A Reflection on Some Socialist Fundamentals from a Salem, Oregon Socialist

Believe it or not, the following points are a reflection on events in Salem and in our region. They are presented here as a reaction to some of the trends which I see in place locally as I engage with other union members, working-class people, anti-racist organizing, and Salem’s leftists and progressives. These comments reflect only my own opinions, and they continue from some points I made while speaking at a community forum in Salem last week. I mention many organizations and publications in this post, but none of them have been consulted about this post.

There are several public employee strikes underway, and some possibly in the offing, as I write, and labor is making some gains regionally. The employment picture is slowing in Oregon after a boom, and volatile market activity indicates capitalist uncertainty. Whatever gains are being made at the ports, which are largely automated, are likely being offset by the fires which were either caused or exacerbated by global warming. Youth resistance, labor struggles, and immigrant rights struggles are key in Oregon.

Nationally, the resistance to the Trump agenda is continuing and has had some successes: Trump has been unable to govern except through executive order. Women’s struggles and resistance to white chauvinism and the national oppression of people of color has center stage. The outrageous mistreatment of Puerto Rico, and the continuing blatant oppression of the Puerto Rican people and the people on the U.S.-colonized islands and in the south after the storms, exposes the settler-colonialist nature of the American capitalist system. With these conditions, and others, there has been an increase in socialist organizing and outreach. This has been seen most clearly in the growth of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and DSA’s ability to gather young people and enter local political races as a player, the rise of the Jackson Movement, renewed talk of left wing coalition politics, and the tremendous advances made and represented in the Movement for Black Lives Platform. The Platform represents the most advanced political program in the U.S. today.

Our local social movements and the left here both lack the needed maturity to lead, however. This ability to lead, which is a precondition of progress, can only be gained through strategic political organizing. Besides Trump and the fascist wave behind him, we are most often the victims of our own inexperience and immaturity. The rush of people to the left which came after the2008 crisis, during the Sanders campaign, and after the election caught the organized left by surprise, or unprepared. Why were we unprepared? I think that neo-liberalism, the heightened white-chauvinist assaults on people of color, the hopes and failures of the Obama presidency, the 2008 crisis, setbacks for labor, and---reaching back---the fall of the Soviet Union and much of the socialist bloc and the failures of anti-imperialism all left us confused and disoriented. We sacrificed principles which we knew to be true, principles which were in our leftist DNA. We abandoned the working-class and our base among people of color in key urban centers and in the south and southwest.

We also continue to suffer from many of the same problems which afflict the Democrats. This is not because we are Democrats, or because we identify with them or because we often vote with them, but because on our best days we share the same base as the Democrats do. That base consists of the most politically engaged people among labor, women, and people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, and youth. These are the core forces needed for change: when they get the sniffles, we get the flu.

It is especially important in this period for us to proceed carefully and not jeopardize the support that we have among these core forces, and to thereby jeopardize opportunities to learn how to lead and to miss the boat in upcoming political races. We can jeopardize this support through paralysis and inaction, by taking an ultra-left line, or by not encouraging people from the core forces to engage with us and fully enter the movement and win leadership in principled ways. We need total commitment to organizing and to building principled unity around a broad program for social change and victory. This is a political struggle, not a moral crusade.

In pragmatic terms, in Oregon this means an all-out effort to defeat IP 22 and win on immigrant rights issues, win a real people’s budget, defeat white chauvinism and national oppression wherever it arises, defend labor rights, prepare alternate people’s-power mechanisms (like representative assemblies), stop the loss of jobs and stop the destruction of the environment and reverse environmental damage, and fight the right and win on women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ struggles, and on all democratic people’s demands. We have much to learn from the immigrant rights movements and from the Salem climate activists united in 350 Salem. This is a fully pragmatic socialist approach.

We can’t get to that pragmatic socialist approach without rediscovering some the fundamentals which run deep in our leftist DNA. I offer the following incomplete list of some of these fundamentals in order to provoke discussion and to distinguish a socialist approach from others.

1.       Revolution is the project of overthrowing the ruling class, and only that. Other projects have their time and place, but it will take a revolution to overthrow the ruling class. Revolution is not on the agenda now. That means that we should not be surprised when non-revolutionary projects succeed and things either go on as before or get worse. It also means that democracy within this system remains our training school. We have to master democracy in order to understand how it can be used defensively (to hold on to past gains) and offensively (taking advantages of contradictions within the system in order to win gains). Democracy is relevant to the extent that it furthers the project of revolutionary self-determination.

2.       Historic fascism is “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” as Georgi Dimitrov said. It forms in reaction to revolutions and revolutionary movements. Granted that the Obama presidency felt like the revolution to a significant body of Americans, we do not live under a terroristic dictatorship of finance capital which has been aroused to power by a failed revolution. We can’t underestimate the fascist threat, but we do not live under that system. Anti-fascism, as opposed to organizing the working class and the masses of people around socialist demands, disarms people and disempowers them because it strikes at the wrong target.

3.       The reasonable response to the ultra-right and to the fascist threat is to build a united front from below. Coalition politics is the weak American brother to the concept of a united front. An appeal must be made by proven and established leaders to the rank-and-file members of every liberal and left organization to join them in a broad-based political effort built from a common democratic program which prioritizes the needs of the core forces mentioned above. The Movement for Black Lives, the Jackson Movement, and DSA have the programs: people need to be won over to them and held accountable for carrying them out.

4.     Building a left party under current conditions is not a reasonable response to American conditions now. Many left parties already exist, and a few are growing, but none are yet capable of leading. Their presence and growth locally now most often endangers the democratic social movements where people are learning how to organize and lead. This does not mean that leadership can emerge spontaneously or that independent revolutionary political activity can’t or shouldn’t happen. People should be learning democratic leadership skills in their unions, in their neighborhood associations, in DSA, in the immigrant rights and anti-racist and feminist movements. Radical and revolutionary political activity can be localized in DSA chapters, or can exist in pre-party formations and organizing committees, or in other engagement with the core social forces, or in some of the historic parties of the left. When or where a new socialist party is on the agenda, it will need to calendar out its development over 5 or 10 years.

5.       We hear from many liberal and radical people in Salem that there are no guiding texts for social change and that we have to make things up as we go along. I believe that this is mistaken. The Communist Manifesto provides a list of reforms and explains how we get from a period of reform to a time of revolution. Capital and Wage-Labor and Capital both describe how capitalism works. The works of Stalin, Lenin, and Mao describe the struggles against advanced capitalism and imperialism. Dimitrov is our guide to fascism. Alexander Spirkin teaches us how to think. Malcom X, Cornel West, Michael Harrington’s and Barbara Ehrenreich’s work on poverty, much of Naomi Klein’s work on environmentalism, Amílcar Cabral, Gus Hall, Claudia Jones, Killer Mike, Marlene Dixon, Angela Davis, W.E. B. Du Bois---whatever their considerable differences---are indispensable starting points. Read the Marxism-Leninism Today blog, subscribe to In These Times or to Monthly Review.

6.      We need to reframe the white understanding of racism and oppression as understanding these as white chauvinism and in terms of class exploitation and national oppression, as deliberate strategies used by capitalists to divide workers in order to ensure higher profits, or rates of profit, and the survival of colonialism and neo-colonialism.

7.       The Universal Basic Income (U.B.I) concept---the idea that a government will provide a sufficient basic income to all people regardless of income or work status---is often presented locally as an aspect of a revolt against work. Local proponents of U.B.I. most often claim that the fights with the bosses that we all have cannot be won, or that work cannot be humanized and turned into a creative endeavor, and must therefore be abolished. This is exactly what we do not believe. U.B.I., impossible as it is to imagine now, sounds increasingly dystopian. The old labor anthem got it right: our jobs are ours not to slave in, but to master and to own.

8.       Capitalism has two primary forms of production. One produces surplus value and profits in workplaces by exploiting workers who receive wages. The other main form of production produces, or reproduces, the commodity we call “labor power,” or all that creates workers, replenishes us in our daily lives, makes it possible for us to go to work and to have something to return to. This second form takes the form of housework, emotional labor, and actual reproduction of and caring for human beings---the unwaged work done mostly by women. We need to focus equally on both when we talk about capitalism.

9.       Building a regional and national left out of real people’s struggles and organizing will mean that we will eventually need and have a revolutionary party. This is inescapable; there is no way around this. A revolutionary party means that we will have a direct interest in regional and national politics and regional and national production. Our interest is in making sure that politics and production are not sabotaged by the capitalists and the far-right in order to sabotage democracy. These interests will grow and deepen as our movement advances. Small, local production is not the solution to capitalist crises, and it complicates democratic development under capitalism.

10.   We are reminded on a regular basis by some friends in Salem that we must remain non-violent. I have wondered why these regular reminders pop up. I have not encountered a large group of people who want to use violence or who do. The immediate problems for me with these warnings are that they seem to come from people who are not politically engaged in radical efforts in the first place, that they come from the white middle-class, that the people who insist on non-violence have no alternative political strategy which builds movements, and that they serve to limit a movement’s strategies and tactics before that movement exists in a mature political form.

11.   The working-class is the base of revolutionary activity. This is so because full intersectionality only occurs within the working-class, and because the working-class has the key position in capitalism and forms the opposite of capitalism. Being the base means just that: other struggles can be built from that base. Not all motion is progress, however. Workers do not move at anyone else’s speed, but when we do move we surpass any organization representing us.