There is no “safe space” in a revolutionary situation, or even in a democratic or anti-fascist struggle.

I hope that people on the Left---and particularly white people on the Left---will read and reflect on the article which appeared in the New York Times of Sunday, November 26 about the fascist Tony Hovater. I believe that the article validates certain points some of us have been making in the anti-racist movement over the past two years. The article also calls to mind certain shortcomings in our work.

If white radicals are not about the business of organizing working-class whites as part of an anti-racist, pro-socialist, and revolutionary strategy and tactics then we are surrendering people to the opposition. Note that in the Times article Hovater talks about his version of serving the interests of whites in Appalachia. There are scores of Hovaters at work, no doubt, and they’re working quietly in places like Appalachia, the Midwestern factory and farming towns, and the logging towns of the Pacific Northwest, winning people over to a reactionary agenda which does not serve their interests. Most of us do not have a strategy and tactics to counter this, and we place the burden of thinking and doing on people color or we engage in introspection instead.

Organizing the working class once ran deep in our Leftist DNA. The move away from class-based politics on the Left, aided and abetted by every fake-Left ideology which says that the working-class is not the primary revolutionary force in the world, has meant that we no longer talk about white chauvinism as the most pernicious force dividing workers, that we talk more about racism and less about national oppression, that we do not recognize in principled ways the need for self-determination and people of color-based leadership, and that we do not reach out to the grassroots and to our co-workers with a revolutionary program. It is not that there are not revolutionary programs. You can start with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Communist Party, the Party of Communists, Freedom Road, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the Movement For Black Lives (M4BL) to find fully-developed political programs which can be adapted or put into practice in your workplace or community. Readers of this blog know that the DSA and M4BL programs resonate with me, whatever their differences or contradictions. The problem is not that we don’t have programs. The problem is that we don’t have the will or the means to put these programs into living form. The price we pay for that is Trump, or worse.

We should cease trying to reinvent the Leftist wheel and instead look into our Leftist DNA. We need full support for the leadership and grassroots in Jackson, MS., where the living traditions of revolutionary self-determination and socialism are resurfacing. But not only support---we need to learn in all humility from Jackson, and from other such places, and bring that home in a package. We believe, or should believe, in the principles of self-determination and working through every democratic option as part of constructing a larger revolutionary path. This should apply to how we understand the struggles of all nationally-oppressed peoples (Black- and Brown-majority regions), women, LGBTQIA+ people, the differently-abled---and to places to places like Appalachia as well.

What does this mean? It means full support for the M4BL program and adapting that in our work in principled ways so that we’re building working-class power free of white chauvinism. It means dropping white- and middle-class-based integrationism and intregrationist slogans and respecting the rights of people of color to determine their collective destinies. It means carrying every freedom struggle into our organizations and into our communities in ways which build solidarity. It means collectively dealing with the fear which we are all facing every day. It means understanding that there are needs for specific people of color revolutionary organizations and supporting the rights of people of color to form those organizations. It doesn’t mean alliances until everyone is working in organizations which can ally with one another---and by then, perhaps, we will have something better than allying with one another as an option. It means looking at whatever disrupts the reproduction of labor power as a working-class fight, as part of the class struggle, while understanding that it is the working class who carry out the revolutionary project of overthrowing the bourgeoisie.

Not everyone is going to be good with this. Since the conversation about “twenty-first century socialism” began, and since the Sanders campaign, we have been talking about “big tent” socialism and all-inclusive organizations and movements. This has been an error, or is proving to be. We are not distinguishing between a movement, which is absolutely essential and needs to be inclusive of all oppressed and exploited people, and socialist political organizations. In the past people worked their ways through movements and into political organizations. Recognizing oneself as a socialist and being accepted into a socialist political organization were regarded as achievements, as something special. Some socialist organizations had probationary periods, and potential leaders were mentored. Some organizations still require interviews to join, and they only admit, say, white male applicants after people of color and women or non-binary people have joined. Some organizations balance their organizations along the lines of class composition. The expectation was that members donate one day of pay each month, subscribe to the organization's newspapers and magazines, sell the papers, attend the rallies, join a study circle, and sign up new members---and all after working on a job and while managing a relationship or a family. Few people did all of that work because they were power-hungry or driven by ego or were careerists. You learned how to fit in, judge situations, organize, not be the outstanding person getting everyone's attention. These were the good practices of an Old Left, but much of that has been lost. And so it is that a socialist meeting might have a majority of people who are not members of an organization present, or not even socialists, making decisions impacting socialist organizing. The meeting might be led by a union staffer with their own interests and priorities.

In such situations we can see much is being lost. Opportunities to learn and be mentored are being lost, there is not a commitment to an organization, time and energy get burned, people come in thinking that they have a right to take the floor and speak without knowledge or investigation, organization gets treated as a commodity when people say that they will quit if they don’t get their way, projects get put off, and integrationism and progressive stacking get used instead of socialist-proletarian democratic processes. Good people show up and never come back because they were not prepared for the meeting. None of this is democratic. Most of these are features of white-majority organizations seeking to grow and build with good intentions, but they're doing so with what are sometimes petty-bourgeois prejudices and leadership.

The special meaning of having membership in a socialist organization was expressed by the poet Yevtushenko in these words:

Party Card

A shot-up forest full of black holes.
Mind-crushing explosions.
He wants some berries, he wants some berries:
the young lieutenant, lying in his blood.
I was a smallish boy,
who crawled in the long grass till it was dark
and brought him back a cap of strawberries,
and when they came there was no use for them.
The rain of July lightly falling.
He was lying in remoteness and silence
among the ruined tanks and the dead.
The rain glistened on his eyelashes.
There was sadness and worry in his eyes.
I waited saying nothing and soaking,
like waiting for an answer to something
he couldn’t answer. Passionate with silence
unable to see when he asked me,
I took the party card from his pocket.
And small and tired and without understanding
wandering in the flushed and smoking dark,
met up with refugees moving east
and somehow through the terribly flashing night
we travelled without a map, the priest
with his long grey hair and his rucksack,
and me and a sailor with a wounded arm.
Child crying. Horse whinnying.
And answered to with love and with courage
and white, white, the bell-towers rang out
speaking to Russia with a tocsin voice.
Wheatfields blackened round their villages.
In the woman’s coat I wore at the time.
I felt for the party card close to my heart.

One tradition on the Left---the tradition I most identify with---recognized the right of people of color to full self-determination while also building people of color leadership in integrated organizations. As far as I know, the first instance of an American Black military commander being in charge of majority-white American troops followed from this and was in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. We were the first to practice what became “progressive stacking” and affirmative action in combat and political life, but we did so from the standpoint of intersectionality as mass organizing was underway. Why do whites on the Left now so seldom connect support for people of color leadership and methods like progressive stacking to mass organizing? Certainly a tradition has been lost, and people in my Leftist corner bear responsibility for this, but the Trotskyites, social democrats, and anarchists who were on the wrong side in Spain (and elsewhere) have set about reinventing the Leftist wheel and rewriting history and blocking unity once more. The modern-day careerists assist them. In such hands, then, progressive stacking becomes a liberal attempt at balance or control. If it is not linked directly to leadership accountability through criticism and self-criticism, it becomes a means of reformism.

What does it mean to say that something becomes a means of reformism? It means for us that petty-bourgeois interests are being substituted for radical or revolutionary objectives and that hope is being put in individualism rather than in the oppressed and exploited masses or in the working-class. Any radical or revolutionary organization in the U.S. now will have two or more political lines present and in competition with one another: one will come from the petty-bourgeois people who have joined the left and one will come from women or people of color or proletarians or LGBTQIA+ people who are engaged in revolutionary organizing. A petty-bourgeois line, or politics, may not be wrong in itself under particular circumstances, but it will not be viable in the long run. The U.S. is not "exceptional" among countries in the sense that the system here does not have weaknesses and cannot be overthrown, but the petty-bourgeois mentality in the U.S. is exceptionally strong and constantly invades the left, taking the forms of pacifism, the Greens, social democracy, anarchism, following the Democrats, refusing to learn and refusing to lead, racism and sexism and transphobia, ableism, distance from the working-class, and reliance on leadership and NGOs and trade unionism.

We need unity with pacifists, Greens, social democrats, anarchists, the Democrats, the NGOS and the trade unions. We also need these organizations to unite against Trump, put forward at least a minimal radical-democratic program, and build an inside/outside strategy which will defeat the ultra-right and take us to a new stage in struggle. We need everyone to show self-discipline, cooperation, and solidarity. But our appeal as the Left needs to be to people at the base of every organization, and our faith must be there and not in the organizations themselves. We want a united front, or at least coalition politics, but we must understand that, by itself, coalition politics are petty-bourgeois and reformist. That doesn't get us off the hook for having to have a healthy relationship to leaders and leadership; it obligates us to win leadership based on relations of trust and hard work. A perfect line doesn't win the day. The application of that line to real problems wins. We build coalition politics because we understand a push and pull in society and because we believe in democracy and---most importantly---because we are fighting for our survival and the survival of the planet. But we go into this knowing that capitalism has to go. Our first allies need to be the workers and the exploited and oppressed peoples. We respect them by learning from them and by showing up every day to do the work, being the first to arrive and among the last to leave. The trade union tactics of putting everyone at a meeting on a rating scale, manipulating a few leaders, doing selective one-on-ones and creating the trappings of democracy without ever talking about militance and vision only ensures that things will get worse. Facebook and the latest social media undermines unity because it prevents needed face-to-face and collective discussion. Our Plan A should be to be with one another and with the oppressed and exploited. Our Plan B might be social media.

    

Our tradition has also said that “power comes from the barrel of a gun.” We took this in the worst of possible of ways, using this to justify armed struggle when it was adventurist and just wrong. Let’s back up. The saying also means that state power is inherently coercive and rests, when all is said and done, on the coercive power of government. The anarchists see this as an evil; we see it as a transient moment in history. If we acknowledge that government is inherently coercive, then we also interrogate the concept of democracy: whose interests does a particular government or system best serve, where has this system come from and where is it going, what are the forces at work here? And we quickly conclude, once we understand what the balance of forces is, that there is no “safe space” in a revolutionary situation, or even in a democratic or anti-fascist struggle.

Things change because there are differences of opinion, competing ideas, and competing systems. The old cannot go until something has arrived to replace it, and something of the past and of the future is always with us in the present. For some years now our movements have been talking about “safe space” as if we could achieve safe space in a movement or in a capitalist society. We should instead be steeling ourselves through collective study, collective work, and criticism/self-criticism. Revolution is not a tea party, after all.

Criticism/self-criticism is not the right or responsibility to throw off or throw down with people. It is the responsibility to investigate failures and successes, understand the push-and-pull of events, see a big picture and a small picture, own one’s mistakes and successes in light of existing political and economic and social conditions, be modest, and dedicate oneself to one’s self-improvement and the advancement of the collective. It comes from below, not from above, and cannot be formulaic or a form of punishment or a means of maintaining control. In fact, the leading bodies and the leading activists in our organizations need to be the first to engage in and teach criticism/self-criticism.

Zhou Enlai, when he was revolutionary, wrote the following:

1. Study diligently, grasp essentials, concentrate on one subject rather than seeking superficial knowledge of many.

2. Work hard and have a plan, a focus and a method.

3. Combine study with work and keep them in proper balance according to time, place and circumstances; take care to review and systemize; discover and create.

4. On the basis of principles, resolutely combat all incorrect ideology in others as well as in myself.

5. Insofar as possible, make the most of my strengths and take concrete steps to overcome my weaknesses.

6. Never become alienated from the masses; learn from them and help them. Lead a collective life, inquire into the concerns of the people around you, study their problems their problems and abide by the rules of discipline.

7. Keep fit and lead a reasonable regular life. This is the material basis for self-improvement.

One criticism I get is that this is all theory and has no application. This is often valid. But our local organizing work tells me that we need help doing two things: fighting white chauvinism and national oppression among white working-class people, and growing socialist-minded cadre with the ideological tools needed to move forward. Much of what I have written here comes from real local practice. Please consider the rest as a plea for solidarity and discussion.

Another criticism is that this is “above the heads” of the people, and this also has some validity. If there are easier ways to communicate what is being said here, or if the opinions given are wrong, then let’s talk about that in real time and in the context of organizing. Let’s get started!