence of new “broad” parties that reject neo-liberalism and, in a few cases, capitalism. The most successful of these was the Workers’ Party in Brazil, which emerged out of struggles in the 1970s and 1980s, in the workplaces, in the favelas, etc.. They looked in some ways like pre-World War I social democracy. They brought together radicalized layers of workers and intellectuals and some left-leaning trade union officials, parliamentary politicians, etc. We also saw the emergence of the Party of Communist Refoundation in Italy and Die Linke in Germany. All of these groups were attempting to respond to both the failure of previous revolutionary party-building movements and the crisis of reformism. In the early 1990s, both the social democratic parties and what’s left of the Communist Parties, after the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” are no longer even capable of successfully fighting for reforms. For periods of time, these “broad Left” parties had some resonance, but all of them go through their own crises as tensions between the two wings—the radicalized, revolutionary-minded base, and their officials—lead them into an impasse.
Now, I firmly believe that these sorts of broad parties will continue to emerge because the material conditions for the revolutionary Left to transform itself into a mass independent revolutionary party simply don’t exist; and the official parties of the labor movement and the Left have abandoned the struggle for reform. Today, we see the revival of Die Linke in Germany after they threw out some of their most extreme right-wing elements. In Britain, there’s Your Party, which seems to be intent on aborting itself before it’s ever born.
Just to sum up, and this is a sort of broad sweep: from the 1870s to the 1930s, we see, through continuous waves of working-class struggles, the emergence of a true mass working-class vanguard of radicalized workers who are active in their neighborhoods, their workplaces, etc., who formed the left-wing before the First World War of social democracy, and then became the mass base of Communism in the 1920s and 1930s. As the Communist Parties are bureaucratized, Stalinized, subordinated to the ruling elites—the ruling classes in the Soviet Union and then later China, etc.— they, even while going on zigs and zags through ultra-leftism, fundamentally begin to move in a reformist direction and become themselves very similar to the mass social democratic parties.
This not only politically disorients radical workers, it transforms them sociologically from workplace and community fighters into candidates to become full-time officials. This throws up a tremendous obstacle to the party-building efforts of the 1960s and 1970s. And since then, what’s left of the revolutionary Left has tried to figure out how to proceed in a situation that all of us find, in many ways, unexpected.
DC: That’s a very helpful overview of a lot of history, so thanks for that, Charlie. Let’s go back now and just pick up on the thread about the so-called party-building groups that started to emerge in the late 1960s. As you said, most of those groups had either collapsed or shrunk dramatically by the early 1980s, and these groups attracted lots of very committed young fighters of your generation.
Why do those groups do so poorly? Today many people who went through that experience and lots of people who didn’t but watched them would say it was because any kind of revolutionary politics is wrong. But I think that’s not a very helpful explanation.
CP: It’s not because revolution is impossible, and it’s certainly not because a revolutionary transformation of society is not necessary to the future survival of our species. The micro-sect strategy failed for a variety of reasons. The most fundamental was that the human material, the layer of radicalized workers that would be the base for a real revolutionary socialist party— rooted in that significant minority of workers who actually can play leading roles in struggles—had ceased to exist.
Now, it didn’t help that most of the party-building groups made all sorts of subjective errors. In North America, the majority of these groups openly identified with one strand or another of socialism from above, some variant of Stalinism, mostly pro-Chinese Stalinism, some pro-Cuban, but they were basically Stalinists. They had, as a result, a limited repertoire of how to relate to actual struggles they might be involved in. These groups would swing wildly between ultra-left abstentionism and adaptation to whoever was leading the struggle.
For the Trotskyist groups, who had ostensibly better politics, they shared with the Maoist and Stalinist groups a notion that, in order for us to win leadership in this growing layer of radical workers, we had to be organizationally and politically homogeneous. Internal debate and discussion was not seen as a sign of the health of a group that was rooted in reality and was grappling with new challenges, but instead as deviations. But again, the fundamental problem was that the human material for these projects didn’t exist. And that only actually worsens their commitment to an ideological purity and an organizational despotism in order to make up for that fact.
Rather than acknowledging that what they were trying to do might not be possible in their particular historical moment, they began to beat up themselves and their members by saying, you’re not trying hard enough, you’re not disciplined enough, you’re deviating from the line. Most of the people who went into these projects had incredibly unrealistic expectations, and I have to include myself here as well. I firmly believed until the late 1970s that we were on the verge of the most important political recomposition of the working class since the Russian Revolution. I was convinced there would be mass splits in the social democratic and Communist parties in Europe, and that one or another variant of socialism from below would emerge as a mass current. A very small minority of comrades and I were able to adjust our expectations while maintaining a revolutionary politics, a politics that understood that, even in a period of working-class retreat, the difference between reformists and revolutionaries matters in terms of how you conduct even those defensive struggles. The vast majority of the people I radicalized with weren’t able to make that transition, and most of them left politics completely because they thought it was simply pointless. And the majority who remained political adapted to a social democratic or reformist realism.
DC: I think that really highlights the importance of having a historical and materialist understanding of the working class, not treating the working class as an abstraction that jumps from the pages of Marx’s Capital into social reality. There’s a very complex process the working class goes through in terms of how forms of organization develop, how relationships within the class and among different sections of workers are made and then remade, and so on. And so we have to be much more concrete in how we think about the working class.
We’re trying to contribute to the self-organization and self-emancipation of that class, but again, the working class is not an abstraction and we have to recognize the ground on which we fight— not just in terms of how capital is organized and what’s happening to capitalism, but also where the working class is in relation to all of that.
CP: Right. Despite waving the selected works of Lenin, people in my day ignored his most important contribution, which is that the “living soul” of Marxism is the concrete analysis of the concrete conjuncture—the actual balance of class forces and state of working-class self-organization and self-activity.
DC: Unfortunately, most of what’s there on the far Left today has not learned useful lessons from the experience of the generation that you’ve just talked about. The most visible far-left groups either organize using the kind of micro-party model and proclaim themselves to be parties, like the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in the U.S. and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in the Canadian state, or they use the micro-party model, what they would call building a Leninist organization, while recognizing in some sense that they’re not yet what they see as a party. Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and Left Voice voice in the U.S. and the International Socialists in Canada, I think, would all fall into that category.
This party-building approach generates very strong pressures to act in sectarian ways that don’t actually help advance the struggles of working-class and oppressed people, but which may be good for this or that political group in a narrow sense—boosting the group’s profile, recruiting more members, and so on.
And for those groups on the far left that do have at least some commitment to the idea that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, it leads to making the group the center of politics instead of thinking and acting in terms of what that group can do to contribute to the long, complex, messy, and non-linear process of the working class becoming a force that can change society.
And here I think we should also mention that, in a society that is shaped by sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression, all organizations are going to be scarred by those forms of oppression. Of course, those of us who are members of these kinds of groups are products of the same society like everybody else, no matter how much or how sincerely people oppose oppression.
Far-left groups that use the micro party model are, I think, especially prone to dealing badly with oppressive behavior, especially by their leaders. Three former members of the New Socialist Group and I wrote a public letter about this in 2019. We argued then that
There is often a connection between the micro-party approach and inadequate responses by a socialist group to oppressive actions by members. This approach tends to inflate the importance of the group in the minds of its members. Preserving the group often becomes an end in itself. When people make the stability or preservation of the leadership and its “Leninist” authority their top concern, they may avoid suspending or expelling members, especially “leaders,” for oppressive behavior.
Organizing on micro-party lines with a “fetish of leadership” can fuel an abusive group culture. That kind of culture reproduces rather than challenges our societies’ oppressive forms of behavior. And socialist groups that treat their own expansion as what matters most are usually resistant to opening themselves up to struggles against oppression, learning from them, and changing.
CP: Yes, and you were writing in response to the crises of two of the largest revolutionary organizations in the English-speaking world: the Socialist Workers’ Party of Britain, which had lost a significant layer of its membership because it covered up the fact that a member of its Central Committee was involved in sexual violence and sexual abuse, and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the U.S., which implodes precisely because its leadership had covered up a rape by someone who, at that the time they were involved in the sexual assault, was one of the leadership’s favorites. When this came out, it created a tremendous level of demoralization. While the British Socialist Workers Party survives in a shrunken form today, the ISO had no choice but to dissolve itself,
DC: So, these are particular forms of the debacle of the micro-party model.
What’s the alternative to the micro-party model? That’s the key question that comes up in the U.S. today, as you know very well. There are a lot more politically active people who consider themselves socialists who are part of the Democratic Socialists of America than who belong to all the other socialist groups combined. But DSA is politically really pretty broad. Why not, in the U.S., just join and build DSA and perhaps one of the many political caucuses within DSA that supports a more defined kind of socialist politics?
CP: DSA was a small and moribund social democratic organization prior to 2017. One of its younger members, who joined sometime around 2010, said it was a socialist version of the American Association of Retired People (AARP), which is a nonprofit that collects dues from its members, doesn’t expect them to do anything, and sends them a newsletter.
DSA explodes as a small mass organization reaching 90,000 members not because of the 2016 Sanders campaign, as most DSA leaders claim, but in response to Trump’s first election. And at that point, I was one of the people on the far left saying that the revolutionary socialist Left had to relate to this, possibly join it as a grouping with a coherent worldview and with some proposals on how to move DSA forward. The alternative, I believed, would be DSA’s reversion into a staid, reformist, electorally-oriented grouping. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so there had to be revolutionaries posing the alternative of building DSA into an activist organization that was really committed to workplace, community, anti-war, and anti-imperialist organizing.
Now, I believe that, from 2017 to early 2020, there were a lot of opportunities to work in DSA. And, in fact, when Tempest first formed and for a period of time thereafter, I’d say a majority of our comrades were members of DSA.We worked in various DSA branches trying to push for the idea that DSA should not be involved in the Democratic Party and that members should be educating and agitating for an independent workers’ party. We agitated for DSA to orient itself towards building effective rank and file organizations and unions rather than looking to left-leaning officials who might be friendly to DSA politics.
Now, there was space for all of that for quite a while, and some currents did grow. The problem was that none of these currents had enough size, political coherence, and weight to really have much of an impact. A turning point came in 2021-2022. In 2018, a number of DSA members and DSA-endorsed candidates won Democratic primaries and actually got elected to the House of Representatives in the U.S.—the so-called Squad, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez being the best known. There was also Rashida Tlaib and an African American congressperson from the Bronx and part of the suburbs outside of New York named Jamal Bowman. Now all of these candidates, in order to get DSA endorsement publicly endorsed Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel and pledged to promote those politics. Bowman, almost as soon as he’s elected, ends up voting to fund the Iron Dome missile system that essentially allows the Israeli state to rain terror on Palestinians and on its Arab neighbors without much worry about them sending missiles in and actually hitting Israeli targets.
This sparked a tremendous debate in DSA, and our comrades played a big role in initiating a movement in various branches calling for, at the minimum, Bowman to be censured, if not expelled, from DSA for basically disregarding the politics of the organization. In other words, this was an attempt on the part of the members of DSA to hold their electeds accountable. The DSA leadership, including those who claimed to be on the left of the DSA leadership, responded by saying, “Our main priority is to support Jamal Bowman.” And they ended up basically making a number of organizational moves against centers of opposition on this question. In particular, they shut down the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Working Group, which had been involved in the call to expel Bowman and basically removed its leadership and appointed a leadership that would not openly criticize Bowman.
In the wake of that, thousands, probably up to 20,000 members of DSA, left the organization, stopped paying dues, stopped going to meetings, etc., By 2022, when several DSA members and Sanders supported Biden’s breaking of the railway strike, there was practically no opposition.
And what you started to see in many of the branches is that they became more and more bureaucratic and authoritarian. So, for example, our comrades were very active in the New York City Labor Branch of DSA, which had been a place where people involved in organizing rank and file caucuses in various public sector unions had been very active in talking about their work and trying to coordinate it. Increasingly, the leadership of that branch was appointed by the citywide leadership, which is very conservative, and branch discussions no longer included discussions of the fight in the teachers’ unions or the fight in the big public employees’ unions but what candidates DSA was going to support for state assembly and city council. It became more and more narrowly electoralist.
Today in New York Tempest, we’re beginning to reassess this. There seems to be, in the wake of the election of Zoran Mamdani as New York City mayor as an open member of DSA, some ferment within New York City DSA. A few weeks back, the leadership of the branch held a meeting during which they instructed people not to share any information online. And if they did, they’d be expelled from DSA. Despite that, information from the meeting was shared, and DSA’s line was, “Our job, once Mamdani is elected, is not to hold him accountable, but to help him govern,” which means they will help cover for him as he retreats in the face of pressure from the Democratic Party and capital.
Now, there seems to be a considerable minority of members in New York City DSA who are not going along with this. And that’s something. So, we’re beginning to reassess. For me, it’s a tactical question. DSA is, in its majority, a social democratic organization, which in the United States means that it doesn’t even advocate its own political electoral party. It tries to remake the capitalist Democratic Party. DSA, as an organization, has come to see electing people as taking power. All other forms of political organizing get subordinated to that.
But there have been times, particularly from 2017 to 2021, where it attracted a lot of radicalized people who wanted more than that, and there might be some opportunity today. The problem is something we saw with many of these caucuses that formed in DSA. As the group shrank in the early 2020s and there was less opportunity to actually influence new people, these groups became sort of power groups concerned solely with winning positions on leadership bodies rather than organizing politically, which is always the problem with revolutionaries working in larger, predominantly reformist organizations. But again, it’s a tactical question. There may be openings in DSA in the coming year or so in New York. We’ll see. I am, in principle, not opposed to it. In fact, I actually thought that it was imperative that revolutionaries join DSA and promote our ideas within DSA when it was a growing radicalizing group.
DC: I should add that in the Canadian state, we don’t have anything like DSA, and there’s a certain amount of unfortunate DSA envy among people on the Left here (and in the UK too). What we have is the New Democratic Party, which is a weakened social democratic party that has really adapted to neoliberalism. The European term social liberal fits pretty well for it, although there certainly are people who are NDP members who are more left wing than that. There’s currently an election process for the new leader of the federal NDP where there is one or possibly two left candidates running. But at the grassroots level, NDP constituency associations are not, with very few exceptions, activist organizations or places that attract people who are looking to do more than be involved in some way around elections.
In Quebec, there’s also Québec Solidaire, which is a left-wing party that was originally formed as an alternative to the nationalist Parti Québécois and more right-wing parties. And Québec Solidaire originally talked about being a party of the ballot box and the streets, combining both elections and non-electoral work, although it, I think, fundamentally leaned in an electoral direction. It became more successful in electing more members of the National Assembly in Quebec but has also moved to the right through that process, with more influence of the MNAs and their staff and so on within the party apparatus. And so, although it certainly remains a not insignificant organization, there’s not very much of the “party of the street.” It has a fundamentally electoral approach.. The Left has had a difficult time organizing itself in relation to Québec Solidaire.
If people who’ve been listening to this discussion have been listening carefully, you recognize that Charlie and I understand that it’s a mistake to think that the only options people have when it comes to socialist organization are, on the one hand, broad organizations like the DSA with members that range all the way from moderate reformists to revolutionaries, and on the other hand, micro-parties and other far-left groups organized along those lines.
There have been and still are revolutionary socialist groups that reject the micro-party model. Affirming the commitment to the revolutionary transformation of society, these groups try to organize in ways that make sense where they are. In the spirit of what British socialist Duncan Hallas once wrote, which is that “organizations do not exist in a vacuum, they’re composed of actual people in specific situations attempting to solve real problems with a limited range of options open to them.” And one of those groups that tried to carve out a different path was the one that you were in, Charlie, Solidarity. And Solidarity was certainly an influence on the New Socialist Group in Canada.
Can you share some thoughts about the strengths and weaknesses of Solidarity in the years that you were a member, between 1986 and 2015?
CP: Throughout the history of Solidarity, there was an extremely strong and healthy commitment to training comrades to be activists and militants, particularly at the workplace.
Two of the groups that came together to form Solidarity, Workers’ Power and the International Socialists, had a decade or more of experience doing workplace activism as revolutionary socialists. And there was a layer of comrades who were my age and a bit older who were very excited about training younger people to continue doing that work.
And in the early years, I’d say up until about 1993, there was also a continued strong commitment to training people in the broad politics of revolutionary socialism from below on the need for revolution, the need for class independence, the importance of anti-oppression struggles, etc.
Over time, and this became more and more evident in the late 1990s and then later, particularly in the 2000s, Solidarity was unable to maintain those two strengths, both a commitment to training people in revolutionary politics combined with grappling with the world as it is today—attempting to understand the nature of the economic crisis, the nature of the restructuring of the working class and the oppressed, etc. We were doing both of these, I’d say, until the mid 1990s. I think we began to abandon the second, and that had an effect on how we trained people as activists. Our commitment to maintaining revolutionary politics and training people in these politics weakened over time, and this affected how we were training people to do day-to-day organizing.
The weakening of our commitment to training people in revolutionary politics had two sources. One source was the demoralization of a layer of older comrades of my age and older about the prospects of revolutionary politics. A number of them, including leading comrades, came to the conclusion that the idea of revolution was simply unrealistic and that the best we could hope for was to build left reformism
At the same time, we had projected ourselves as a regroupment organization—an organization that would bring together people from a variety of political traditions and try to cohere something new. Initially, in the mid 1980s, we thought we could include some of the people coming out of the Maoist milieu, who had drawn conclusions about micro-sects and about Stalinism. Those folks never showed. And by the early 1990s, regroupment came to mean integrating layers of people who had come out of primarily the crisis of the main Trotskyist organizations in the United States and who had not drawn lessons about the micro-party. These are people who thought that their previous organization had gone wrong because of some ideological deviation and unclarity about what Trotskyism is, rather than thinking that the project was flawed because the layer of working people that would be the basis of a revolutionary party simply didn’t exist.
So, we had a layer of older comrades who were saying all this stuff about how the restructuring of the working class, the restructuring of the economy, etc. was not that important anymore. They were saying that we just had to do practice. But other folks were going, all we need to do is read Trotsky and memorize the Transitional Program and be able to spit it out and we’ll be fine.
The result was we would periodically recruit layers of young people who would either become good workplace militants but drift to the right, politically adapting to the trade union officialdom, or who would try to transform the group into a more coherent, revolutionary group that did real activism but would leave.
And by 2011, to be quite honest, I had been trying to keep the group on what I saw as a reasonable path. I’d been very active through the 1980s and 1990s in my branch in New York, which at points was fairly successful, had up to 40 or 50 people, which for us was large. And I served in national leadership from 2000 to about 2008. I came to the conclusion by 2011 that the group was going nowhere, and I was pulling back from my activity.
For personal reasons, I dropped to a sympathizer in 2013, but then in 2015, the group, which had shrunk tremendously from 350 to 400 members to at most 100 members on paper and 30 active—voted to participate in the Sanders challenge in the Democratic primary, at which point I left and decided that this group had reached its limits and wasn’t going anywhere. Now, Solidarity still exists. They still have some very good comrades who I have tremendous personal and political respect for, but they don’t seem to be a vibrant organization that’s recruiting new people, that’s capable of having an impact on the Left, not on the world, but at least on the Left. So, for me, the big failure of Solidarity was its inability to define what broadly it means to be a revolutionary socialist group and also the boundaries of being a revolutionary socialist group, and then the concomitant failure to train new members in the fundamentals of these politics while encouraging them to think about the world and think about their activity as revolutionary socialists.
And what we ended up with was that the group—politically, not organizationally— liquidated itself into a more amorphous left-reformist current.
DC: Thank you for that. It’s a sad story, but an instructive one. And it brings us to the question of the Tempest Collective, of which you’re a member. I’m also a member.
It’s a U.S. organization that also welcomes members in the Canadian state, and Tempest is trying to build a socialist group that rejects the micro-party model and tries to avoid repeating the problems of Solidarity and other really loose groups.
The Tempest website puts it this way:
We need new forms of revolutionary organization that can better meet this moment, that can bring fresh eyes to how we make revolutionary organization relevant to what’s happening and what needs to be done. We do not claim to have the answer to how a new revolutionary organizational form will come about. We want to contribute to the process of figuring out how to strengthen organized socialist forces in this era of worsening crises, a process that is underway in many different publications and organizations.
And, of course, there are groups in other countries with a similar approach to Tempest.
So, just to wrap up, what do you think is the most important thing for people in very small groups like this to bear in mind about how we approach building a socialist organization?
CP: I think the most fundamental thing is to be aware of and have a real grip and analysis of the pitfalls of ideological and political and organizational looseness. This is the notion that all we have to do is be active. We don’t really need to develop our thinking as revolutionary Marxists. We need to reject that, which, I think, was the problem with Solidarity. And at the same time, we need to reject the micro-sect model, which was the problem with the ISO. Tempest was formed mostly by people who survived the breakup of the ISO and a small number of us who survived as revolutionaries from the disorganization of Solidarity.
We know these are the two directions. We don’t want to go on the broad path in the middle. We have at best a compass but not a roadmap. Tempest comrades joked at our founding conference that we’re building the plane while flying it. This is an experiment, and I have been very pleased by how Tempest has collectively attempted to find our way.
We were willing to be active in DSA as revolutionaries but not as sectarians who were going there to lecture people on the correct program. We are seen as good workplace activists, as good social movement activists, but also as people who have a clear politics. We related to Bernie, AOC, and now Mamdani not by being purist or sectarian. Rather than simply denouncing, we’ve tried to understand the support for these left-wing Democratic Party politicians as a sign of people searching for a left-wing, collectivist, solidaristic alternative to the crisis, to capitalist politics and to rightwing populism, while at the same time arguing honestly that the Democratic Party is a trap for revolutionaries and for radicals.
There is no guarantee that we will be successful. The pressures on small groups to adapt to either sectarianism, a comfortable micro-sect model, or to just adapt to the milieu you’re in are very strong. But I’ve been very happy so far and very pleased with the way in which our collective has responded to political pressures and continued to grow, integrate new people, etc. And to be honest, it is also one of the most internally healthy organizations I’ve been in since Solidarity in its early days. We have really good, honest, healthy debates about real questions facing revolutionaries.
As Solidarity became depoliticized, not only did the discussion level drop to the mundane: What do we do next? Not in terms of what is to be done, but rather, what do we advocate tomorrow? And it became an incredibly personalized and toxic atmosphere, as bad as what comrades described in the micro-sects.
So, Tempest has succeeded so far, but, again, we know what our guardrails are— the micro-sect, on the one hand, and political adaptation, on the other. On that broad path, we at best have a compass. We don’t have a roadmap.
DC: And I think we can say that the fate of Tempest and all other attempts to build non-sectarian, revolutionary socialist organizations of one kind or another is really deeply wrapped up and shaped by the fate of the working-class and social struggles that are happening and will happen in the future. Those are the powerful forces that will ultimately blow an organization one way or another.
The best you can do is try to understand where those forces are blowing and where they’re moving, and how you can most effectively try to navigate through that. Our fate is not going to be something that we make in a vacuum but in the circumstances we find ourselves thrust into.
CP: You actually do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.