Okay, time to wrap it up. In these blog posts, I’ve:
§1 — Framed the discussion to be around DSA’s electoral strategy.
§2 — Discussed how the institutional, social, and economic environment in the USA installs practical structural limits on the capacity of socialist electeds to make institutional change with their elected position. These structural limitations on elected officials are reflections of the condition of the class struggle.
§3 — Discussed how this environment leads socialist electeds to engage in self-moderation, to maintain the institutional powers that socialist electeds can wield. In many cases, this self-moderation is unnecessary, but exists because there is a lack of communication and coordination between socialist organizers and electeds. A level of self-moderation is probably properly strategic, but this degree can only be really decided through communication, deliberation, and coordination in the socialist movement.
§4 — Discussed strategic principles which socialists impose on themselves—primarily the need in the Global North for a revolution led by the mass, inclusive working class. This closes the door on some strategies which might be appealing to a less-principled socialist movement, or which might be appealing to socialists who impose the Marxist-Leninist model of political revolution onto the significantly different historical situation of the Global North.
§5 — Listed actual practical powers of socialist electeds, which can: help the spread of socialized productive forces and relations, help build the organizing capacity of the revolutionary working class, help increase the broader working class consciousness, and institute harm-reducing reforms.
Now, in this section, I will talk about what helps me determine desirable strategies in the historical class struggle. I suggest the rather broad guiding principles of (1) organizing around stable / immanent qualities of the institutions we want to influence, and (2) organizing in strategic areas in which the proletariat has a natural asymmetric advantage. I discuss those in the context that socialist electeds find themselves in, of bourgeois institutional, economic, and social limitations.
I also re-emphasize the necessity for communication, deliberation, and coordination between on-the-ground working class organizers and socialist electeds. I’ll describe how we can try to build a positive feedback loop between socialist organizers and electeds, meant to promote a revolution led by the mass, inclusive, coordinated working class.
Finally, I will give a warning and a discussion around how much electoral politics and legislation can effectively instantiate socialist policies before the creation of that mass working class movement.
Determining socialist strategies, in the context of institutional, economic, and social limitations on socialist electeds
As discussed in §2, our organizing environment has institutional barriers in government, individual economic precarity that puts pressure on each individual member of the working class to become more dependent on capitalist economic circuits, and reactionary social behaviors which arise out of attempts to find individualist success in a world which requires us to depend on each other.
While I’ve so far talked about these things primarily in the context of winning legislative battles, it affects all of our socialist organizing. This isn’t surprising—legislative wins for the working class are usually simple reflections of the strength of our working class organizing. If we organize, then legislative successes will come almost naturally as a result of our successful class struggle.
I’ve landed on a couple guiding practices for determining socialist strategy in these bourgeois conditions.
The first guiding practice is to identify the stable qualities of the institutions you’re organizing against, so we have something to structure our organizing around.
In government institutions, it can be frustrating how higher levels of government and different branches of government preempt or override policies that are made in lower levels of government or other branches. The Supreme Court is captured by the bourgeois; and gerrymandered, Republican-captured state legislatures preempt any pro-working-class policies that try to get passed in the Democratic cities. But we can find stable qualities in the bourgeois government—these will necessarily exist because it is designed according to particular bourgeois profit-promoting principles. These include things like individual ‘human rights’, property rights, private space which is freer from government imposition, and government stability to promote a stable environment for markets.
These things are usually antagonistic to the working class, but some qualities can be built on and grown to promote socialism. For example, we can promote a more expansive democracy. We can also build upon the existing framework for associations and incorporation, to establish working class institutions and economic power in things like unions, cooperatives, and federations of cooperatives. Having more stable things in the government to organize around can lessen the frustration of having the rug pulled out from under us.
When the unorganized working class align themselves with capitalist circuits of accumulation, it’s usually an attempt to improve their material conditions or lessen their economic precarity. While we don’t like capitalist circuits of accumulation, these underlying, stable basic human needs of safety and security are admirable. We can undercut working class alignment with bourgeois economic practices by providing alternative, socialist ways of achieving material betterment and economic security.
Similarly, to prevent people from falling into reactionary social beliefs, we would need to attack the underlying feeling of competition between members of the working class, and emphasize the need for inclusive social solidarity to fight against the different forms of economic insecurity which different people face. Fascism is an inherently slippery ideology, but there are stable qualities to it. In a previous blog post about fascism, I wrote that: “The fascist movement is utterly inconsistent with reality, and its most stable quality is its desperate, spiteful, and distrustful desire for power and domination over others. We should build an explicit opposition to fascism on that point. It is where fascism cannot shift and slip away as easily.”
The second guiding practice is to identify the organizing playing fields—the qualities of class struggle—in which the working class has an asymmetric organizing advantage.
Capitalists have a shit-ton more money than we do, to fund projects, lobby, campaign, litigate, and propagandize. In most cases, we are fighting a steep uphill battle if we choose to play on those playing fields, although with social media and crowd-funding, some of these fights have gotten slightly more even.
There’s a common sort of nonprofit saying that aphorism that “They have money, we have people”. Maybe a more Marxist version of this would be “They have the capital, we have the labor power”. In any case, what sort of asymmetries exist in organizing beyond this?
One major asymmetry is that, by the nature of people being in the working class, they will be stepped on—dominated and exploited—by their position in capitalist economic circuits. This is a stable part of the class struggle, and it affects the quality of working class life in a direct, material way. There’s always an in, and as capitalist profit-seeking heightens, the pain it imposes on the working class is unfortunate, but also an opportunity to help people develop their analysis and class consciousness.
These two guiding practices help me think through strategies to overcome these institutional, economic, and social problems for working class organizing.
Self-Moderation and Coordination
Socialist electeds can provide a useful perspective from their position within government, but effective working class organizers are likely to bring a perspective that is more attuned to the interests of the working class and contemporary Marxist theory. By communicating, deliberating, and coordinating, organizers can counterbalance the temptation toward unnecessary self-moderation; and they would have ideas of what sorts of legislation and advocacy would best increase the organizing power and class consciousness of the the working class. Socialist electeds will have familiarity with the current condition of the legislative landscape and ideas about where to focus organizing so that it can effectively influence the government. That was a very basic sketch of how these two perspectives can productively fill in each others’ weak spots.
There is a worry that overly-self-moderating tendencies of legislative considerations will spread into these coordinating conversations. However, I think that inclusive and informed deliberation with revolutionary intent will minimize the spread of self-moderating tendencies and help socialists find the true economic and social limits to these legislative positions.
For strategic coordination to be successful, we need a good group culture to create a place for welcoming communication, good-faith deliberation, and inventive collaboration. This can already be a challenge to create even in normal organizing, and it may be more difficult in an organizing environment with electoral considerations and the self-moderating pressures described in §2. But basic practices apply for creating a good group culture. Things like speaking frankly and openly about our worries about these self-moderating influences, affirming each other’s feelings, and getting down to the human needs we want met as socialists is the place to start.
We should also consider how there are many more organizers than there are elected officials. Some way of effectively communicating between a large organizing group, and socialist electeds and their staff would be useful. Here are a few options:
Bite the bullet and have monthly-ish meetings with large groups of organizers and the socialist elected official and their staff. Recognize that if people go on long asides, it will bite into the time for other people to contribute to the conversation, or to spend their time doing other things they want to do—but also that if someone thinks that something is being overlooked, they should bring it up at some point.
More regular, but smaller interactions between staff and organizers.
A group of organizers which rotates or is selected by random lottery, who meet with the socialist elected and their staff. This means not trying to moderate a large group every time, and getting a wide variety of views from the organizing community.
An elected / selected group of organizers who meet with the socialist elected and their staff. This group of organizers is responsible for summarizing the views of the organizing population, and communicating the ideas of the elected official back to the organizing population.
I personally recommend the ‘rotation/lottery’ method. If the organizing group is small enough, then regular meetings with as large of an organizer attendance as possible also seems reasonable.
Creating a Positive Feedback Loop Between Socialist Organizers and Socialist Legislators
Way back in 2020, I was already thinking along general lines of the broad socialist strategy of creating a positive feedback loop between organizing in civil society and legislation.
The strategy I tend to like the most is building democratic structures and institutions in everyday civil society. People get more experience and practice running things democratically. They also hopefully realize that other things in their life aren’t as democratic as they should be, and begin to demand better.
Building that sort of organized people power lets us elect progressive representatives. The laws they change makes it easier to build a more democratic civil society (which in turn makes it easier to elect better people, and so on).
— Three Points About Socialism-As-I-Understand-It, Sept 26, 2020
Things have changed, and I’ve gotten more organizing experience. But while I might phrase it in a more nuanced way now, I believe the general gist stands.
I would emphasize now that our strength in legislation lives and dies on the power of our working class organizing in civil society (outside of government). Pro-working class legislation can put a stake in the ground and institutionalize some of our gains, so that we don’t have to keep fighting the same fights. Legislation is one part of the institutionalizing scaffolding which allows us to move our on-the-ground organizing to bigger fights.
This can become a positive feedback loop, in which on-the-ground organizing benefits legislation, which benefits on-the-ground organizing, and so on. But simply because I can describe a positive feedback loop does not mean that we will inevitably win. The existence of a tendency toward socialism does not suddenly negate all the counter tendencies toward the maintenance and development of the capitalist mode of production. It can take a while to reach the tipping point where mass working class organizing takes off exponentially—decades of nothing, and weeks that contain decades, as the saying goes.
I’d also like to say that I’m not describing a sort of gradualist or reformist politics. The speed of exponential change which comes from a positively reinforcing loop almost certainly implies on-the-ground revolutionary change in effective control over the means of production into the hands of the working class.
Preventing legislative leading which would put us in a position of unsustainable catch-up organizing or shortcut organizing
Usually, building working class consciousness will come in the form of long, hard-fought organizing and community building, in which we show how our socialist positions are naturally in the interest of the working class. This opens the door to passing socialist legislation as we grow more confident that the increasingly-class-conscious working class will robustly support each new piece of legislation. Legislation like this is essentially a symbolic reflection of working class coordination, but it nevertheless is a necessary part of the process of institutionalizing socialist revolutionary reforms.
In other cases, however, building working class consciousness can come quickly, in the form of passing legislation which we expect will be so incredibly popular among the working class, that the working class will fight tooth-and-nail to protect it. This is the case with things like a National Healthcare Service or Social Security. But the capitalist class continually tries new tactics to weaken and destroy these pro-working class policies, so even these relatively stable working class policy bastions likely have expiration dates unless we strengthen broad working class organizing capacity.
Clearly there are situations in which legislation outpaces the working class’ class consciousness. This means that the immediate beliefs of the unorganized and individualized working class are against the particular piece of socialist policy. However, as socialists, we believe that if this policy were carried out long enough or enjoined with even a slightly larger ecosystem of socialist structures, the working class would be significantly, materially better-off. Legislative leading can be effective at establishing-by-decree some particular socialist material relations, but unless the working class is organized to support and protect these pieces of socialist legislation, the bourgeois state or counter-revolution will inevitably roll it back.
A crucial point here then is whether we can grow genuine working class support for these policies before they are rolled back. Looking even closer at this problem, it’s an issue of whether the policy and the broader organizing environment are enough to grow working class consciousness around the relevant points which would lead the working class to know that their material interests are being protected and promoted by the socialist policy. Of course, there will always be some variation, and things will come up which we can’t predict, but this consideration hopefully gives us a starting point for analyzing how we might try to engage with “the ready-made state machinery” to promote organizing which makes the bourgeois state—based in class rule—irrelevant.
When socialists see a problem like this, a pitfall is that we might jump quickly to thinking it’s a problem to merely be solved with “better political education”. But this idealist style of organizing—where we’re merely working in terms of convincing people about ideas—usually fails to consider the material issues underlying the unorganized working class’s bourgeois economic beliefs and reactionary socialist beliefs. Only by addressing these underlying material concerns; such as, how the unorganized working class may become economically bourgeois-aligned, or socially reactionary with regards to a policy-area. These are things I wrote about in §2, and in the part above about identifying stable qualities in antagonistic institutions.
There’s sometimes a criticism of Orthodox Marxists of wanting to be too gradual in our organizing, and that we think that to achieve socialism, we need to go through the development of capitalism first. As I wrote a bit about in §4, my concern is that socialism is built in a politically sustainable manner, which seems to me to be the only and best way to achieve socialism in the Global North. It’s tough work, which means it is likely to take a while—at least until we reach the tipping point in the revolutionary potential of the mass working class.
Unsustainable Catch-Up Organizing:
We will sometimes find ourselves in a position where we can take legislative action, but doing so would considerably outpace the class consciousness and organizing capacity of the working class.
In these cases, we can organize our asses off, and still find that the counter-revolutionary tendencies remain dominant. The capitalist class attacks and defeats the policy through institutional veto power, or mobilizes the unorganized working class against the policy through economic blackmail and reactionary social division.
Sometimes, this will still be worth it. We can significantly build our organizing capacity even in our failure. In other cases it is obvious to the working class that the capitalist class is mobilizing their capital to bureaucratically veto a clearly good working class policy—the doomed fight still builds class consciousness. Sometimes, it is unclear if the legislation actually will significantly outpace our organizing capacity to catch up the unorganized working class, and the simple possibility of succeeding makes it worth it to try. I also think we actually often underestimate how much we can pull off if we are well-coordinated—it’s worth being bold.
However, if we fall into a pattern of unsustainable catch-up organizing, in which we’re always biting off more than we can chew, then we will get nowhere. Our policies will get rebuked and reversed. Socialist electeds will get recalled or voted out when they would otherwise have had genuine opportunities to install sustainable revolutionary reforms. On-the-ground organizers never get the legislative scaffolding to stand on and build out the organized working class. We resign ourselves to a future of intermittent periods of harm reduction, organizing for which uses up most of our self-directed labor power and never allows us to build up enough organizing capacity to challenge the capitalist class. I thought we had a world to win—what the fuck is this!
We want to be bold in our legislation, while not falling into that pattern of unsustainable catch-up organizing. To thread the needle, we need to be able to judge our own capacity and the likelihood that policy/legislation will create the organizing conditions which can maintain and build out from the policy/legislation. We can only achieve this through practices of inclusive and informed deliberation, and collective prediction of risk. (Read Hélène Landemore!)
Shortcut Legislative Organizing:
Marxist-Leninists have a dorky common tendency to think that they can create socialism-by-decree when they have political power—that, after gaining political control, they simply smash the bourgeois state and decree what the positive aspects of socialism are going to be. This view takes a dorky turn when organizing in the Global North, in a historical situation which seems to demand significantly more mass working class organizing to win people over before we can “smash the state”. Marxist-Leninists, from my experience, will look at socialist electeds in the Global North and demand that they should always take the most hard-line immediate actions; that a minority of socialist electeds should always act as if they can smash the bourgeois state when they cannot due to things like the structural limitations described in §2.
For the most part, this means that Marxist-Leninists simply want socialist electeds to make a bunch of performative actions and statements; many of which are harmless, sometimes useful, and then sometimes likely to get them recalled or replaced. But there will of course be rare moments in which socialist electeds have the chance to actually pass something. But if we always take the opportunity to take the hardest line on what to pass, then in some of those cases, we will be passing legislation which vastly outpaces the class consciousness of the mass working class.
In these situations where the mass working class is outpaced by legislation, Marxist-Leninists again have a dorky strategy. Organizers and socialist legislators, if they want to keep this vastly outpacing policy in place, would need to engage in whatever they can to quickly gain support for the policy—even if it’s superficial support or institutional maneuvering, not rooted in bread-and-butter organizing to build class consciousness. They would be compelled to use shortcuts to discipline or rhetorically convince the working class to join along (through misrepresentation of the organizing situation, shame, fear-mongering, or nationalism). These are meant to be temporary short-term practices, and they get justified in the heads of these vanguardist organizers as a way to quickly protect these wins against counter-revolutionary forces. But if we are not careful, these short-term practices will get repeatedly carried out until it becomes a stable and ever-present part of the nominally “working-class” revolution. Vanguardist organizers, from what I’ve seen, are usually not careful about this.
I want to emphasize that ‘shortcut practices of getting the working class on our side’ actively go against our goal of building a well-informed, democratically-practiced, class-conscious working class.
In practice, these shortcuts normalize practices of reaching people through overly-simplified and misleading analyses, and normalize anti-democratic practices of decision making. These shortcuts all create a merely superficially radical working class. In an almost cult-like fashion, the working class may be mobilized to follow the politics of the leading organizers—all without actually building a robust and nuanced socialist analysis for themselves. But we need the broad working class to build that deep and nuanced socialist analysis—it is the driving force of any truly working class revolution for communist social relations. As vanguardists become more dependent on methods of social discipline and social engineering, they stray farther from actual practices of building up the working class to achieve a desirable, sustainable socialist world.
At worst, the policy-decreers will have a mistaken technical analysis, and the policy will cause harm to the working class. But since disciplinary and merely rhetorical methods are used to create superficial mass working class support, the policy doesn’t have the chance go under the empowered scrutiny of an inclusive, deliberative democracy. The harmful aspects of the policy are not caught and fixed, until it’s too late.
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The larger the amount of catch-up we put on ourselves, the more time the capitalist class has to organize and build counter-revolutionary pushback. The more that socialist organizers rely on shortcuts, then the more the working class is cut off from possibilities of self-sustaining socialist practices and institutions. And, while not a nail in the coffin, if the counter-revolutionary action succeeds, this will be misrepresented as proof that the entire socialist strategy was bad in the first place. Since the fall of the USSR, the history of these anti-democratic state-vanguardist shortcuts have become incredibly useful for the bourgeoisie as anti-socialist propaganda.
The key is to generally avoid getting ourselves into a situation of unsustainable catch-up in the first place. But there are always exceptions to the rule, so here are things I think are worth considering when pushing for legislation and judging if it is a good use of our labor power:
How much labor power does it take to get to the point of mass working class consciousness around support for a policy—prior to getting it passed?
If we were to pass a policy before we have mass working class support, would that make it more difficult for us to build working class power and class consciousness in this area going forward? This is a more generalized discussion than simply whether a socialist elected gets recalled or voted out by the unorganized working class—which itself would be a reflection of our lack of working class support.
If we were to pass a policy before we have mass working class support, then will the policy get rolled back before we can build enough working class consciousness to maintain support for the policy?
Is the temporary benefit of having a policy passed worth the potential problems brought up in 2 & 3?
If we got together and thought about it, is there a viable alternative strategy which might be more effective?
Legislation should put a stake in the ground, and help create stable institutions so that the organizing working class can move on to the next fight. It can even outpace the class consciousness of the unorganized working class, so long as it helps create an environment where we can effectively organize the unorganized. Through this organizing, we should be confidently able to catch up the working class to the initially outpacing legislation. Then, the working class will actually be able to maintain and continue organizing beyond the legislation.
So there we have it
Organize, organize, organize, to build the revolutionary capacity of the mass working class!
Legislation and engaging in electoral politics can be a useful tool for socialists in accomplishing this, insofar as bourgeois government is a reflection of the working class. But bourgeois and reactionary views abound even when the state is a basic reflection of the working class. The unorganized working class often finds themselves, as individuals, economically aligned with certain capitalist circuits of accumulation, which they have become dependent on as individuals. Unorganized working class individuals are also much more likely to fall into reactionary social beliefs when they are alienated from and competing with their fellow members of the working class.
For socialists to effectively use the legislative tool, without overly-self-moderating to these superficial bourgeois and reactionary beliefs of the unorganized working class, we need effective communication, deliberation, and coordination among socialist organizers and socialist electeds.
It can seem like a chicken-or-egg problem sometimes. Socialist legislation needs the support of a class conscious working class, but building a class conscious working class seems to sometimes rely on the passage of pro-socialist legislation. In part, we can rely on the crises and contradictions of capitalism to radicalize the working class. But as active organizers, we need to create a positive feedback loop between on-the-ground organizing and legislation. On the side of on-the-ground organizing, this means using whatever organizing wins we get to open doors for stronger working class legislation. On the side of legislation, this means installing sustainable legislative wins—sustainable because they put organizers into a position of building up working class consciousness and revolutionary capacity, so that we may sustain and grow that level of pro-working class legislation.
The working class builds the revolution, as our socialist electeds pass revolutionary reforms and necessary harm reduction.
Building a truly democratic and empowering socialism has never been an easy task, but it is achievable with inventive organizing which nevertheless stays true to the fundamentals: practical material analysis; focus on developing socialized forces of production; increasing the working class’ self-directed labor power; growing nuanced mass working class consciousness; healthy communication; good-faith deliberation; and strategic coordination. The international, inclusive working class has the world to win!