Most of the labor and radical political organizations that I have been involved with have had a group of leaders and activists and a rank-and-file who tune in and out. Whether the leaders and activists intend to or not, they often build a moat around themselves. They do ever more work but their energies and numbers diminish over time. At some point some of them turn on one another or turn on the rank-and-file. The rank-and-file, for their part, might have a transactional or user mentality, or they may have signed on because they are good with the organization’s program, or because they want to give financial support but not do more, or because the right person or the right moment needed to move them has not arrived. Leadership may also fall into transactionalism, meaning that inducements of one kind or another are used to get members or to build projects. Or leadership may conciliate with members’ inaction, or they may keep looking for the right thing or a right moment to move people.
Being a socialist does not mean that one is free of all capitalist influences or individualism. And being a socialist now, when much of the U.S. Left has arrived where they are through the Occupy and Sanders movements or through a battered labor movement, often means that counter-culturalism, so-called “identity politics,” forms of liberalism and anarchism, tendencies to work for change “from above” rather than with workers and nationally oppressed peoples at the grassroots, going to the many manuals for social change that are out there for answers, living in the world of the non-profits, and not engaging with the classics of socialism runs pretty strong. We have seen in a very short time the practical disappearance in many areas of a traditional, militant, self-educated Left made up of workers and nationally oppressed peoples. And it is not only that we have seen this disappearance, but that it has been a forced disappearance in some sense, driven by ageism, nihilism, anarchism, and liberalism on the Left.
What we know, or what we think we know, is that if you do not build activism into an organization from its first minutes you end up with inactivism, busyness (not organizing), or division. And we know, or we think we know, that if you do for people what they can do for themselves you diminish their ability to lead and limit their identification with the organization. We know that not all motion is forward motion, but it is questionable if we can identify backward motion when we see it and if we know how to stop it. We should know that learning history is a subversive act, and that we have a responsibility or right to insist that everyone take up the tools of theory and practice as they enter our organizations. We know, or we should know from the labor movement, that an organizer can spend all day preaching unity, but when one person says “Maybe we’ll get fired if we protest” the group falls apart. The Left has our equivalents: personal attacks, anti-communism, the “white fragility” line all set activity back. We know that people will enter a house with many wide-open doors, but we should also know that not everyone coming through the doors is someone you want planning your next party and deciding who is going to serve the punch at the party. We should know that we cannot tell people to bugger off and expect heir cooperation or open ears.
When these problems occur in the context of a “big tent” socialist organization like a chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) the undemocratic underpinnings of the organization become more problematic. We should not expect a socialist organization in the U.S. right now to be fully democratic, fully participatory, and fully attuned to what the working-class and oppressed peoples are thinking and doing. And it is not that DSA is primarily undemocratic in its structure or decision-making, but that the “big tent” formulation is, in itself, undemocratic. “Big tent” means, on the one hand, that all “democratic socialists” are welcome---a good thing when “democratic” refers to democracy in motion but a bad thing when it refers to a specific social-democratic tradition or some form of Left liberalism. On the other hand, “big tent” also means that there will be problems with decision-making, focus, and attention to national projects. People will drop in and out. What we think of as “political line” and “mass work”---the two necessary aspects of activism that are in non-antagonistic opposition to one another---will not be taken up by the entire organization, or at least not in the same ways and at the same times.
A comrade who is not engaged in mass work but who has a long history of activism and leadership will be prone to take occasional swipes at other comrades, and especially those in leadership. His comments can be caustic and can be heard as blow-offs to the Chapter, although this is not his intention. This is what isolation accomplishes in many situations. The leadership is feeling burdened with the work that they do and the relatively low numbers of people involved; they are understandably defensive when attacked. Both the comrade who is attacking and those who are feeling the attack understand that there are openings for DSA and for socialism that are being missed. Both are aware that each meeting creates more work, and neither is completely confidant that they are moving in the right direction quickly enough. The former cannot hear the others asking for his participation (too often on their terms, and not on his), and the latter keeps on taking on work as if their energy is infinite and as if their methods of work are democratic.
Because we have a “big tent” organization we cannot find unity on questions of self-determination, defunding the police or putting police under community control, some of the basics of exploitation, and the role of the state. We do not have a commonly shared analysis of colonialism and imperialism. We have not discussed or come up with a shared analysis of the coup attempt in D.C. or the fascist threat here in Oregon. The people in the organization who have backgrounds in Marxism and organizing drop the ball when it comes to discussing these questions, engaging in education, and doing practical work in these areas---or we conciliate with liberalism or anarchism.
And because we all live in the U.S. and drink deeply from this culture, we see our failures in individual terms, we excuse them as matters of personal angst or exhaustion, we burn out, or we conciliate in less-than-principled ways---or we gather up our toys and go home angry and sulk. Political disagreements are taken as personal affronts, and this is sometimes inescapable when political line is distorted and expressed in caustic terms. Anyone active in the labor and Left movements meets a good number of alcoholics and dopers, burn outs, angry people, mansplainers, too-busy people, and droners. What they share in common are unhealthy relationships to power and individualism that negate collective work and power. We over-emphasize the role of negation in making change, if we think about how change happens at all. But for us, as socialists, the problem should be less about what is healthy or unhealthy and more about what it takes in terms of our relations to the masses to get on and stay on a path to working-class power.
These turns signify bourgeois or petty-bourgeois intrusions into our movement, or at least an absence of criticism and self-criticism and support for those of us who want to grow and do better. They have their complementary political positions in opposition to theory and intellectual development on the Left, political defeatism and indecisiveness, a distrust or rejection of paths to power, and an inability or unwillingness to think dialectically and work with the push and pull of political struggle. This is where we get Trotskyism and reflexive anti-communism and anti-Stalinism from. This is where unprincipled coalition activity (and not united fronts) comes from.
Go here for Part 3.
Go here for Part 3.
No comments:
Post a Comment