{"id":1249,"date":"2020-08-16T10:41:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-16T15:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=1249"},"modified":"2020-08-20T17:37:55","modified_gmt":"2020-08-20T22:37:55","slug":"socialist-organizing-and-mass-movements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2020\/08\/socialist-organizing-and-mass-movements\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on the DSA Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

[I]t is clear that the mass strike cannot be called at will, even when the decision to do so may come from the highest committee of the strongest social democratic [socialist] party … If, however, the direction of the mass strike in the sense of command over its origin … is a matter of the revolutionary period itself, the directing of the mass strike becomes, in an altogether different sense, the duty of social democracy and its leading organs. \u2026 the social democrats are called upon to assume political<\/em> leadership in the midst of the revolutionary period.
\n\u2014 Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions<\/em>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For the first time since at least the 1960\u2019s, the world is experiencing an extended wave of struggle<\/a> involving millions. In one country after another, people have mobilized in the tens and hundreds of thousands, in response to the consequences of neoliberal capitalism: economic crisis, systematic racism, government austerity, climate change, state violence, gender oppression, shootings in schools (and elsewhere), migration, and threats to workplace health.<\/p>\n

These mobilizations arise as part of a general global phenomenon of political polarization and radicalization. In the United States this has led to the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a socialist organization whose membership numbers now rival those of the Communist and Socialist parties of the Great Depression and World War II eras.<\/p>\n

The question of how the DSA relates to the ongoing global movement\u2014particularly the huge, unanticipated revolt against police violence and racism in this country\u2014is now squarely on the agenda. Social movements are not likely to abate, as capitalism\u2019s crisis continues to unfold, now and in the post-pandemic near future. Without a systematic consideration of how socialists ought to regard these movements and their own involvement in them, the opportunity for the movements\u2019 cohering into a force that can challenge the rule of capital\u2014and its drive towards social and environmental devastation\u2014will pass us by.<\/p>\n

This essay is an attempt to characterize how DSA has thus far responded to the mass upsurge, and then to make some suggestions regarding what that response could, and should, be. The examples given are mostly specific to DSA\u2019s New York City Chapter, but I believe they are generally characteristic of the organization as a whole.<\/p>\n

\n

On September 20, 2019, some four million protestors filled the streets of major cities worldwide, demanding immediate, radical action to limit climate change. The huge numbers and deep passion of the marchers, mostly young, and many inspired by the fearless and precocious Greta Thunberg, showed the extent of their generation\u2019s anger toward society\u2019s rulers for sacrificing the human and natural future to economic pressures and political expediency.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

In New York that day, hundreds of thousands of these demonstrators streamed towards a Battery Park rally, carrying colorful, creative signs and banners, and maintaining high energy with chants and songs. Their slogans revealed a sophisticated understanding of the role of the fossil fuel industry, its political defenders and enablers, and their failure to slow the global warming that they have actively aided and abetted.<\/p>\n

DSA, however, remained mostly aloof. Neither the national organization nor its New York City Chapter endorsed the Climate Strike. No unit of DSA played any significant role in building it.<\/p>\n

Within DSA most specific movement issues are the responsibility of \u201cworking groups\u201d which do not necessarily coordinate activities with the organization as a whole. The result, as in the case of the Climate Strike, was that a small contingent (perhaps 20-30) of DSAers marched together as members of the New York Chapter\u2019s Ecosocialist Working Group. They carried DSA flags and distributed literature about the group\u2019s support for the (Congressional) Green New Deal. If other DSA members\u2014in a chapter modestly estimated at about ten thousand\u2014attended the march, it was as unidentified individuals. There was no organized presence beyond the Working Group.<\/p>\n

As a longtime socialist who attended the march it took me some time to understand the logic of why a socialist group would behave in such an apparently self-isolating way. I was aware of the overwhelming importance DSA attached to Bernie Sanders\u2019 presidential candidacy, and had some sense of the door knocking and phone banking its members were doing in advance of the 2020 Primary season. But I did not yet fully understand that \u201cbuilding socialism,\u201d to the DSA leadership, meant putting a political priority on elections, campaigning for legislative reforms, and urging people to join the organization.<\/p>\n

About eight months later, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the police murder of George Floyd led to an even more inspiring and profound global wave of protests. This time DSA\u2019s response has been quite different, though still problematic.<\/p>\n

To its credit, the New York City Chapter organized an online chapter-wide meeting featuring reports on the demand to defund (and eventually abolish) the police, the participation of members in the protests, and the Chapter\u2019s strategy for achieving the demand. In the ensuing weeks branch leadership committees within the chapter tracked demonstrations happening in each geographical area and contacted members, encouraging them to participate. And, in a significant departure from the Chapter\u2019s practice, the Racial Justice Working Group (RJWG) and Afrosocialist Caucus pulled together a march and rally with over 50 co-sponsoring organizations. This action took place on the eve of the City Council meeting at which measures sharply curtailing the Police Department budget were to be voted on. (The next day, after a budget was passed without significant PD cuts, the RJWG returned to City Hall and vowed to continue its alliance with those who had been conducting an \u201cOccupy\u201d action in City Hall Park.)<\/p>\n

Still, the Chapter as a whole did not engage in any systematic planning regarding what its relationship to the huge antiracist, anti-police revolt, ought to be. First, it is notable that it was still left to working groups, in this case the RJWG and the Afrosocialist caucus\u2014to do the work. Second, there was little, if any, attempt to understand who the protestors were; to consider why millions of young white people returned day after day to stand alongside people of color demanding racial justice in the middle of a pandemic; to establish ongoing relationships with the groups planning the marches (and potentially to the multitude of participants), or to ask what a socialist organization\u2014with its understanding of capitalist society, its historical knowledge of how movements exert power, and its resources\u2014had to offer regarding the potential direction and strategy for this new and rapidly radicalizing movement. Seeming to ignore the power of the very street movement members were encouraged to participate in (as individuals, not as an organized contingent<\/em>), Chapter leaders at the online meeting reminded members that the plan for DSA\u2019s organizational role in defunding the NYPD consisted of getting as many DSA members as possible to urge their City Council members to vote favorably (with no effort to encourage non-DSAers to do the same), and to elect as large a slate of DSA-endorsed candidates as possible in the 2021 Council elections. The group\u2019s organizational role seemed reduced to an aggregation of the responsibility of its individual members to act.<\/p>\n

If there has been a change in DSA\u2019s attitude towards mass movements, it may or may not represent the beginning of an evolution in the organization\u2019s self-conception. It would be facile\u2014and inaccurate\u2014to say that this is simply the result of the fact that Bernie Sanders is no longer a candidate. (This especially in light of the effort DSA continues to put into its endorsed candidates; taking great encouragement from the victory of some of those candidates in the New York and Kentucky primary elections.) But the vast wave of the Black Lives Matter protests has seemed to help revive an organization struggling to retain enthusiasm after its singular hope for a national political victory evaporated.<\/p>\n

There has always been something of a disconnect between recent DSA theory and practice as it relates to mass movements. On the one hand, some members have sought to justify the inordinate amount of resources and attention given over to electoral work. For example, Paul Heideman has argued that it is only electoral campaigns, typified by Bernie Sanders, that can succeed in convincing millions that their needs are best met by \u201csupporting a socialist\u201d. He counterposes these electoral efforts to the sort of movement activity exemplified by the Occupy protests of 2011, which, in his view, limited themselves to a narrow segment of participants who shared certain cultural habits. \u201cSocial movements, like the antiwar movement or Black Lives Matter, broke out of this narrowness and attempted to mobilize people on a mass scale. But their mobilizations were sporadic and short-lived.\u201d With Sanders\u2019 withdrawal, Heideman sees the revived danger of \u201cmovementism\u201d as the left retreats into \u201ccomfortable\u201d old habits. While Heideman\u2019s piece has been subject to sharp criticism,<\/a> it does reflect an apparent common-sense among the DSA leadership.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, DSA literature always recognized that elections by themselves would be insufficient to achieve socialism. This too represents a common sense within the organization, albeit one held in tension with the dominant electoralist strategy. There were always individuals and subordinate units within DSA urging organizational involvement within such movements, with a minority arguing that this be a priority. Some of the Working Groups certainly involved members in actions beyond DSA itself (notably on immigration, for example). And in a group that takes seriously its aspiration to represent the working class and sees an important role for organized labor, the importance of the 2018-19 teachers\u2019 strikes was not lost. But at the height of the antiracist revolt, as the primary season continued, elections remained DSA\u2019s top priority. For example, on June 16, during the upsurge following George Floyd\u2019s murder, an email from the NYC Chapter Steering Committee, entitled \u201cPaint NYC Red: Get Out the Vote,\u201d read, \u201cIf you do one thing this week, it should be this.\u201d<\/p>\n