{"id":1431,"date":"2020-08-25T16:04:49","date_gmt":"2020-08-25T21:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=1431"},"modified":"2022-11-07T19:19:11","modified_gmt":"2022-11-08T00:19:11","slug":"taking-the-wrong-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2020\/08\/taking-the-wrong-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking the wrong lessons from history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">T<\/span>he tradition of socialism is not a singular one. It is composed of different, sometimes conflicting, trends and sharp debates that bear both positive and negative lessons. The recent Jacobin <a href=\"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2020\/07\/dsa-socialism-history-new-york\">article<\/a>, \u201cDSA Elected Are Carrying on the Socialist Tradition in New York\u201d, by Liza Featherstone, connects the recent wins of DSA candidates for the New York State legislature to a wave of socialist candidates that won office one hundred years ago. According to Featherstone, it is in \u201cthese footsteps\u201d that the recent DSA candidates are following. Unfortunately, the glowing historical comparison put forward by Featherstone deserves scrutiny. And for the emerging socialist movement of today, the lessons of that earlier period are largely negative\u2014of what <em>not<\/em> to do.<\/p>\n<p>In a general sense, we celebrate the election of socialists and fight against any undemocratic attempts to silence them or force them from office, which was exactly the fate of the New York socialists elected in 1919. Any time our side advances\u2014whether via electoral or other means\u2014the ruling class trembles and seeks to roll back these advances by whatever means they can. The question for our movement is how best to defend those advances.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Any time our side advances the ruling class trembles and seeks to roll back these advances&#8230; The question for our movement is how best to defend those advances.<\/aside>\n<p>Most of the individuals who won seats in 1919, including August Claessens, who authored the pamphlet quoted in the article, were on the right-wing of the Socialist Party. When the party split later that year, with the left-wing going on to form the Communist Party, they remained in the minority. Even then they were among the most conservative members of the party, as part of what was termed the Old Guard faction. What characterized their political tendency was the insistence on electoral politics being the primary vehicle for the Socialist Party, an allegiance to the trade union bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and a disavowal of disruptive activity that risked breaking laws. After the split, they were sectarian in their refusal to work in united front campaigns with the then-larger Communist Party. This included rejecting joint work with the Communists in the South against the Klu Klux Klan in 1934.<a id=\"fnref1\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\" href=\"#fn1\"><sup>1<\/sup><\/a> In the 1930\u2019s the Old Guard would carry out a six-year factional campaign and left the Socialist Party to form the Social Democratic Federation.<\/p>\n<p>Louis Waldman, who won a seat in 1919, was one of the primary leaders of the Old Guard. He was against any kind of \u201cdirect action,\u201d which according to his memoir <em>The Good Fight<\/em>, included \u201c[t]he general strike for political purposes, sabotage, the use of violence, the spread of fear, the paralysis of industry, trade, commerce, and even government.\u201d His consistent zealotry for law-and-order would also apply to the civil rights movement, which he opposed on the basis that Martin Luther King Jr. advocated breaking the law.<\/p>\n<p>Morris Hillquit, while not a winner in this specific election, is also mentioned as the lawyer for the five socialist Assemblymen and is quoted as the \u201clast word\u201d of the article. Hillquit, like Waldman and Claessens, was on the right of the Socialist Party and exemplified the focus on electoral politics <em>rather<\/em> than disruptive struggle. He had fought for this principled position in 1911 when \u201cBig Bill\u201d Haywood, then an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), was elected to the national leadership of the Socialist Party (by more votes than Hillquit). A year later Haywood had been purged from the leadership by Hillquit for refusing to denounce illegal action.<a id=\"fnref2\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\" href=\"#fn2\"><sup>2<\/sup><\/a> It should be noted that this was decades before <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/National_Labor_Relations_Act_of_1935\">the Wagner Act<\/a>, so unions themselves were \u201cnot legal.\u201d<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Between May and August [of 1919], Hillquit and the right-wing purged two-thirds of the Socialist Party, dropping their total membership from 110,000 to 35,000<\/aside>\n<p>In 1919, the Hillquit leadership refused to recognize internal elections that would have put the left-wing of the party in the majority, and they went on to purge the left from the organization. \u201cLet us clear the decks,\u201d Hillquit wrote in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/history\/usa\/parties\/spusa\/1919\/0521-hillquit-socialisttask.pdf\">an article<\/a> from May 1919. Between May and August, Hillquit and the right-wing purged two-thirds of the Socialist Party, dropping their total membership from 110,000 to 35,000.<a id=\"fnref3\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\" href=\"#fn3\"><sup>3<\/sup><\/a> The split that would form the Communist Party followed, and Socialist Party membership <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marxisthistory.org\/subject\/usa\/eam\/spamembership.html\">fell<\/a> to 11,000 by 1922.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1451\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1451\" style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1451\" src=\"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"318\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-1.jpg 800w, https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-1-600x239.jpg 600w, https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-1-300x119.jpg 300w, https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-1-768x305.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1451\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">In 1920, Socialist delegates to the New York legislature were expelled by a coalition of local Democrats and Republicans.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>While this might all appear as a bunch of historical footnotes, it is worth mentioning because Featherstone\u2019s article uses these historical figures to intervene in a current debate within the emerging socialist movement about the use of elections and the role of parliamentary struggle in the fight for socialism. When Featherstone argues that the lesson to be learned from that earlier experience is that their attempts to win substantial reforms were unsuccessful because \u201cthere were not enough Socialists in the Assembly\u201d, is the lesson to just elect more socialists? Can socialism be voted in? Should the focus of socialist demands be strictly on bread-and-butter demands? Can the state be taken over by socialists via elections and wielded to carry out a fight against capital? Does the state need to be smashed and replaced with something different? These are important debates that have massive ramifications for socialist strategy. It is for that reason it is important to look at the historical examples and how they are used today.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">While their victories in 1919 were driven by a broad radicalization around the idea of socialism, the majority of the figures who won seats in the NY State Assembly had a vision of socialist progress that was purely electoral in focus.<\/aside>\n<p>While their victories in 1919 were driven by a broad radicalization around the idea of socialism, the majority of the figures who won seats in the NY State Assembly had a vision of socialist progress that was purely electoral in focus. It is that perspective that drove their election in 1919 and dozens of later campaigns throughout their political careers. Samuel Orr, for example, ran again the following year and won an Assembly seat. He was later appointed New York City Special Deputy Comptroller, and served for a decade in that position and later as a City magistrate. This was the primary focus of their political lives because their vision of socialism was that of the slow accumulation of electoral victories.<\/p>\n<p>They expressed this quite plainly. In a 1921 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/books\/edition\/The_Logic_of_Socialism\/DAgOAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;printsec=frontcover\">pamphlet<\/a> called \u201cThe Logic of Socialism,\u201d Claessens laid out this vision in a section called \u201cHow We May Obtain Socialism.\u201d In it, he describes socialism being won by the methods of \u201ccompensation, competition, taxation, and confiscation.\u201d In this outline, socialists win a majority in legislatures and then take private property from capital by taxing them, buying industry from capital, creating government-run ventures that would compete with private industry, and in some cases confiscating industry. These methods would be carried out once we get \u201ca majority of votes for Socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1452\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1452\" style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1452\" src=\"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"272\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-2.jpg 800w, https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-2-600x204.jpg 600w, https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-2-300x102.jpg 300w, https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists-body-2-768x261.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1452\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A New York newspaper heralds the expulsion of Socialist delegates.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Hillquit too, in his 1919-1920 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/history\/usa\/parties\/spusa\/1920\/0500-hillquit-dictatorship.pdf\">polemics<\/a> against the Comintern and the left-wing in his party who supported the Russian Revolution, articulated that socialism would be obtained by \u201cparliamentary majority rule.\u201d In keeping with the right-wing\u2019s consistent disavowal of revolution and illegal, disruptive action, Hillquit argued that the regime of private property could be wrenched from the tightly-held hands of the capitalist class without the \u201cdisarming, disenfranchisement, and outlawing of the bourgeoisie.\u201d Rather, it was purely through the \u201cmeans of the weapons and methods of political democracy\u201d that socialism would be won.<\/p>\n<p>Hillquit saw socialism, as Paul Heideman has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jacobinmag.com\/2017\/02\/rise-and-fall-socialist-party-of-america\">pointed out<\/a>, as \u201cnothing more than the culmination of reforms.\u201d He denounced revolution and instructed Socialist Party branches to \u201cconcentrate all activity on electoral ventures.\u201d This is a key point. The political position of Hillquit and company, that Featherstone is so quick to praise, prioritized the electoral road over all others. The newly-formed Communist Party, focused on struggle but also used elections as a tool to further that struggle.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">The political position of Hillquit and company, that Featherstone is so quick to praise, prioritized the electoral road over all others. The newly-formed Communist Party, focused on struggle but also used elections as a tool to further that struggle.<\/aside>\n<p>As a consequence of their positions, Hillquit and the Old Guard would remain isolated\u2014focused purely on the electoral road\u2014while the world turned upside down in a period of massive labor upsurge, fights against racism, and world revolutions.<\/p>\n<p>It bears special mention that the right-wing of the Socialist Party\u2019s excessive focus on elections meant downplaying struggles against anti-Black racism, including muting criticism of the segregated unionism of the AFL. As a result, many of the key Black cadre of the party\u2019s Harlem Section left, and it would be the Communist Party, which (at least after 1919) had an explicit anti-racist orientation, that would play a pivotal, <a href=\"https:\/\/wearemany.org\/a\/2017\/08\/left-aint-white-multiracial-communist-organizing-in-1930s-and-40s\">influential role<\/a> in anti-racist struggle.<a id=\"fnref4\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\" href=\"#fn4\"><sup>4<\/sup><\/a> Meanwhile, the Old Guard carried on in their way and got a City magistrate position out of it. I hope that these are not the footsteps to be followed by today&#8217;s socialist movement.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">It bears special mention that the right-wing of the Socialist Party\u2019s excessive focus on elections meant downplaying struggles against anti-Black racism, including muting criticism of the segregated unionism of the AFL.<\/aside>\n<p>As a side note, in Featherstone\u2019s article she focuses heavily on the socialist reforms that the Socialist Party representatives attempted to bring to the Assembly, like advocacy for public housing, pension, and public transport fare reductions, but there is an omission that is curious. Some historians, like Jacob Zumoff<a id=\"fnref5\" class=\"footnote-ref\" role=\"doc-noteref\" href=\"#fn5\"><sup>5<\/sup><\/a>, connect the expansion of membership in the Socialist Party that led to the 1919 electoral wins, to the anti-war position taken by the party through a weakened compromise between the left and right wings of the party in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/history\/usa\/parties\/spusa\/1917\/0500-spa-proclamationandwarprogram.pdf\">the St. Louis Manifesto<\/a>. Hillquit himself received support for his 1917 mayoral campaign from none other than <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/reference\/archive\/keller-helen\/works\/1910s\/17_11_05.htm\">Helen Keller<\/a> primarily because of his opposition to war and militarism. Though the war had ended a year before they were elected to office, Featherstone doesn\u2019t mention this at all in the article, leaving her readers to assume that their popularity was based entirely on support for their bread-and-butter demands, rather than a principled anti-imperialism, or the raised expectations of the victorious Russian Revolution.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, even on its own terms, the socialist victories of 1919 were limited. As Featherstone notes in her article, by 1920, members of the Republican and Democratic Parties had united to expel the Socialists from the Assembly. A narrow focus on electoral activity had left them without the forces necessary to fight back against the inevitable counter-attack from the mainstream parties.<\/p>\n<p>It is a good thing that DSA candidates have won more seats in the NY State Legislature. However, I would hope we don\u2019t follow in the footsteps of the past socialists\u2019 efforts like those comrades in 1919. They consistently fought for an idea of socialism that flowed along the path of elections. They decried and purged those who thought that disruptive\u2014and yes, sometimes illegal\u2014extra-parliamentary struggles from below are essential to win socialism.<\/p>\n<p>Examples like the early-twentieth century right-wing of the Socialist Party, or the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jacobinmag.com\/2020\/08\/sanitary-free-public-bathrooms\">current<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jacobinmag.com\/2020\/08\/open-container-public-drinking\">Jacobin<\/a> fascination with the Milwaukee \u201csewer socialists\u201d of the same time period, are not the beacons that we need to follow. Elections can be an important tool, but will not be the means for socialist transformation. Rather it is in building a movement that focuses on mass disruptive struggles from below, like those that have won every major working-class advance that has ever been wrestled from the greedy hands of the ruling class. We should build a movement whose goal is not to run the capitalist state but rather to destroy it.<\/p>\n<section class=\"footnotes\" role=\"doc-endnotes\">\n<hr class=\"half\" \/>\n<ol>\n<li id=\"fn1\" role=\"doc-endnote\">Robin D. G. Kelley, <em>Hammer and Hoe<\/em> (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press; 1990) p. 120<a class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\" href=\"#fnref1\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"fn2\" role=\"doc-endnote\">Jacob A. Zumoff, The Communist International and US Communism (Chicago, Haymarket; 2015), p.26<a class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\" href=\"#fnref2\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"fn3\" role=\"doc-endnote\">Zumoff, p.37<a class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\" href=\"#fnref3\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"fn4\" role=\"doc-endnote\">See Mark Solomon, <em>The Cry was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936<\/em> (Jackson, University of Mississippi Press; 1998), chp 1. &amp; Philip Foner, <em>Organized Labor &amp; the Black Worker: 1619-1982<\/em>, (Chicago, Haymarket; 2017), pg 162-163.<a class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\" href=\"#fnref4\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>\n<li id=\"fn5\" role=\"doc-endnote\">Zumoff, p.27-28<a class=\"footnote-back\" role=\"doc-backlink\" href=\"#fnref5\">\u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><strong>brian bean<\/strong> writes a response to a recent Jacobin article comparing recent DSA electoral success to Socialist Party victors in the state 100 years ago, analyzing what lessons are worth following and which not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":1432,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[45,48,61,60,19],"class_list":["post-1431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-debate","tag-elections","tag-history","tag-new-york-city","tag-socialist-party","tag-strategy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/ny-socialists.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}