Archive for category: REGENERATION MAG

Peter Kropotkin, author of “Mutual-Aid: A Factor of Evolution”.

Mutual-aid is in the air. Look near any anarchist or socialist project, and you will see the importance of it emphasized in big bold text. In the name of mutual-aid, people are doing food shares, repairing pot-holes in black bloc attire, fixing brake lights, mucking and gutting flooded houses, and giving out Narcan and clean IV supplies to drug users. These have become ubiquitous practices on the left.

All very good deeds, how can we be against this? When people are hungry, you feed them. If you have two coats and your neighbor has none, you have one coat and your neighbor now has one. The impulse is more than relatable, I too believe in these things. The appeal is hard to disagree with. From disaster to crisis, mutual aid comes like Superman to save the day, feeding and housing everyone, saving each other’s lives.

But the truth is, mutual-aid isn’t a challenge or threat to the social order which produced hunger and precarity. The state is largely indifferent or even welcoming to it. In a world where the working class is increasingly being told to fend for itself, can we continue to call this “solidarity” with any honesty? If not, then what actually do these practices do for us? 

The problem of poverty is precisely that we don’t have the shit. Let’s get a few very agreeable things straight, which really clarify why mutual aid is wholly insufficient: 1. The world of private property and wage labor drive poverty and produced a number of social problems. 2. The poor and working class is characterized by lacking reserves and does not have free time, and 3. The poor and working class do not have the unpaid labor and unused property by which to alleviate these problems directly without going to the source keeping it from them.

However, Big Door Brigade, a website which collects and aggregates mutual-aid efforts across the country says the opposite:

“What do we mean by “mutual aid”? Mutual aid is when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW!”

How can both be true? If the working class does not have the shit, why is mutual aid elevated as “the work”? What are the impulses behind the popularity of mutual aid? Is it organizing? Is it solidarity? What do these things mean if it is not? What does the Bread guy that AOC likes to quote actually have to say about all of this?

Honest Service Work

Young Lord’s Lincoln Hospital Offensive.

It is more honest to call the bulk of what gets sold as mutual aid to be “service work”. This comes under various names: “survival programs”, mutual aid, and “serve the people”. Regardless of the nomenclature, these function largely the same. They are not new, Food Not Bombs has been a staple of anarchist culture for decades.

There is no shortage of examples of good groups engaging in honest service work throughout history. The most well-known example is the Black Panthers. As the Black Panthers were constantly portrayed in the media as frightening armed terrorists, their survival programs served a number of functions at once. They brought legitimacy to their more central practices. They improved their standing amongst the people they were trying to organize. They also served as an outlet for those wanting to have an “immediate” positive impact. It also overcame barriers to organizing, a Communist Party that takes up a literacy campaign doesn’t just do this to improve lives, but to actually further be able to reach people and deepen their relationships.

It is worth delineating and examining these and how they related to other organizing. The Lincoln Hospital was a site of struggle for the Young Lords as much as it was a place transformed by service work into something more egalitarian and humanistic. This was the kernel of what would become “harm reduction”, which is mostly voluntaristic work that saves lives every day. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union had service work as a part of its multilateral apparatus, providing abortion care and procedures women did not have access to, this was one of many projects which brought attention to their brand of Socialist Feminism, while they also were heavily involved in workplace organizing amongst women in Chicago factories. It is hard to not be influenced by a historic organization which incorporated service work.

Honest service work is not always antithetical to a broader struggle which is primarily propelled by target-and-demand driven projects. They can be a very good supplement, to the point where if you are in a growing group dedicated to class struggle that is really making bigger and bigger moves, devoting a bit of extra labor in this direction is a good idea. However, it raises the question of an overall strategy, and where we really want to put our faith. We need to harvest new relations and forms of care, but outside the context of conflict, we lack the thrust which gives these new forms their class character.

This is not just the domain of the left either, Identity Evropa (a fascist group, now American Identity Movement) shares supplies and picks up trash in parks and neighborhoods, and you’ll hear a lot about the “good work” that Gazi and the Black Hammer organization are doing. However, this also says a lot for how we should approach honest service work: it’s politically neutral, often the domain of opportunists, and is very limited. It should be seen honestly for what it is, rather than giving the impression that this suffices for organizing. A “both-and” approach isn’t something I’m against, but it’s on us to make the service-work supportive of the organization’s broader thrust.

Words and Deeds

Fixing potholes in Black Bloc.

Today’s mutual aid efforts spend a great deal of time explaining all the ways in which they are not charity. They try to make it clear that they, the feeders of the hungry, are on the same side as the freedom fighters. According to Mutual Aid activist Dean Spade, mutual aid organizations “Use people power to resist any efforts by government to regulate or shut down activities”, “is connected to other tactics, including disruptive tactics aimed at root causes of the distress the aid addresses”, and “builds broader political participation, solidarity, mobilization, radicalization”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says in her Mutual Aid 101 guide, that mutual aid is: “A great jumping off point for other kinds of organizing and movement work”

My contention is that mutual aid organizations do little, to none of this. The beliefs and rhetoric simply do not translate into action. There is certainly support at the peaks of struggle, protests are supplied with medics and water-bearers, however this is not the way this looks day-to-day, for either the mutual-aid groups, or the disruptive organizations they claim to build solidarity with. Most of the day-to-day looks like increasing support for mutual aid.

One characteristic of mutual aid sticks out, and reminds me of the self-exploitation that co-op workers put themselves through. It’s the rebranding of what are essentially capitalist firms and enterprises to be “movement-friendly”. As someone experienced on what a non-profit looks like from the inside, including as someone who was paid but was glad to do the work otherwise, this jumps out as a major concern from Spade’s chart:

“Efforts to flatten hierarchies—e.g. flat wage scales if anyone is paid, training so that new people can do work they weren’t professionally trained to do, rotating facilitation roles, language access”

If implemented on a wider scale, this could possibly lower the value of everyone’s labor in a related industry. The capitalist class laughs all the way to the bank with this one, just look at the “learn to code for free” classes tech companies are giving, this lowers the cost of the labor for everyone, which Silicon Valley wants very badly to cut. There’s also nothing preventing a non-profit from seeing this and running with it, thus using a mix of volunteer and paid-staff labor to further exploit everyone!

I always try to reserve judgement not for where people came from, and less so (but still important) what they say, but mostly for what they do. These are not always the same thing, and the disconnect should always set off alarms. mutual aid groups dress up what is functionally similar to NGOs and church groups, and pass it off as something new and most contentiously, something “radical”.

Most of what Spade characterizes as mutual-aid he believes is radical because of what is believed about poverty (which reduces stigma) by the organization, how people are educated (to overcome differences), and an egalitarianism of expertises and skills. These are all good things, but all in the realm of ideas, the problem isn’t the way we think about care and poverty, it’s about how it’s organized, and how our labor is organized.

The problems and insufficiency with NGOs was never really the services they provide though, it’s where they locate and build power (“proper channels”, Democratic Party, seat at the table), and yes, to Spade’s credit, their ethic and structure. However, it’s not clear if breaking with this structure in form yields some new content. If anything, the mutual aid model that has become popularized is a good guide of practices that many non-profits could adapt and improve themselves, and they should. At times when reading Spade, I become confused as to whether what is being proposed cannot be done by a non-profit or is antithetical to them, as when describing the solidarity which mutual-aid builds, he still describes a non-profit organization (Sylvia Rivera Law Project), with a multi-tiered staff structure and all the fixings.

Why does the “non-profit industrial complex” use the organizational model of capitalist firms (sometimes at the cutting edge) to operate? Because it is effective. We will also never out-organize them by trying to compete directly with them. Instead, my proposal is to circumvent them entirely and organize the unorganized, but also to break with the primary function (service) they serve. Also, instead of abandoning NGOs to create a superior model, we should consider the fact that these are workplaces that need to be organized, and would be improved by organizing.

Funding? Nowhere in Spade’s “Solidarity, Not Charity”, even in the section describing the challenges of not being a charity, is there any discussion on how mutual-aid groups are funded. My personal experience is that they are either crowd-funded, or are funded by micro-grants/sub-grants from actual non-profits. That’s not quite “the revolution will not be funded”. Member run unions, tenant and student organizations solve this problem often with dues structures. Dues can be made sliding scale and have free rates for houseless and unemployed members, and slush funds to further assist them. If an organization is committed to democracy regarding how dues are spent, members can have a sense of ownership in the organization. Also, restricting donation sizes for members also prevents any member from using this as leverage, while still allowing for large donations and incomes overtime from members who have more to spare.

Peter Kropotkin and the Altar of Mutual Aid

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s mutual aid model.

A common source for the popularity of mutual aid is the work of 19th century Russian Anarchist Communist Peter Kropotkin. One of his works which could rightly be called his magnum opus, titled Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution has endured almost 120 years of relevance. I want to side-step a bit to examine what Kropotkin meant, as this is a common justification for the practices amongst anarchists. Is the mutual aid of today really what Kropotkin meant? In reading his description towards the end of the book, it would seem that Kropotkin was a proponent mostly of mass strikes and rebellions. He also described pretty clearly the interdependency of the working classes historically, even under capitalism, mutual-aid is a factor of capitalism, it was a factor of the reformation in Europe. In capitalism, through wage-labor, the working class is collectively subservient to the production process and therefore each other.

Nothing in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution justifies the mutual-aid groupings of today. I wish he had foretold more, but there’s certainly no evidence that this was what he envisioned. It’s pretty clear that Kropotkin was a proponent of worker’s revolt, and spent a great deal highlighting the history of this in Chapter 7. He spoke clearly and plainly about solidarity, but of a specific kind, and never made reference to what we’d call mutual aid today.

In Chapter 7, Kropotkin clearly states:

“From the point of view of social economics all these efforts of the peasants certainly are of little importance. They cannot substantially, and still less permanently, alleviate the misery to which the tillers of the soil are doomed all over Europe.”

Kropotkin does follow up with a good deal of clarification, and I don’t think we should entirely dismiss the social economics, and examine the practices of the Panthers, Young Lords and CLWU as above. However, it is clear that quoting Kropotkin to justify today’s mutual-aid is misleading and uncharacteristic of his views. Kropotkin does decry individualism of the ruling class, and associates this with charity and philanthropy. He also tells clear stories of mutual-aid playing a part of a life-death cycle of systems and institutions in Europe, the destruction of guilds by the state, and their replacement with trade unions. He also discusses mutual-aid in the daily lives of those living in slums, but again, you find no calls for trying to distribute goods and supplies within these, and amongst its inhabitants.

Where’s the Solidarity? The Lost Art of the Fighting Organization

Black Panther Party Free Breakfast Program.

Look anywhere near a mutual aid grouping and you will see the slogan “Solidarity, Not Charity”. While the look of “charity” and its association with philanthropy may not be what is intended, and it is arguable if the model is different enough to say it is not charity, the point is that “solidarity” doesn’t describe service work. This is concurrent with a historical decline in class struggle organization.

By conflating “solidarity” with service work, we risk impoverishing what solidarity actually means and feels like. It’s a serious problem when we’re perplexed when a worker is having a conflict with their boss/landlord over stolen wages and rent, and the best thing we think we can do is start a GoFundMe for them. If your work is visibly indistinguishable from NGOs, capitalist firms, well-meaning religious groups, and even fascists, you cannot expect the political content to actually be different. No amount of plastering red flags changes this.

Proclaiming “solidarity, not charity!” doesn’t actually put you in a position of solidarity with the people you claim to fight for, solidarity isn’t about service, it’s about reciprocal defense of each other because we are in the same social position. It also means “skin in the game”, you’re all in it together. That feeling, that massive undertaking, all the building that happens prior to the march on the boss, are not bonds formed by sharing our meager crumbs, but coming together to take what is ours. It’s high points are preceded by less flashy work, but it’s based in the kind of relationship between people willing to sacrifice themselves for each other.

It is certainly not easier to do actual organizing, with targets and demands, amongst people who are actually positioned to be in solidarity with each other. It takes a great deal more patience, planning, ground work, research, courage, pain and sacrifice. However, it is without any substitute. So, we need to think critically and politically about what is elevated as “good work”, because there’s a lot that’s getting thrown around as such which is getting us nowhere.

Some may detract and point to the need to organize collective care work and the creation of a new world, and this deserves consideration. However, this is always proposed in the context of a clearly demarcated struggle. Proponents of mutual aid differ in that they presume the relationship of fighting organizations to mutual-aid efforts, and presume their political content, whereas those who sought to revolutionize care work paid close attention to the relationship of their reproductive labor to capital. What is proposed by these proponents looks markedly different than the mutual aid that Spade proposes.

If our mutual-aid efforts are not closely linked with target-and-demand driven fights with bosses, landlords, administrators, it has no relationship to organizing. What passes as “organizing” today is mostly being a member of an organization and doing whatever it takes to make that organization grow. Like “solidarity” and “direct action”, we have to draw some lines and some contrasting of “organizing” with mutual-aid.

Mutual-aid or Class Struggle? Why does the Liberalism in Mutual Aid Prevail?

Food Not Bombs “Soup for the Revolution”.

What is the grip that mutual-aid has on the left? Why do people take to mutual-aid so quickly, instead of building a target and demand driven fighting organization? The answers to me are pretty clear

  1. It requires little risk on anyone’s part. If there is a risk, it’s also a risk for the state to repress it, because of the moral consequence and optics of trying to impede service work. It poses very little challenge to the state and capital, who view these efforts largely indifferently, or even positively, since you are actively helping them reproduce workers, a burden increasingly relegated to the working class.
  2. Anyone can participate regardless of their social position. A group of aristocratic worker/petite bourgeois socialists can easily get in on the “work” without blowing their cover. There’s very little in common you actually need to have with the people you are serving. In fact, there’s a stark power division, you have something valuable, that these people need and do not have.
  3. Because this does require some labor, you get away with all the ability to capture the rhetoric of “organizing”, you are doing “the” “work”. You can tell people “well, what are you doing?”. Most leftists who become active and reach out to leftist groups are looking for the first thing to DO and will latch themselves to the first thing that looks good. You can “do first, think critically about what you’re doing later”.
  4. The optics are undeniably good and you get all the moral high-ground. Your critics become critics of feeding people, and your opponents can be framed as not desiring people to be fed. This moral buffer can even be used to excuse other unrelated problems with your politics or practices. In this sense, it serves the same function as philanthropy from the ruling class.
  5. Professional and managerial tendencies translate neatly. Your skill juggling 5 different communications platforms and work-flows are needed. You learned everything you need on how to check vibes, social network, “emails emails emails”, the whole thing. You’re on the cutting edge, and there’s important work to do. Who’s gonna send the email about it? 
  6. It requires neither the patience nor discomfort of class struggle work. Instead, the “good feelings” are immediate. The payoff and gratification of “doing something” comes instantly, and cannot be taken away from you. You may have had to enter an uncomfortable conversation but for the most part, you can do a lot just talking to the people you know.In today’s fast-moving world, our redemption and sleep at night comes to the lowest bidder on a first come, first serve basis.
  7. While this might seem counterintuitive to rationale 5 above, much of the economy is already service oriented. Therefore, it is easy for some to reduce it to the same interchangeable parts, and the work is accessible, and people know to expect a grind. It is easier to get people to give their labor in a strategic way, than it is to get them to withhold it.

It’s not as simple as it is to say it’s “easy”, as mutual-aid organizations do a lot of work. In fact, the point of it is sort of that there’s always work to do. It’s more accurate to consider the myriad of political reasons why this gets attention over organizing. Mutual aid projects are more well supported than fighting organizations because they alleviate conditions on an individual basis (even if done many times over) without challenging their source, and it also provides no challenge to “common sense” consciousness that pervades much of US liberalism.

One “March on the Boss” is worth 1000 “Food Not Bombs”

A Food Not Bombs food-share.

Spade, in the beginning of “Solidarity, Not Charity”, gives an urgent warning to those who neglect mutual-aid:

Movement organizations could fail to provide any real relief for those whose lives are most endangered and leave newly scared and angry people to the most passive and ineffective forms of expressing their opinions.“

Is mutual-aid now the least passive and most effective form of expressing your opinion? Also, is expressing our opinions the only channels we need to fly open? Why is it not an option to build an organization where people feel like they have a voice, where democracy lives and propels the organization forward, which actually favors direct action?

What do these things look like to me? Taking the problem to the boss. Taking the problem to the landlord. That’s direct, not passive. That’s effective. People with a common grievance come together and fight back and win every day. That’s tenants coming together to fight deposit theft and rent hikes in their complexes. That’s workers coming together to fight wage theft and speed-ups in their workplaces. That’s public university students coming together to fight tuition hikes and cuts to ethnic and cultural studies in their schools.

You won’t find any of this in Spade’s paper. The bonds formed this way can never be formed in his mutual-aid model. This is because it’s not even on the table in his vision. In his view, “Working and living inside hierarchies deskills us for dealing with conflict”, therefore conflict is best not located and fought in our daily lives, between workers and bosses and tenants and landlords, but in the context of mutual-aid. Spade gives what comes closest to a vision for a broader struggle in “Solidarity, Not Charity”:

“Resistant left movements seek to reignite people’s imaginations about not just what they can demand but also what tactics they can use to win. Such movements model three kinds of work that change material conditions rather than just winning empty declarations of equality: (a) work to dismantle existing harmful systems and/or beat back their expansion, (b) work to directly provide for people targeted by such systems and institutions, and (c) work to build an alternative infrastructure through which people can get their needs met. Dismantling work includes campaigns to stop the expansion of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and deportation, to close precincts and prisons, to stop privatization of schools and utilities, to terminate gentrification, pipelines, fracking, mining, and more. This work includes such tactics as pipeline sabotage, direct actions at building sites, training people not to call the cops, divestment campaigns, blocking deportation buses, disrupting city council meetings, door knocking, and working to change state and municipal budgets to defund police and jails. Work to support people impacted by harmful systems can include prison visiting and pen pal programs, rapid response systems for ICE raids, ride sharing, reentry resources, eviction defense, medical clinics, childcare collectives, food distribution, disaster response, and court support efforts. Work to create an alternative infrastructure based in left values of democracy, participation, care, and solidarity includes many of the prior activities, which establish community connections and put in place structures for meeting needs. It might also include things like creating food, energy, and waste systems that are sustainable and locally controlled, building methods of dealing with conflict and harm that do not involve the police or prisons, and building health, education, and childcare infrastructure controlled by the people who use it.”

A lot of this is very solid, however there are also glaring omissions. Almost all of the above can be done without having to talk to your neighbors and co-workers or build in the places where the dreaded hierarchies that Spade decries run our lives. When you eliminate a lot of stuff on this list categorically, such as work that could also as easily be the domain of non-profits (anything involving education and service), spectacle-oriented and symbolic actions (disrupting city-council meetings, direct actions at building sites), you’re left wondering how this is supposed to both build up and coordinate what we need. It speaks to the decades of decline and defeat of the labor movement.

There is an liberal tendency within today’s anarchism that favors amorphous movements over the kind of long-term organization building that poor and working class people need, such as member-run independent unions or political organizations. There is a lot of emphasis on service and consciousness raising with symbolic actions and protest militancy, with some good ideas mixed in. Of course, I think organizations need childcare infrastructure, and things like rapid response systems for ICE raids are great as well. However, there is an allergy to organization building that has been plaguing anarchism since the 90’s. The prescription is to look inward, to affinity groups, to people you trust only because you have the same ideas. Most (but not all) of the tactics in Spade’s vision are completely consistent with the CrimethInc affinity group model. This is the same model that allowed for a dine-and-dash, calling for a Rent Strike everywhere early in the COVID-19 crisis, only to hear not a peep about the tenants movement months later. 

Instead of actually grappling with the realities of friends and enemies, winning and losing, we have in its place grandiose delusions about “actually building new social relations that are more survivable” while my city is 6 feet underwater. Mutual-aid during Hurricane Harvey was phenomenal, but was also rife with conflict, opportunists, and just generally tragic experiences. Mutual-aid was so prevalent, whereas fighting organizations were nowhere to be found, what happened was people were left to fend for themselves, and the state called the bluff, evicting people at record-breaking rates. The role that mutual-aid actually played was contradictory and a mixed-bag at best. What we learned most from that experience is we cannot treat mutual-aid as some kind of silver bullet.

What we needed during Hurricane Harvey that wasn’t there was any struggle against the forces which made our lives so fragile to begin with. There was no accountability and no taking back any of the wealth we created. What we needed was what we always needed, and the problems of poverty in Houston could not be resolved in Houston alone, nor does disaster present any special “opportunities”, nor does it make organizing easier or change the rules around long-term building and fighting and winning.

To conclude, my prescription is actually not to pack up all the service work the left does. It is instead to be honest, to start building the kinds of fighting organizations the working class needs in the long run, and to think strategically about the role that service plays in our organizations, movements, and history. We can make the organizations of our future right now, and build the workplace organization that will someday be able to stop and bend entire economies to its will. We can build tenants’ movements that won’t stop until we have a world rent and landlords. These are where we can locate the kernels of “actually survivable relations” and they all begin in the here and now. We will have the mutual-aid and revolutionizing care work too, but we can’t have a revolution without the organizations that build and fight at the places where capital is produced and reproduced. Every picket line needs reinforcement, every rent strike needs support, every comrade deserves care and aid. Instead of envisioning mutual-aid to contain the beginnings of a new world, we have to apply mutual aid to existing organizations that actually are.

“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow.”

WEB Du Bois

References:

Spade, D. (2020). Solidarity Not Charity. Social Text, 38(1), 131–151. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971139

Kropotkin, P. A. (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. United Kingdom: McClure, Philips & Company.

Murdock, S. (2016). Anarchists In Portland Are Fighting The System By Fixing Potholes. Huffington Post https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anarchists-fixing-potholes-portland_n_58caaa7be4b0ec9d29d9575b

Peyser, E. (2017). The Democratic Socialists Are Here to Fix Your Brake Lights. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwwkaa/the-democratic-socialists-are-here-to-fix-your-brake-lights

O’Brien, M. E. (2019). Communizing Care. Pinko #1. https://pinko.online/pinko-1/communizing-care

James, S., & Dalla Costa, M. (1972). The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community: Women and the Subversion of the Community. The Falling Wall Press Ltd.
https://libcom.org/library/power-women-subversion-community-della-costa-selma-james

Fabricatore, A. (2018) How We Marched on Our Boss. Labor Notes. https://www.labornotes.org/2018/06/how-we-marched-our-boss

Horras, T. (2020, June 28). Organizing the Unorganized: The Left’s Task in the Labor Movement. Regeneration Magazine. https://regenerationmag.org/organizing-the-unorganized-the-lefts-task-in-the-labor-movement/

Torres, C. (2019). When Flood Waters Run Dry: Hurricane Harvey, Climate Change & Social Reproduction. Regeneration Magazine. https://regenerationmag.org/when-flood-waters-run-dry/
Garneau, M. (2020). The myth of the “present moment.” Organizing.Work. https://organizing.work/2020/04/the-myth-of-the-present-moment/

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A blank Massachusetts state election paper ballot on a metal table with a cream color privacy hood (source: "ballot" by hlkljgk)A blank Massachusetts state election paper ballot on a metal table with a cream color privacy hood (source: “ballot” by hlkljgk)

The views in this article are not the official position of the Marxist Center National organization and represent only the views of the author, an at-large Marxist Center member.

Of course, in politics, where it is sometimes a matter of extremely complex relations between classes and parties, very many cases will arise that will be much more difficult than the question of a legitimate “compromise” in a strike or a treacherous “compromise” by a strike-breaker, treacherous leader, etc. It would be absurd to formulate a recipe or general rule (“No compromises!”) to suit all cases. One must use one’s own brains and be able to find one’s bearings in each particular instance. It is, in fact, one of the functions of a party organization and of party leaders worthy of the name, to acquire, through the prolonged, persistent, variegated and comprehensive efforts of all thinking representatives of a given class, the knowledge, experience and—in addition to knowledge and experience—the political flair necessary for the speedy and correct solution of complex political problems.

V. I. Lenin, “No Compromises?”

There is a growing discussion within our network about the upcoming election, and electoral action in a general sense. Due to the broad nature of our membership, this discussion is causing some internal confusion. Some members question why the election is a point of discussion at all, given an “anti-electoral” position put forth in our Points of Unity. Others react to that questioning with concern: do we not care about suffrage, voter suppression? Which then elicits another reaction: do we have members that wish to take the Democratic Socialists of America’s road of potentially supporting the Biden campaign against “Trump fascism/authoritarianism”?

From this insider’s perspective, these concerns mostly seem to be jumping at shadows. Perhaps this is a result of concerns of “devolution” and fully justifiable exhaustion from previous negative organizing experiences outside of this network. I wish to re-assure: we are not as far off as we may fear. Regardless, it is necessary to spotlight that there is a single significant political difference that we should discuss and analyze as a network.

To begin to shine a light on this issue, let us examine our “anti-electoral” position by examining our network’s Points of Unity:

3. Acknowledge and educate about the conditions existing for the proletariat and work towards their dismantling and liberation of all people through the foundation of socialist principles.

4. Reject the strategy of administering or reforming capitalism and recognize that the capitalist state can never be made to serve the interests of the working class as a whole. Work against the interests of the capitalist state even if holding government office.

7. Oppose and refuse compromise with all forms of US settler-colonialism, imperialism, and domination.Oppose the exploitation of countries affected by colonialism by the imperialist core.Recognize that the United States is a settler-colonial entity. Support the complete emancipation, decolonization, and self-determination of Indigenous and oppressed peoples. Work within the core to undermine imperialist development and achieve reparations in the global south.

Immediately we see a few key points: we must refuse compromise with all forms of U.S. imperialism, capitalism, and settler-colonialism. We know that trying to administer this system ourselves and ushering in reforms will never actually serve the interests of the working class, while also acknowledging the need to educate the working class about their currently existing conditions. Even more explicitly: always work against the interests of the capitalist state even if holding political office within the US.

Some “anti-electoralism”— we mention what to do while holding political office within the U.S.! This very heavily implies at least some degree of willingness to engage in an extremely specific form of electoral action.

One could easily make the argument that there is a contradiction here: we both say to oppose all compromise and attempts at reform in capitalism, but leave open the possibility that our members could hold political office within the settler-colonial empire we reject? Isn’t this allowing opportunism?

Let’s return to Lenin on this point, not merely because he is Lenin, but because he is typically seen as someone advocating for a strictly revolutionary professional “vanguard party” that holds bourgeois democracy as obsolete, AND to highlight the still-existing hundred-years-old debate on these tactical questions:

It has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revolutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament, even a few weeks before the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with; it facilitates their successful dissolution, and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism “politically obsolete.” (…) Now let us examine the “Dutch-Left” arguments in favor of non-participation in parliaments. The following is the text of Thesis No. 4, the most important of the above-mentioned “Dutch” theses: “When the capitalist system of production has broken down, and society is in a state of revolution, parliamentary action gradually loses importance as compared with the action of the masses themselves. When, in these conditions, parliament becomes the center and organ of the counter-revolution, whilst, on the other hand, the laboring class builds up the instruments of its power in the Soviets, it may even prove necessary to abstain from all and any participation in parliamentary action.” (…) The authors of the theses are engaged in muddled thinking; they have forgotten the experience of many, if not all, revolutions, which shows the great usefulness, during a revolution, of a combination of mass action outside a reactionary parliament with an opposition sympathetic to (or, better still, directly supporting) the revolution within it.”

V. I. Lenin, “No Compromises?”

These are often quoted portions that some within the “Democratic Socialist” left select to justify their own support for the Biden or even the Sanders campaign, while omitting and ignoring the most critical portion:

At present, British Communists very often find it hard even to approach the masses, and even to get a hearing from them. If I come out as a Communist and call upon them to vote for Henderson and against Lloyd George, they will certainly give me a hearing. And I shall be able to explain in a popular manner, not only why the Soviets are better than a parliament and why the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the dictatorship of Churchill (disguised with the signboard of bourgeois “democracy”), but also that, with my vote, I want to support Henderson in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man—that the impending establishment of a government of the Hendersons will prove that I am right, will bring the masses over to my side, and will hasten the political death of the Hendersons and the Snowdens just as was the case with their kindred spirits in Russia and Germany. If the objection is raised that these tactics are too “subtle” or too complex for the masses to understand, that these tactics will split and scatter our forces, will prevent us from concentrating them on Soviet revolution, etc., I will reply to the “Left” objectors: don’t ascribe your doctrinairism to the masses!

V. I. Lenin, “Should we participate in Bourgeois Parliaments?”

We all know well that the heavily electoral sector of the US socialist movement conveniently forgets these critical requirements in their rush to support Bernie more as human footstool/palanquin bearers than as Lenin’s rope.

This also ignores other requirements Lenin describes of complete political and agitational independence, a fully constituted worker’s political organization that consistently carries out both parliamentary action AND successful mass action. This organization is also mature enough to simultaneously walk and chew bubblegum without one action consuming all available resources and stopping the other. Beyond Lenin, other points are ignored by the most common Biden and/or Bernie-boosters within the Democratic Socialist electoral camp, such as the number of non-voters in the US, and many electoral campaigns not necessarily being rooted within or growing from actual working class struggles.

One may argue that the position of the Democratic Socialist camp is closer to Lenin’s rope in their support of Biden, but again we know their agitational propaganda around the need for the complete dissolution of the congressional republic and the utter failure and spinelessness of the Democratic Party establishment (if not sectors of the “progressive left” as well) often leaves much to be desired.

With the notion dispelled that Marxist Center is a purely “anti-electoral” grouping, or that a Marxist party worthy of the name must support bourgeois candidates in elections, what are we and should we be doing?

There have been many different articles and documents put forward about “organizing the unorganized,” “base building,” and “building regional and national collaboration and cohesion” as cornerstones. There is even some disagreement on the efficacy of various electoral actions within such articles. I won’t repeat all of the specifics here. The bottom line is precisely building the independent working class political organization that can both build the basis for consistent and effective mass action first, prior to wading into costly electoral struggles. Once this is constructed, then wade into such struggles ourselves when that makes political and organizational sense.

It is putting the proverbial horse ahead of the cart, on a basis that again is exactly intended to ward against liberal co-optation or “getting lost” in elections, and eventually succumbing to traitorous reformism.

The hope of this author, then, is that we do not inversely mechanically assume that a large non-voting bloc and the apathy of the US population automatically infers support for a revolutionary socialist transformation of society. It also should not mean revolutionaries won’t eventually need to put efforts into electoral struggles.

This takes us back to the growing debate within the Marxist Center about the current election.

Some of our DSA-affiliated comrades — who on the whole are extremely opposed to the DSA backing Biden (so much for any secret DSA-affiliated Biden-supporting fifth column in Marxist Center) — have put forward a position that a “strategy of confronting street violence with protest of our own merely puts our best organizers and the sympathetic at legal and physical risk. “Even in the lucky event that we carry out street tactics without injury or arrest, this strategy will have no impact on the presidential transition or on the social dynamics we are working within. (…) We must maintain the core principle of working-class political independence [in defiance of Democrat/Biden campaign co-optation]. If we do truly face down the barrel of fascism, the only effective response is to build, reinforce and broaden organization at every level. (…) That work starts at ground level. Conveniently, that’s where we find ourselves now. We need to start to build.” (editors’ note: citation from an unpublished piece with permission from the author)

Another position paper from Unity & Struggle has circulated around the organization with a slightly different tack, that sees “mass action as they key to controlling the streets and shaping the narrative, on election day and in whatever follows,” with the important caveat that “a battle between armed specialists is [not] politically desirable.” They indicate that the “left’s role will be to fuel mass, militant direct action that overwhelms the far right and multiplies points of resistance in the institutions of the state and economy. (…) Against calls for passivity and nonviolence, the left should celebrate and spread resistance, linking it with the long history of labor and freedom movements in this country.”

The two groups have interesting differences:

The former position claims that “we do not believe that a Trump re-election—though of course it will be harmful for the working class and for socialist organizing—signals impending fascism (…) the present situation [may] appear to share some characteristics with historical fascism or proto fascism (…) [but] they are nowhere near the scope nor the type that left to historical fascism. (…) Even if we are wrong about the threat of fascism, the two solutions [mass actions/spontaneity and electoral support for Biden] do nothing to address it.”

The latter interestingly mostly agrees but pulls a different conclusion and level of threat out of this, in that “the GOP has obviously devolved into a power-hungry, racist, authoritarian mess. Whether this unfolded over 40 years or 4, whether it represents nascent fascism or your run-of-the-mill authoritarianism, these nuances won’t matter so much in the coming weeks. (…) If the Democrats have a plan for securing power, they haven’t shared it with their supporters. (…) The uprisings this summer showed a vast potential for street action, but lasting organizations in neighborhoods and workplaces – socialist, anarchist, Black radical, whatever – are few by comparison. Trump can’t name a communist group in the U.S. and has no clue what “antifa” is, but he’ll use these bogeymen to attack all of us in a second term. A constitutional coup might just be one building block in the emergence of fascism, but it’s a muscle we shouldn’t permit the right to exercise.” To that end they propose strengthening “networks that will respond in the case of a coup, and build their capacity to take the initiative (…) establish direct contacts, signal boosting networks and carpools among regional groups, and develop action plans for election week. We can facilitate training for marches, street medics and other key skills. We can link with the bases of NGOs and the trade union rank and file fighting voter suppression – not to join their efforts, but to find others who, in a crisis, might take independent action.”

Interestingly, this position paper also sees a Biden victory as buying us time to prepare for an inevitable later confrontation, with a Trump coup or re-election forcing more immediate confrontation, in their “two scenarios.”

To reiterate the agreement:

  • Both groups acknowledge that lasting and significant left-wing organizations and movements are few and far between
  • Both groups want to increase our independent working class organizational capacity, and don’t currently see wading into electoralism as being of value to the network or their organizations at this time
  • Both groups reject collaboration with the Biden campaign as being tactically effective at this juncture

The disagreement, then, can be reduced simply to a desire to either participate in or reject street action in the immediate aftermath of a Trump-contested election.

This divergence raises a few immediate questions from the author and from the broader membership:

  • What actions are Marxist Center affiliates, specifically, taking in response to the election? Do we have other analyses or positions on election-related action within the network?
  • Should we encourage collaboration and cooperation on election-related actions?
  • Do we think that we have capacity either as individual affiliates or as a national network to make any significant intervention in election-related actions?
  • Are broad policies of either “all street actions against Trump/right-wing election interference should be supported” or “all actions are too risky” accurate?
  • Should we develop some sort of internal national policy, considering the potential for chaotic and violent street action post-election? (even if that is only “please don’t claim your individual actions are done at the behest of the national org”)
  • Is there a framework we could develop organizationally to analyze upcoming actions as being particularly worthy or unworthy of supporting? Is this effort worth-while given our organizational capacity or lack thereof?
  • Is a clear Biden victory truly providing “a few more years of (sort of) favorable conditions to prepare” as the latter position paper by Unity & Struggle claims, or could there be a threat from a Biden victory we need to prepare for as well?
  • Do electoral actions to build working class power need to be coming from within the network to be valuable?
  • Should we lend our organizational energies to any socialist-oriented electoral actions? (from anti-voter suppression actions all the way up to supporting Green candidates or Socialist candidates from other tendencies)

To answer some of these questions, the membership and the Political Education and Organizing Working Groups have decided to immediately organize a series of internal Marxist Center discussion and coordination calls on a weekly basis in the run-up to the election. We plan to continue these talks in the aftermath of the election as well.

We hope that this will form a basis for ongoing analysis and help to cohere engagement with different responses and actions from our affiliate and at-large membership.

The post Is There Something To Be Done? Elections and Strategy in Marxist Center appeared first on Regeneration Magazine.

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RTU members rally against evictions on July 1, 2020Richmond Tenants Union members rally against evictions on July 1, 2020

The following interview was conducted in June 2020 between a member of CounterPower, a Marxist Center affiliate, and an organizer with the Richmond Tenants Union (RTU). RTU is an affiliate of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN). Margaret is a member of the Richmond Tenants Union (RTU), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),  and Richmond Coalition for Peace, Justice, and Jobs (RCPJJ). Padráig is a member of the Richmond Tenants Union (RTU) and CounterPower.

Padráig: Could you tell a little about yourself and your connection to the Richmond Tenants Union (RTU)?

Margaret: I’m a freelancer currently living with my partner in a four-unit building in Richmond, Virginia. I got in touch with RTU at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, because I wanted to get to know my neighbors, I was feeling isolated and scared if something happened, and because I didn’t have anyone in my immediate area to rely on. The pandemic created a sense of urgency, so once I got to know my neighbors I started a group chat with them to start feeling things out. 

Politically, I think landlords are terrible and will go the way of the dodo at some point. But I was hoping I could convince my fellow tenants that we could take collective action—like a rent strike—but I was also aware they didn’t know me, and I couldn’t put pressure on them to do that if they weren’t familiar with the struggle for housing justice and to build tenant power. So I reached out to them one-on-one outside at a safe distance, got their contact information, and started a group chat.

I’m a member of the Richmond branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which is how I found out about RTU. I started talking with RTU members about what actions I should take to get my neighbors on-board with forming a tenants’ council and taking action.

Padráig: How did you go about forming a tenants’ council?

Margaret: I caught-up with them outside one-by-one. I introduced myself and my partner. I’d say, “I know we don’t know each other, but things are getting real, and it’d be good to check in with one another in case there’s an emergency.” I didn’t bring up politics off the bat, because you gotta test the waters with people, and see where they stand. Not everyone necessarily makes the connection to see bosses and landlords as the oppressor. I was worried about my job, whether I could pay rent. I shared that insecurity with them, and that made my neighbors feel comfortable and willing to share their experiences with me about our landlord. Our landlord is a bad communicator, doesn’t take care of maintenance issues right away, and is generally not a fun person to know. This opened the door to discussing our collective rights and power as tenants, what actions we could take to defend ourselves, and what’s going down with the world economy. So much was changing so quickly, so we didn’t know how careful we needed to be with the money we were trying to save. 

Padráig: Where did you learn how to organize with your fellow tenants?

Margaret: I learned a lot of organizing basics from the IWW Organizer Training 101, because it’s the same idea with tenant organizing. When you try to talk with your coworkers about forming a union in your workplace, you don’t usually lead with, “This boss sucks! We need to unionize and go on strike now!” You test the water, and find common ground with your fellow workers. You gotta learn about where they’re at. There’s a methodology to radicalizing people politically, but it takes time and it requires building strong relationships. And it doesn’t happen overnight. Those were great trainings, because they’re equally applicable to tenant organizing. The boss and the landlord are the problem, and it’s not your fault you can’t pay rent.

Padráig: After you reached out to your fellow tenants and started a group chat, what came next?

Margaret: We shared our anxieties, frustrations, and problems with our landlord. RTU hooked us up with information about our rights as tenants, what types of demands we could make to bargain collectively with our landlord, and what collective action we could take to achieve those demands.

There was a period when everyone in Richmond—and probably around the country—was talking about a rent strike. It’s a powerful action. But it’s not right or possible at all times. It’s like a general strike. Honestly, I don’t know what a general strike would look like today. We’re not at the point where we know how that would play out. I didn’t want to go into tenant organizing pushing hard for a rent strike, but first had to see how my fellow tenants felt about withholding rent to gain leverage with the landlord to obtain a reduced rent. If there were tenants in my building who could not pay anything, we could establish a mutual aid fund so the tenant council could support them in avoiding eviction. It was about testing things to see where my neighbors were at and building relationships before jumping into action.

Padráig: Once your tenant council was formed, what actions did you take?

Margaret: We met as a council, wrote up a demand letter over the course of a few days, signed it as a council, and sent it to our landlord via a protonmail account at the end of the month. We demanded from him outright for rent forgiveness for the remainder of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only three units in my building wanted to do this with me, the fourth unit didn’t feel comfortable yet, but we kept them updated about what the council was doing. So three out of the four units in my building signed a letter demanding rent forgiveness for the remainder of the pandemic, and suggested the landlord go to the bank to demand mortgage forgiveness. Basically, we said: “These are our needs, and we’re standing together to win them.”

Padráig: What happened next?

Margaret: After the landlord received the letter, he immediately texted all of us angrily. He was saying we “weren’t allowed” to form a tenant council, and he threatened to turn the utilities off if we didn’t pay rent. We shot back and said, “Legally, you can’t shut the utilities off, and we have the right to form a tenant organization. However, would you be amenable to negotiating reduced rent in good faith?”

He then blocked our tenant council’s protonmail account, but agreed to reduce our rent. My rent went from $800 to $450 a month. It was the same for two other units. The fourth unit—which is a bigger apartment—got reduced to $500. However, we didn’t realize that at the time, because we were all sent separate rental agreements.

Padráig: What’s your landlord like?

Margaret: They’re a young landlord. [They] only [have] one property they rent out. They must be earlier in their landlording career. The landlord was pretty distracted with another project when all this was going down, and didn’t know how to deal with self-organized tenants. This landlord probably never gave us tenants a single thought, let alone thought about what legal rights and power we might have to push back.

Padráig: Could you tell me about the collective action your tenant council took?

Margaret: Building collective power and taking collective action is about recognizing what sort of situations you actually have leverage in, and building trust with the people you’re trying to organize with. If my neighbors didn’t trust me, they wouldn’t have felt safe making demands on our landlord. We were still scared of being evicted, despite the eviction moratorium in Richmond.

Padráig: What was the response of your landlord?

Margaret: They started by singling out my neighbor, assuming they were responsible for all the organizing. I just learned about this concept called “power mapping,” where you look at all the players in a situation, to see what power is behind the individual, what relationships different players have to each other, and then you decide where to apply pressure, and decide what strategies and tactics might work. If one of my fellow tenants had been close with our landlord or sympathetic to him, things probably would have turned out differently and power-mapping can help you visualize how to make those judgments. 

After we won the rent reduction, we realized he didn’t do his due diligence because he gave the rent reduction to all units in the building, including the one unit that didn’t join our tenant council. But after that, this neighbor wanted to be in the know with what our tenant council was doing. This particular tenant signed the second letter we prepared to send to our landlord, for when we pay rent this month. Sometimes building trust is about waiting until certain people are ready to join, and making space for them to be afraid, to be nervous, and when you make wins, those people are gonna want to join your organization and fight with you.

Padráig: How’d it feel to win?

Margaret: It felt really good. What made it successful was we collectively withheld our rent until the landlord agreed to recognize our tenant council. He was scared and desperate. He gave in for fear of not getting that money coming in.

The best thing tenants can do with themselves when going up against the landlord is knowing as many of your neighbors as possible. If you don’t know everyone you work with, you gotta map your workplace. Same is true with your building: you gotta know what properties your landlord owns, and know the people who live there. 

Tenancy in Virginia is opaque. Everything’s like a shell company in a shell company. They’ve done this intentionally to try to prevent the people from organizing. It’s like this for a reason, and it sucks. But on a microcosmic level, like in our building, you can see how tenants can organize to win under these circumstances. 

Padráig: Why a tenants union? Why RTU?

Margaret: The first organization in Richmond I heard was coordinating housing justice work was RTU. The organizers I met from RTU were so willing to help and listen. They had tons of resources and connections throughout the city, and felt like a great group of people that wanna help tenants survive. Even if we took collective action and didn’t get the outcome we wanted, I felt like we’d have support from RTU. That’s really important for people who are new to organizing, who might not have a political analysis of things or they’re not familiar with left politics. They need to feel safe and secure, and they need to know that the union has their back if something goes wrong. RTU did that.

The way people are now living in this neoliberal bubble where your landlord might be shitty, but the system feels familiar. Stepping outside the system you might not feel safe. That’s scary. RTU made us feel safe. There were no conditions, no “you need to do it this way!” They were more like, “what do you need?,” “what resources can we provide?,” and “how can we support your organizing work to grow your collective power?” 

Padráig: Any concluding thoughts?

Margaret: I feel equal parts hopeful and terrified all the time, and the only thing that gets me through it is that if shit really hits the fan, I know I got people in my corner to help me out. I’m a scared person, and I feel like the community of workers and tenants here in Richmond has a lot of power and potential to change people’s lives. RTU is a great example of that, because Virginia is such a terrible state for tenants. We have the second-highest eviction rate in the United States. The future can feel bleak, but it’s less bleak when I think about the work organizers are putting in here in Richmond to build people power.

The post An Interview with a Member of the Richmond Tenants Union (RTU) appeared first on Regeneration Magazine.

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The German Marxist, Clara Zetkin, stated in her report to the Communist International in 1923 regarding fascism’s rise in Italy,

Fascism confronts the proletariat as an exceptionally dangerous and frightful enemy. Fascism is the strongest, most concentrated, and classic expression at this time of the world bourgeoisie’s general offensive. It is urgently necessary that it be brought down.

In Albuquerque in mid-June of this year, a group of armed men determined to “protect” the statue of a Spanish conquistador shot at protestors in broad daylight. It was another example of white vigilantes confronting protestors, including white men in cities like Philadelphia wielding bats and attacking those they condemn as “threats”.

As the rebellions against police brutality grow, the police themselves have continued to intimidate, assault, and arrest scores of protestors, doing what they’ve always done in poor and working-class Black and Brown neighborhoods at a broader scale.

Finally, as the lockdown is lifted and as the Democrat and Republican party leadership continue prioritizing the needs and interests of major corporations, working-class communities, many of which are disproportionately Black and Brown, are left economically devastated.

Echoing the era in which Zetkin produced her report, the economic and political conditions in our present-day are ripe for the power of right-wing authoritarians and fascistic politics to grow.

Those of us on the Left, whether socialist, communist, or Left-wing, must take this threat of right-wing authoritarianism and fascism seriously. Whether we’re discussing the benefits of electoral politics or its limits, whether we’re exploring the potential of the recent rebellion against the police, or whether we’re creating more labor unions, we must incorporate tackling this threat into all of our organizing or otherwise risk any hope in building a more humane and socialist country, even a social democratic one, to be ended.

FASCISM 101

One of the core features of fascism that Zetkin among others, such as Yale philosopher, Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, identify is its appeal to people beyond the traditional base of conservative policies, especially among the downwardly mobile middle-classes.

Fascists and right-wing populists construct a narrative in which the political “elite” are working on behalf of historically oppressed groups against the interests of the nation’s “true” people. The enemies of the “people” aren’t the capitalists working in service of themselves but instead, elites beholden to so-called Jewish “interests” or a trans “agenda”. These elites, according to them, must be replaced and the historically oppressed groups must be controlled or exterminated.

A second core feature is the insistence that racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies are natural and that challenging them breeds chaos. Essentially, certain people must be dominated for their own good and for the good of society. Those who seek to undermine these hierarchies, such as Communists and feminists, are agents of chaos.

The third feature of fascism is its reliance on “glorifying” the “nation” as a means of organizing society. Glorifying the nation is made synonymous with growing the economy. Fascist leaders collude with business owners in ridding obstacles in their way of building up the capitalist economy. This is why fascists have always attacked Communists and labor unions the moment they gain power.

The final core element of fascism is its overt reliance on extreme forms of violence to maintain “law and order”. Fascistic politics encourages the use of extreme violence targeting groups that would oppose such rule, such as Communists, feminists, labor organizers, and historically oppressed racial, religious and ethnic groups.  

WRAPPED IN THE FLAG

Elements of right-wing authoritarianism and fascistic politics have been a part of the U.S. since its inception as a capitalist country on stolen land. The U.S. was founded on a racial hierarchy which justified the snatching away of the labor and land of Black and indigenous people.

This type of proto-fascist thinking was best exemplified by the Confederacy.

“The Confederacy, like Hitler’s Reich,” Stanley explains, “was built to defend the ‘aristocratic principle in nature’, the principle of racial hierarchy.”

Hitler and the Nazi Party were inspired by the Confederacy and by Jim Crow.

Under Jim Crow, Black Americans were violently oppressed by the law and by paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

At their peak, by the early 1900s, the KKK had developed themselves into a nation-wide organization capable of organizing Anglo-American workers and the Anglo-American middle-class through KKK affiliated community groups.

“Many were mutual benefit societies, essentially insurance cooperatives providing for burial, medical expenses, and the support of widows,” historian Linda Gordon explained in The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.

Through these groups, the KKK promoted the worldview that Black and Brown people, that Jewish Americans and Communists were subverting the “American way of life” with the aid of elites.

“Its primary adversaries, those responsible for the erosion of American values and the American way of life, were not capitalists or men of significant wealth,” Gordon explained, “Instead the elites it condemned were cosmopolitan, highbrow urbanites, who are often liberals.”

This toxic conception of politics has been in resurgence since the rise of far-right politicians like Ronald Reagan and the grassroots movements that supported them. This resurgence is due to a combination of factors, including the expansion of U.S. imperialism ,reinforcing the worldview that some (Asians, Africans and Latin Americans) must be dominated, and the inability of the New Left and labor unions to unite against the right-wing.

Trump and those behind him, from white nationalists to white evangelicals, is the culmination of a nearly four decades long right-wing trend in our mainstream politics.

Trump and those who support him have repeatedly echoed the fascist talking-point that the “elites” are working against the interests of “patriotic” Americans by favoring immigrants from countries that are predominantly Muslim or from Mexico and Central America.

Therefore, Trump and political leaders like him have constructed the narrative that the country’s major political fight is between one set of elites who care about the “forgotten” man and elites who are “globalists” bringing in groups who threaten the so-called fabric and “culture” of the nation.

Hence, Latinx immigrants and Muslims must be dominated and controlled through institutions like ICE and through immigration bans, or otherwise, these same groups, with the help of “liberal elites”, will have more rights and privileges than the “forgotten” man.

Prominent labor organizer and theoretician, Bill Fletcher, Jr. expressed in his piece on Trump, the Tea Party and right-wing populism,

Especially in the context of the USA, the new racism takes place in the context of a declining living standard for white workers brought up believing a racial hierarchy would protect all or most of them from the ravages of capitalism. To put it in blunt terms, that no matter how bad things might get, there would always be a person of colour beneath them who was worse off.

Also, growing the U.S. capitalist economy has become tantamount to “making America great again”. Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing obsession among politicians, Democrat and Republican, to continue shifting power into the hands of corporations at the expense of working people. But Trump and the modern Republican Party and its grassroots supporters, such as those demanding that the lockdown be lifted sooner, are an extreme, bare manifestation of this politics.

Policies that would’ve set the precedent for government providing basic resources to working people, such as providing masks and healthcare during Covid-19, have been rejected by the Trump administration. Such decisions have literally led to thousands of workers getting sick and dying. But all of this is deemed “necessary” by the Republicans since protecting “free market principles” and private enterprise, even during a pandemic, is elevated above all else.

Further, there has been a mainstreaming of rhetoric by Trump and others like him that there is a “civilizational” battle in the U.S. and throughout the world. This is a battle between people who are “law abiding” and hard working and who want to honor the country’s history, its power, and the values that made it “great” against those, such as trans rights activists, “Antifa”, feminists, and now the protestors rebelling against the police, who exemplify “chaos” and “disorder” and whose values are antithetical to the “American way of life”.

Thus, the rebellions have been identified by Trump, the Republicans and by the right-wing as an “enemy” force that must be “dominated” by law enforcement.

Extreme forms of violence are wielded effortlessly than in recent memory as a means of controlling people, from starving the people of Puerto Rico by denying them basic aid to policies detaining and separating families on the U.S.-Mexican border to protestors now being shot in the face with tear gas and rubber bullets in broad daylight in front of the cameras.

Dockworkers strike in support of Black Lives Matter on Juneteenth, 2020.

ANTI-FASCISM RESISTANCE & REBELLION

Preventing Trump from winning re-election is a priority. If Trump were to win a second term, his administration and those who support him will be more emboldened to brutalize and detain those who could pose a threat to their rule, from labor organizers to Black and Brown protestors.

However, if Trump were to lose his re-election, the cesspool of U.S. politics that birthed him, won’t go away either. As long as capitalism is the dominant economic system, promoting values of unfettered growth and competition and upholding abusive institutions, the seeds for a fascistic worldview will always be with us. As long as we have economic and political institutions built to provide for the wealthiest ahead of everyone else, then we will keep finding ourselves in crisis like the one we’re in now, with another right-wing demagogue and their emboldened right-wing movement, prepared to “wipe out” the rest of us, trans, Black and Brown, Jewish, Communists, the disabled, and rebellious workers alike.

This can and must change, especially considering the recent rebellions against the police, in which we’ve seen panic spread among the ruling class.

“The worst thing we could do would be to allow our historical understanding of fascism to sway us toward inactivity, toward waiting, or toward the postponement of arming ourselves and struggling against fascism,” Zetkin argued.

A healthy society that no longer produces fascism is one that’s no longer capitalist. A healthy society is one in which the needs and interests of historically oppressed groups and workers are addressed with federal policies extending universal healthcare, universal housing and jobs to all. It is a society in which workers and working-class communities, disproportionately Black and Brown, are in control of major economic decisions.

To achieve this, however, requires building working-class power across race, gender-identity and sexuality.

Fletcher, Jr. explained,

It would have to be a movement addressing gender and class as well as racial inequality and wealth redistribution, government transparency, increased voting rights and popular control, and demilitarization.

Historically, policies shift in meeting more of the needs of historically oppressed groups and workers when workers and the historically oppressed, especially Black and Brown people, organize strikes and lead uprisings. When workers were frustrated with the pace of change at the beginning of the New Deal, they occupied the factories, which forced the federal government to provide labor protections. During the 1960s, many Black Americans were frustrated at the broken promises made by the federal government, and led rebellions across major cities and towns, which led to more federal government investment in Black and Brown communities.

The radical momentum in each instance was cut short by the rise of the right-wing as well as missteps made by the Left, including a heavy reliance on mainstream politics, such as lobbying for change within Congress or within the Democrat Party.

Fortunately, this desire for direct confrontation against pro-capitalist institutions has never went away and in recent years, has been in resurgence, with teachers and essential workers striking, to the recent rebellions against the police.

However, we still need more workers confronting their employers and the institutions that oppress them.  Despite the deteriorating living and working conditions, many workers may still feel anxious and unsure about rising against the capitalist class and the right-wing.

We need political campaigns that remind people of the power they wield when they’re joining other workers and tenants against common class enemies, such as landlords or local employers. By building campaigns that focus on such targets, there is more of a likelihood of different people, as tenants and as workers, meeting other tenants and workers who otherwise they wouldn’t have spoken to. This is necessary because the only power we can leverage against the capitalist classes and their right-wing allies is the sheer number of us who are workers and tenants. The capitalist class is a tiny minority of people while the majority of us are workers and tenants whose labor and consumption sustains the economy. The problem is that many of us are too busy working to realize this, or frankly, too disillusioned to think we could unite with others, especially beyond our workplaces.

By bringing different people together to fight against common class enemies, like the landlords and the police, we are helping them realize that they are not alone and that others may not share exactly what they’re going to but are facing similar types of issues, such as not being able to pay the rent in time or working at a warehouse or supermarket that’s not providing PPE. Building these campaigns helps in breaking down barriers between even different historically oppressed groups, such as working-class Asian Americans, Latinx and Black Americans, who must for the long-term link up in order to survive what’s coming next, which includes more repression by law enforcement and the right-wing.

Zetkin stated,

Every single proletarian must feel like more than a mere wage slave, a plaything of the winds and storms of capitalism and of the powers that be. Proletarians must feel and understand themselves to be part of the revolutionary class, which will reforge the old state of the propertied into the new state of the soviet system. Only when we arouse revolutionary class consciousness in every worker and light the flame of class determination can we succeed in preparing and carrying out militarily the necessary overthrow of fascism.

Such campaigns must be willing to go beyond just organizing one building or one workplace even. Of course, organizing is always difficult and the act of organizing among tenants and workers at one location is a critical first step. But given the scale of our political and economic crisis, worker and tenant campaigns must be willing to link up across workplaces or across various working-class neighborhoods. Once again, by gathering more and more people together to fight against a group of landlords or a group of employers will mean more work to do but also, more workers and tenants getting to know one another.

Workers must utilize their labor campaigns as a means of organizing people beyond the workplace. This is known as bargaining for the common good or as social justice unionism, which has recently been practiced by the teachers striking in Chicago who fought for resources that the neighborhoods they taught in needed. It is a method of building relationships among larger groups of people and a means of leveraging more power against the employers. It is a method of reenergizing class struggle since the fight is no longer just about a contract or more PPE but is about the masses against the employer, whose existence drains resources away from the community, or the masses against the employer and their allies in local government, who are willing to provide tax incentives for major businesses while gutting government services.

Of course, campaigns organizing workers into labor unions is incredibly important too. When labor unions were led by Communists, they were correctly used as not just spaces to bargain for contracts or for higher wages, but as institutionalized spaces to discuss radical politics and to develop necessary bonds and friendships among workers.  

“The labor union is the chief mechanism societies have found to bind people who differ along various dimensions,” Stanley explains, “Trade unions are sources of cooperation and community, and of wage equality, as well as mechanisms to provide protections from the vicissitudes of the global market.”

In the age of Covid-19, campaigns must also find ways of uniting the unemployed. The combination of Covid-19 and neoliberalism has left working-class communities economically devastated, with Great Depression-era level of unemployment.

During the Great Depression, Black and white Communists organized the unemployed, still building campaigns against common class enemies, like the landlords who demanded rents to be paid, and directing peoples’ rage at so-called New Deal Democrats who claimed to be sympathetic.

Similarly, we must find ways of organizing campaigns that can organize people who are currently jobless and feeling angry or hopeless. This still requires us to organize people in our communities against institutions like banks or major businesses.

Electoral campaigns can be useful in doing the work of bringing people together, of engaging people with issues that matter to them. Again, the goal is to embolden and gather historically oppressed groups and workers into fighting back. Hence, we need campaigns, electoral or otherwise, that help in connecting workers to one another. We need campaigns that develop an independent working-class constituency who are willing to do to get what they want, including shutting down the economy.

The final piece to our efforts in staving off fascism is the need for the current rebellions to grow. These rebellions, in such a short period of time, have already been incredibly successful in attracting media and political attention to the needs and wants of Black Americans in poor and working-class communities and in pushing defunding the police onto the national political agenda.

Brittany Battle, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University, who has been part of the protests, stated, “I hope the protests move us toward dismantling the carceral state. I think we are having national dialogues now that just 6 months would have been unimaginable. So yes, I think the protests are being more and more effective.”

The rebellions have been powerful since they represent a threat to many of those in power, from neoliberal Democrats to corporations. The rebellions are a threat to the status quo because they have been inspired by and focused on Black Americans in poor and working-class communities, whose liberation would require a new economic and political system to be created.

Jamel Love, a fellow grad worker at Rutgers University, and who has also been participating in the protests, expressed,

On the other hand, from the perspective of those protesting, namely Black and Brown communities most harmed by police violence, these rebellions represent a growing discontent and apathy regarding the non-responsiveness of politicians and leaders in reforming police tactics to reduce police involved killings and more broadly the ongoing evidence  of the enduring pervasiveness of racism which these frequent unjustified police killings of Black persons continue to show.

Most importantly, these rebellions are inspiring people to directly confront institutions that oppress us, such as the police. Whether it’s been people protesting and marching every week and demanding abolition or others targeting the private property of brutal institutions, like the police and major businesses, these rebellions are undermining the legitimacy of the institutions that those in power depend on to dominate us.

Akin O., a comrade and organizer on issues of economic and racial justice, explained in a recent piece about the rebellions, “It creates an avenue outside of the realm of elections and non-profit organizing, for working people to seek power, and it cannot be easily controlled in the same way that normal marches and protests can.”

As historically has been the case, the moment rebellions on the streets fade, the political openings that they create disappear along with them. Once labor no longer centered strikes in its organizing but rather, on contract negotiations with employers, the ability for labor leaders to lobby for the immediate needs of workers diminished. As the uprisings that took place in the 1960s and those revolutionary groups that were emerged from them, such as the Black Panther Party, were no longer supported, an anti-racist political agenda tied to anti-capitalism also melted away from the mainstream.  

To push policymakers toward adopting short-term reforms that aren’t merely symbolic, such as defunding the police and providing resources that Black and Brown and working-class communities actually need, such as universal healthcare and jobs that pay a living wage, we need for the protests to last.

Battle added,

We cannot let up. We cannot take our foot off the gas in this moment. We have to stay in the streets as long as possible for keep these issues at the forefront. And while these issues are at the forefront of national conversations, then we need to get to work at the local and state level to push the agenda of dismantling the carceral state.

As long as the rebellions continue and as long as they challenge the legitimacy of our existing economic and political institutions, policymakers (politicians or major businesses) will be more likely to adopt particular short-term demands, like defunding. As long as the rebellions persist, more people will continue to be exposed to the fascistic politics at the core of our institutions, such as the willingness of the police to be as brutal as they want to be, and become radicalized.

Most importantly, as long as the rebellions grow, people who have been historically oppressed will continue to feel emboldened to fight for what they want and need, whether against the police, against the right wing, or against institutions that have oppressed them.

“The protests are symbolic of a volcanic eruption and people are becoming angrier, more passionate, and more determined to force change instead of waiting for local leaders or some political savior to emerge in the Democratic party,” Love explained.

It’s simple. Either, we continue confronting the forces that have been leading us toward fascism, or we misinterpret the moment and fail to organize beyond elections.

Sudip Bhattacharya is in the PhD program in Political Science at Rutgers University, where he focuses on issues of racial and economic justice, and co-chair of the Central Jersey Democratic Socialists of America. He is also a writer and journalist, having written for local newspapers and media outlets in New Jersey, D.C. upstate New York and Pennsylvania.

The post The Fight Against Fascism: Building Class Power Before It’s Too Late appeared first on Regeneration Magazine.

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Photo by MARK FELIX/AFP via Getty Images

“But repression does not always come dressed up in riot gear, or breaking into offices in the middle of the night. It also comes in the form of the friendly “neighborhood liaison” officer, the advisory boards to local police departments, and the social scientist hired on as a consultant. Repression is, first and foremost, a matter of politics: it is the means the state uses to protect itself from political challenges, the methods it employs to preserve its authority and continue its rule. This process does not solely rely on force, but also mobilizes ideology, material incentives, and, in short, all of the tools and techniques of statecraft. We have to understand repression as involving both coercion and concessions, employing violence and building support, weeding opposition and seeding legitimacy. That is the basis of the counterinsurgency approach.”

Christian Williams

Part 1: Defense

Since national protests erupted after the police murder of George Floyd we’ve seen a huge increase in Houston of new BLM activists, organizations, individuals, communities and small crews of leftists become active. In the midst of this activity it’s hard to make sense of what the strategy of the police and politicians is in relation to the protests. While some cities are faced with violent repression, others, like Houston, are dealt with using a lighter touch. Mechanisms of  state coercion, concessions, sanctioned multi-racial leaders and protests have been implemented locally in the struggle to preserve authority and legitimacy. Overcoming this limit of counterinsurgency is of utmost importance for police abolitionists everywhere. This analysis is my own observations of counterinsurgent forces and strategies, and what defensive measures people fighting to defund and abolish police can take to oppose it. 

Recuperating the Rebellion

On Friday, May 29th the first protest in Houston for George Floyd was held. The protest was organized by BLM Houston in Downtown. It quickly became apparent that something was different about this protest. Not only did the number of people surpass what BLM Houston was expecting, things got off to a rowdy start as protesters openly confronted police, attacked cop cars and confronted protest organizers. In this video a local organizer can be seen calling out a BLM Houston leader for collaborating with cops leading to a physical altercation. As night fell protesters stayed in the streets and began attacking businesses Downtown. The leaders of these rebellious acts were Black and Brown youth that attended the protests from across the city. 

However, as uncontrollable as people’s actions were over the weekend, they were swiftly recuperated by various political forces. In the matter of a few days rappers Bun B and Trae tha Truth would take the lead in assembling a coalition that included the Mayor, Police Chief Art Acevedo, BLM Houston as well as other activists and community organizations. The coalition included a mix of middle class, small business owners and public sector executives of Black celebrities, Democratic politicians and liberal activists. They called for a rally at Discovery Green Park in Downtown that attracted over 60,000 participants. This was one of the biggest protests Houston has seen against a national instance of police murder. The crowd had energy and there were pockets of people here and there that started their own chants, carried militant signs and stood up to police. 

Protesters listened to a few speeches at the park, kneeled in a moment of silence and then marched over to City Hall. This time the police joined in the march with Police Chief Acevedo leading the way. At City Hall people listened as Bun B, the Mayor and other activists spoke about our righteous anger, our right to protest peacefully, and we were left with promises of reform.  

As evening approached a couple thousand still remained in the street with the most militant sticking around until nightfall. Throughout the event the Houston Police Department (HPD) closely surveilled things and preemptively set up police units and barriers to control the crowd. HPD waited as the number of protesters thinned over a few hours as people got frustrated, discouraged, or simply tired from the heat. The fact that Downtown Houston is laid out in a grid format made controlling the crowd easier. When the last few hundred protesters refused to leave HPD cracked down in the cover of night and violently arrested them. Whatever energy, anger and contempt for law enforcement that existed was provided a proper opportunity to vent and continue with their lives. Those that stayed in the streets afterward got the stick. 

Effective Counter Insurgency

The counter insurgency plan by HPD, the Mayor, Democratic Politicians, activists and celebrities was very clear and well executed. Their containment strategy entailed effectively controlling the political narrative, remaining proactive in their actions and dividing the “good” protester from “bad” protester by sowing mistrust and suspicion among people. Local Twitter posts were rife with stories of bricks being left out by police during protests to tempt people, red baiting of white anarchists, outside agitators, and white kids with skateboards. Key in orchestrating and implementing this strategy were the combined efforts of Mayor Turner and Police Chief Acevedo. 

Acevedo, the son of a right-wing Cuban immigrant, made national news because he condemned Trump, hugged, marched and kneeled with protesters, cued the waterworks as he made emotional speeches at protests, and attended George Floyd’s funeral. Part of what made this possible is the trendy portrait politicians paint about Houston’s liberal multicultural composition. Houston, like most big cities in Texas, is liberal. We’re a majority minority city and the most diverse city in the US for a number of years running. Chief Acevedo was able to use this to make a political pivot and focus on Trump by appealing to the “us” (POC) vs “them” (Trump, the right, white people) framework. Acevedo drew attention away from the 6 local police murders that took place in a span of 6 weeks, and focused on respectability and the outside agitator myth. In the end, the rhetoric of “we’re not like those other cities” won the day. The years Acevedo spent honing his community policing skills in Austin prepared HPD for this moment.

Mayor Turner delivered the follow through punch when he gave his speech. During his time on stage he affirmed that the space people were present in didn’t belong to him or the city, but to us, the people of Houston. He praised Mayor Frey of Minneapolis for condemning the actions of all the cops involved in the murder. He tactfully admitted that there is much work to be done in Houston for underserved communities, and reasserted his commitment to improving conditions. Finally, he used the presence of the Floyd family to morally pressure people to respect their wishes to keep things peaceful. Additionally, Mayor Turner is doing his best to stay ahead of the curve by deciding to take down or relocate local confederate and colonial statues, pass “criminal justice reforms” and adopting some #8Can’tWait policy. All useless “reforms” in reality.   

Furthermore, local media, like popular hip hop station 97.9 The Box, have been fundamental in pushing and supporting this counter insurgent strategy. This coalition is working hard to provide an acceptable political vision for struggle through voting, petitioning, partaking in local political institutions, town hall meetings and partnering up with politicians. They’ve been proactive and unchallenged so far in this. This counter insurgent strategy isn’t new to Houston. This has been the approach locally since the Ferguson moment and possibly even further back. 

Yet, Houston is not alone in experiencing this approach of a “softer” counter insurgency. Baltimore is another example of how community policing strategies have been applied in this moment. A very different experience from 2015. While the legitimacy of the police continues to be shaken the state has not lost all authority and remains flexible in the approach it takes in repressing large protests from city to city and region to region. 

This strategy and their combined efforts successfully prevented a bigger explosion in Houston. For now.

Defensive Maneuvers 

To undermine this counter insurgency there are a number of things those of us organizing to defund and abolish police can do. For one, we can show up to protests in groups with our own bull horns, militant signs, slogans and chants. We can fight to change the protest environment and link up with other protesters who share our outrage by giving them a space to express their thoughts and emotions. We can distribute literature that shares ideas about tactics and strategy.

Cops that enter our protest endanger everyone. We should not let cops join, lead, or freely walk around in our protests. We need to make sure protests are as cop free as possible by kicking them out of our spaces. If you see someone talking to a cop, encourage them not to engage and strike up a conversation with them about why. In relation to this, we need to make sure we’re not incriminating ourselves by taking pictures or video of protesters doing illegal activity. If you do take pictures or video, make sure you blur their faces out if and when you publish them. Too many of us are catching charges and facing jail time for destroying property while killer cops roam free. Of course, this goes for snitching as well. If you see something going down, keep it to yourself. 

Judge people by what they propose and do, not by their identity or rhetoric.  Black and Brown liberals are looking for opportunities to deflect our rage, shut down debate, weaken revolt and silence Black and Brown radicals. People who use ally and privilege politics support this dynamic by giving voice to these liberals who they nominate as spokespeople for all Black and Brown communities. 

Also, we can have an understanding of how a combination of all tactics complement one another in the streets. From the most militant to the most passive. Don’t denounce each other’s actions, it only serves to weaken, criminalize and demonize our movement and communities. Support each other when we fight back. There is a need to organize anti police-repression committees to protect ourselves from the state and support those of us that are jailed during protests. Finally, we can transition from these moments of street protests and form organizations with contacts we made to fight long term for police abolition. All this will go a long way in resisting cooptation and counter insurgency, and make sure we’re setting the terms of our own movements. 

In the follow up piece I’ll discuss the limits we’re facing in Houston, potential openings for intervention and what strategies the left can undertake to go on the offensive. 

Part 2: Offense

In the previous piece I discussed the counter insurgent strategy of the Black, Democratic politicians, activists and celebrities. Here I’ll examine some limitations Houston is facing, potential openings for intervention and strategies that police abolitionists can implement on the ground to go on the offensive. 

Limits

It’s important to note some of the local limitations the struggle now faces as popular energy has been demobilized and things appear to return to “normal.”

Locally, BLM Houston has held a few discussions with other organizations that have taken up the mantle of defunding the police and police abolition. While their rhetoric comes off as radical, actually struggling to abolish police remains an abstraction for some time in the distant future. Their solutions focus primarily on economic demands of redistributing the city budget, reforming bankrupt institutions, legislative action, building ties with elected officials and trying to pressure them. There is no assessment of how these institutions we’re supposed to channel funds into produce and reproduce capitalism or white supremacy. But, they currently have no leverage to push through any demands. In many cities, calls for reform are entertained by politicians after intense, often physical, large scale confrontations with the police and political power structures. To think we can skip these confrontations and expect to gain any change, whether radical or liberal, is absurd. 

All the effort celebrities like Bun B and organizations like BLM Houston put into containing the energy and rage of the popular protests have now hobbled organizing efforts. Proof of this can be found in the city council’s recent decision to increase the budget of HPD to just under $1 billion despite record numbers of people protesting in Houston. To put this in context, the total city budget for Houston amounts to just over $5 billion. Making the amount police receive about ⅕ of the budget. Why shouldn’t the city council ignore demands by activists? What real pressure are they feeling? When mass movements directly confront the police and political establishment through riots, occupations of police precincts, sit-ins, freeway take overs, uncontrolled marches, no cop zones and unruly mass protests they provide the basis for change. The fact that there was no direct confrontation with the police or politicians in Houston leaves the demands activists make here toothless.           

Although challenging to overcome, none of these limitations are insurmountable, and there remains much to be optimistic about. 

Hope For The Future

While many of the larger protests were held in the city center, after 2 weeks activity started to ripple outward and move into the neighborhoods that surround Houston. In recent weeks we’ve seen protests take place in Baytown, Pasadena, Second Ward, League City, La Porte, Pearland, Galveston, and Kingwood. Despite demobilization efforts hundreds of people have been attending these smaller actions which shows there is still energy and desire to carry on the struggle. This is significant because the key, in part, to unlocking Houston’s radical potential is building organizing projects in communities. Not all, but many of these areas face problems in gentrification, police brutality, housing, health care, wage theft, flooding, etc. If there is energy and social awareness about injustice then we have space to link up and struggle with people around police abolition. I’ll go into detail about this in the next section.      

Moreover, there appear to be cracks forming in the “soft” style counter insurgent approach by the Mayor and Police Chief. On the night of June 2nd protesters who remained in the streets were arrested, without a curfew in place, and put in a gym for most of the night at some substation. Protesters were left huddled together en masse, zip-tied, without water, and some had their face masks torn off by police. After this incident, at a later protest, Chief Acevedo was booed by the crowd, had water dumped on him and shouted out of the area. The look on his face was irate as he was escorted away by undercover cops. His hypocrisy was laid bare as protesters confronted him about his actions the night of June 2nd. 

These are not minor details and represent significant openings for defunding and abolishing the police. 

What Next?

While I’m not opposed to efforts that focus on defunding police, that should be one tactic that’s part of a broader campaign to disempower, disarm and disband police. Our approach should not be defunding police first, and perhaps sometime in the future fight to abolish them. We need a multifaceted approach that immediately fights to strip away the power and presence of police in working class Black and Brown communities. The terms of our movement can not be set by the Democratic Party, celebrities or professional activists. With calls for defunding and abolishing police gaining popularity nationally the time is now for police abolitionists in Houston to create our own vision for struggle that isn’t limited to purely incremental economic demands, or reforms. We must be more precise about demands to defund the police, and keep in mind how this demand could be recuperated. Defunding police is not something we can simply uncritically support. 

We need to wage and support campaigns against police brutality when people are killed locally. There has to be a concerted effort to call out the hypocrisy of the Mayor and Police Chief when they’re marching with protesters, or making promises of change. We can no longer solely partake in national upsurges in struggle without using these moments to fight against what’s happening to working class black and brown people in Houston. This can only happen if we’re actively and directly building in these communities. 

Policing pervades our daily lives. A strategy to disempower, disarm and disband HPD can be waged in schools, hospitals, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Across the US cities are making advancements in defunding, disbanding and cutting ties with police. We can work to further build the movement by creating independent working class institutions that mediate conflicts instead of calling the police, neighborhood media outlets that report on community life and politics, self defense groups that stay vigilant and push back against police harassment, demand labor unions disaffiliate from police unions, run campaigns to repeal repressive police policies and militant tenant unions. The possibilities are endless. 

Houston “not being like those other cities” means we’re behind the curve. If we want to break the holding pattern of their counter insurgent efforts and fight to defund and abolish the police, we can no longer wait until “the right moment” or “more favored conditions”. 

The time for police abolitionists to organize is now. Turn up!

Camilo Torres is a member of the Houston Tenants Union, you can find the Houston Tenants Union on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

The post On the Local Uprisings: Containment in Houston appeared first on Regeneration Magazine.

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The following reportback is from a comrade in a Marxist Center affiliate organization, who witnessed the uprisings in Minneapolis in the wake of the lynching of George Floyd. Here our comrade recounts the ebb and flow of the uprising as he saw them. This reportback can only represent the views and experiences of this one person. Personal and organizational information is redacted for security.

Day 1: 

The uprising begins. 

Mass protests at multiple sites in the city. Primarily political targets such as the police 3rd precinct and the site of the murder. Our cadre are not on the ground yet.

Day 2: 

The protests continue to escalate. There is an increase in direct confrontation with cops and expected escalation the next day. We prepare all day and come up at night to distribute safety gear to Black and Brown youth. 

Day 3: 

Tonight, corporate storefronts and a police station are burning to the ground.

The precinct was stormed; an all out cop retreat was forced; the streets were barricaded, the station was ablaze. 

Reflections from this night:

This uprising is led by urban poor Black and Brown people, especially youth. Revolutionaries filled critical logistics roles–medics, safety gear production and distribution, tools and teams to put out tear gas grenades–but urban poor black and brown youth led the action hands down. 

People advanced into the open streets; when enough of them did, they were met with a hail of police projectiles. Our empty bottles vs. their tear gas, our cardboard signs vs. their rubber bullets, our screams vs. their marker rounds (paintballs). Quite literally, our strength in numbers vs. their weapons, our palpable rage vs. their terror. 

People are shot in the head (and all over) with marker rounds and rubber bullets. Teenagers and revolutionaries run to their aid with medicine, water, and handfuls of medical supplies. Many are tended and back at the front in minutes. Some are not so lucky. 

Among the layers of youth on the front and behind the scenes are former and current youth of the organization we helped to build, Our Youth Organization (OYO) (actual name redacted for security). Past members (high school graduates) are in the thick of the protests while many current members use the moment to respark the OYO campaign to get cops out of Minneapolis schools started in 2016. What once was deemed impossible is now our horizon. 

Seeds planted lie dormant until the force of a whirlwind knock the barrier between them and the sun. Many OYO were politicized in 2015 and 2016 by two other police murders of black men in Minnesota (Jamar Clark and Philando Castile). These resulted in multi-week occupations (OYO Minneapolis was born at the occupation of the 4th police precinct) which were a battleground not only against police and the state, but also between urban poor Black and Brown people and revolutionaries on the one hand and nonprofit staff and liberals on the other. 

Today, the nonprofits are nowhere to be seen. 

We surrounded the precinct while corporate storefronts from the last day of action burned and were looted for many blocks up and down the street. Looting had spread all over in small pockets including in large amounts in the city of St. Paul, diverting police and National Guard attention. Due to a weak flank of ours, the cops consolidated and made a rapid retreat–a lucky mistake on our end. 

After their tear gas filled retreat, people pushed over the rest of the barriers and stormed the building. It’s contents were liberated, thousands of people had just created a police free zone for blocks and miles. Not long after the seizure of the building, it was set on fire. 

Comrades have been building and distributing lots of simple shields especially to Black and Brown youth. If we had hundreds instead of dozens, this would’ve changed the game. The offense and defense dynamic of an action is entirely different if we could have established walls of our own instead of relying just on the moveable objects and existing infrastructure around us. 

We are in the middle of a global pandemic. The moment requires even more risk in that way but the people are willing to do it and so are we. Pray for us whatever way you do. 

The 3rd police precinct building after the nights of protests in Minneapolis. Credit Lorie Shaull/Wikimedia Commons.

Day 4:

Shifting dynamics tonight. 

National Guard out.  Cops back in. They gave up the 3rd precinct by mid-morning, under no pressure.

The leadership from urban poor Black and Brown people from specific neighborhoods makes militant action possible. Their activity enables masses to join and achieve critical mass. It worked great last night.  It was still there but less so tonight. 

With the 3rd precinct ransacked and burnt, the highly localized energy shifted from the precinct as a political target to regular looting in the area for residents. There is increasing evidence that looting and fires of community institutions (like black/immigrant owned restaurants) is carried out by white supremacists/out-of-town adventurists. 

Hundreds of others gathered; we distributed shields, and pressed a small line of cops west systematically and easily for many blocks down the main street only having to fend off occasional rounds of tear gas. This went on till we reached a natural political target, the fifth precinct, this was the cops next last stand, and they were very ready for it.

We didn’t quite have the numbers most of the night. A march of a couple hundred people that had taken over the freeway came off the highway and joined us at the precinct. A tactical mistake–instead of staying with us at the precinct they actually absorbed a lot of our numbers and kept marching for several more blocks.

The lack of poor Black and Brown neighborhood residents organically acting with escalated militancy meant we did not use our new critical mass to mount waves of actions. The energy and organic leadership just wasn’t quite there enough to direct it.

What escalated militancy did occur later in the night was in reaction and as methods of defense against dramatically escalated police action. However we did not have critical mass; even our cadre/affinity group had exited based on scouting information. There was no fight to advance or defend in a serious way at that moment. 

It is possible that a militant revolutionary organization rooted in the urban poor Black and Brown neighborhoods could have seriously directed the masses into excellent strategy with key tactical advantages. But that organization does not yet exist in our context.

Our work with our youth organization has never quite gotten to  systematic training in direct action and Affinity groups. Had we done a better job developing those skills and that consciousness within youth in the last 4 years it could have made the difference. 

Our youth organization is very likely however about to win a major victory in the main campaign we have been waging in Minneapolis with students for the last 3 years: getting cops out of schools. The school board is pretty much guaranteed to end their contract with the Minneapolis Police Department. This would not be possible if it wasn’t for the last three years of sustained action across the Minneapolis schools led by our students. Once the uprising began, our students instantly began a mass calling and emailing campaign on school board members and Administration staff which has resulted in the new policy that will be voted on on Monday. A campaign we thought was likely to die is now about to win. And I can’t talk about it without crying.

Other graduated youth, ones we have not been in touch with for years, are suddenly talking with us again about strategy. The point is not necessarily membership in the organization’s we build but  about trust. Our organization is largely white and comes from another town; uniting with Black and Brown youth doesn’t just happen from one night of struggle, but from years of building trust.

The anarchists scene locally is doing a very good job of background logistics support. We have yet to hear of a serious spokes council of affinity groups. A serious spokes cancel rooted in skilled Affinity groups would shift dynamics beneficially. But the bottom line is the necessity of leadership of poor Black and Brown people at the forefront. It’s their home and their fight and we are here to help them build power and lend support and critical mass to their actions. 

Onward comrades, the only way is forward.

Day 5:

There was no return of organic urban poor Black and Brown escalated militant leadership tonight and very few active protests. 

In its place, many thousands of south Minneapolis residents self-organized into neighborhood and community defense committees, many with their own blockades and checkpoints. Many community institutions are also defended. There are some looters but the main threat by far was an increased presence of white supremacists looking to target community institutions and Black and Brown people.

Through large democratic assemblies held in parks during the day, the political consciousness within this context is an odd mix of patterns and contradictions. It is so widespread and robust that after our affinity group had delivered fire extinguishers and supplies to key community defense centers, and discovering no serious protest activity to support, we decided to head home as we were not needed further. Glad we did. We narrowly avoided a mass police violent crackdown across the city. 

Later that night the police and national guard started driving and marching around residential streets shooting tear gas and rubber bullets at anyone standing outside or on their porches or in their cars. They’ve caused an immense amount of violence against the community defense infrastructure. But the people are holding after minor retreats as the cops are mostly just passing through and causing terror. You may notice similar patterns all across the country of massively coordinated escalation in police violence like we saw nationwide at the end of occupy. 

Dozens if not hundreds have also been arrested for being out past curfew. Including a large affinity group of close comrades to us. 

This might be too soon to say but it is likely we are at the end of this phase of the whirlwind in Minneapolis. 

Day 6:

Our affinity group was not on the ground much today. We needed rest and a step back for assessment. We did deliver more shields and fire extinguishers.

The protest type actions have shifted in geography and the social base engaged represents an almost entirely new constituency.

The escalated and militant direct action leadership of urban poor Black and Brown people in  South Minneapolis seems to have subsided. In its place today there was a march of many thousands concentrated mostly in downtown Minneapolis. A mass social base of thousands of people of different race, class, and geography. This mix of class, race, and gender diverse liberals and progressives and particularly young workers of mixed political consciousness marching together in the thousands and being attacked by a white supremacist and to some extent by police has likely many repercussions. Time will tell. The march today is not one that necessarily lent itself towards building organization but expressing mass solidarity and a possible entry point into the movement.

But honestly I don’t think any of the organizations on the ground have the capacity to focus on absorbing new layers of activists from this so far.

The community defense infrastructure in South Minneapolis is still fully deployed across it’s mixed political consciousness. We will get more shields and equipment to OYO youth tomorrow for them to continue to distribute to their peers. We will also await the final vote about getting cops out of schools and maybe taste the sweet victory of a years-long campaign OYO has waged on that front.

Love and rage my friends.

Protesters gather in downtown Minneapolis. Credit Chad Davis/Wikimedia Commons.

Day 7:

Our affinity group is doing overnight community defense of a hotel, seized by the people to house dozens, possibly up to a hundred, houseless people. This is at least the third night that the hotel started operating this way.

No massive protests today but there were peaceful protests in different spots around the city. Ton of arrests at a protest at the governor’s mansion tonight once curfew started. Again, actions are being called by random people, resulting in large numbers but no tactics and often large arrests. 

The established and experienced organizations and activists across the Left in Minneapolis are at full capacity doing defense and support.

As I said yesterday, this is a huge variety of social classes and politics and religion and race and gender class etc.The big question is about momentum and organization. How many of these people will join existing organizations, or start new ones? How long will it take to link them up? Because of this how many of them will always view movements as fully spontaneous and only existing around flashpoints?

The neighborhood defense infrastructure is still going strong. I would argue that it genuinely represents a certain kind of dual power. However, it does not represent Left revolutionary dual power. The political consciousness among the South Minneapolis residents with robust neighborhood defense infrastructure is mixed. A significant chunk of it is white and reactionary and organized at the micro Grassroots level.

The gap left by the State acting as merely an occupying force, abandoning its role as a protector of the white middle class and above, has produced neighborhood level self-determination, a certain manifestation of dual power. This manifestation doesn’t inherently carry Left revolutionary politics. Honestly, Left revolutionary politics do not carry the masses at the moment. Progressive social justice politics certainly do. 

What I think I am gleaning from this is that this moment across the country may produce similar elements of quasi dual-power self-determination but that those manifestations do not inherently carry our Left politics or even a majority of those participants turning to Left and especially revolutionary politics.

Duh.

This is the moment where I wish we could point to existing smaller institutional alternatives of democracy and restorative justice; alternatives to police and things of the like that are at a scale that are serious and not absolutely tiny. But we don’t have those locally, not in a coherent enough way. If we did we could raise mass consciousness around these alternatives and help them become popularized demands within the new masses. But for now the primary political consciousness in the streets is anger, arresting and finding guilty the murdering police officers, and the vague slogan for justice.

The open question remains about navigating this rupture with strategy and not just emergency response. And when we come back to the war of position, the landscape will be so different.

Also, the vote on Cops and Schools is tomorrow, it did not happen today. We will let you know what happens. OYO is mobilizing heavily for a march around it. The Black and Brown youth we have been supporting are immensely grateful for the shields and protective equipment we have been providing. We appreciate all of you so much.

The police have basically been functioning with autonomy from the governor’s office and the mayor. I have no sympathy for the governor or the mayor but the police are actively disobeying their orders and doing as they please. The police union president, a white supremacist, literally drew up plans for deploying the National Guard and police forces across the city and brought them to Republican Senate majority leaders in Minnesota to completely undermine the power of the governor and the mayor. 

Day 8:

A few substantial victories.

OYO is actually the foundation of our affiliate organization. We started it just after graduating high school/while in high school in a nearby town a few years ago. Within two to three years, we had expanded to Minneapolis based on a police precinct occupation. Ever since then, getting cops out of schools has been OYO’s main campaign. For the last four years, OYO students have done surveys, petitions, political education workshops, protests, school board meetings, and actions all to get cops out of schools.

Last night we won.

Partially. All it took was murder and the riots but the Minneapolis School Board ended their contract with the Minneapolis Police Department to provide cops in schools. The school board is looking for alternatives in the forms of Department of Parks and Recreation police which are technically different than the Minneapolis Police Department although they are in the same white supremacist union. Not a full victory but getting them out is the first and massive step.

Had OYO students, and other youth organizations, not been pressing the attack for years this swift vote and victory would not have been the same. Doesn’t mean it would not have been possible. Hard to tell.

Arguably, these partial victories really only set us up for flashpoints in the future. When the state inevitably fails to achieve anything even close to justice, there is the potential to spark mass anger and action. Our task is to get into position in the downtime through organizing and relationship-building to maneuver during the next ruptures.

Also, today it was announced that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) would send some critical permits to a Minnesota court further delaying the permits. This was our main political goal recently. Last week, we had actually just calculated to not press our luck by doing house actions on MPCA staff and instead focus on other political targets. That calculation proved right I guess!

I’ll say this in a short way here. If it wasn’t for the last two years of direct action training and affinity group building, years of OYO organizing, and our Collective going through a very intentional political education process about what a revolution is and how do we build towards one, we would not have been able to act as quickly and as usefully as we have in the last week.

it all brings to mind what Teresa was writing about recently for Marxist Center cadre about war of position and war of maneuver. We can’t accurately guess what the next ruptures will be but we can come close with scenario planning for multiple possibilities. We should then be very intentional about working backwards from those moments of possibility towards what we need to be building now to take advantage of them. That’s a core lesson so far. We are moving on to victory.

The post A Reportback from Minneapolis appeared first on Regeneration Magazine.

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Protestors links arms with Nick Lambert Saturday during a protest.

A recent salvo of polemics has renewed discussion around the question of unity throughout the emergent US socialist movement. With the DSA convention in August serving as a point of departure, several analyses explain the underlying contradictions of this political moment and offer a way forward. I argue that while these interventions successfully identify certain fundamental challenges currently facing socialists, they still leave us chasing our tails, debating abstract notions of unity and basebuilding without an analysis of their utility and application as tools of class struggle. While these abstractions result in part from the polemical form of these exchanges, they tend to muddy the waters rather than bring clarity to the situation. 

I suggest that the way out of this quagmire is through the widespread pursuit of strategic declassment, through which socialist and communist cadre of all tendencies embed themselves within social movements through the embrace of basebuilding re-theorized as “mass work.” Mass work retains the practical kernel of the “basebuilding” paradigm and its concern with rooting socialist politics in the working class while transcending its theoretical limitations as an inherently class-neutral tactic (any effective political group might basebuild, after all). A return to the revolutionary concept of ‘mass work’ reasserts the historical role of revolutionary cadre, especially in pre-party contexts, as agitators, educators and organizers, tasked with building new structures of autonomous power capable of locating and enlisting the advanced and class-conscious segments of the working class, while simultaneously opening up points of contact and solidarity with the wider masses. A shared strategic orientation towards cadre formation through mass work would lay the foundation for meaningful socialist unity, and further the road towards dual power. To situate declassment through “mass work” as key to building proletarian autonomy, however, we must first give an account of the current conditions of the movement, cutting through the prevailing confusion which has recently dominated socialist discourse.

Socialist Unity: An Elusive Mirage

The US socialist movement, experiencing a groundswell of participation from disaffected and proletarianized middle class intellectuals (here we understand the disillusioned individuals of petty bourgeois backgrounds, educated for and capable of intellectual labor but precariously or under-employed), is showing signs of strain against the organizational configurations which have hitherto contained it. Constructive manifestations of this shift are embodied in the success of new socialist formations like Philly Socialists as well as the 2018 regroupment push that resulted in the Marxist Center network. However, more chaotic articulations of this tension erupted as well. In March 2019, the one-time largest revolutionary US socialist group, the International Socialist Organization (ISO), imploded around a toxic bureaucratic-centralist structure which failed to address misogynistic violence perpetrated by leadership. To many, the group’s dissolution was unexpected but not altogether unsurprising, in light of heightening contradictions between a dogmatic, ossified leadership and an agitated, increasingly heterodox cadre. The organizational void in its wake leaves this socialist cohort looking for a new political home. It is too early to say what concrete effects this rearrangement will have on the wider movement, but the surge of cadre turned-loose is sure to disrupt the existing balance in unpredictable ways at the very least. 

A parallel contradiction is playing out within the country’s largest socialist mass-organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), as revealed in the latest analyses of the recent 2019 conference. As the “big tent” organization struggles to consolidate around a common orientation, confusion around its countless factions, caucuses, and tendencies have resulted in clashing prognoses. Is the primary divide between reformists and revolutionaries? Between centralizers and decentralizers? Or between “basebuilders” and “government socialists?” On what basis, or around which strategy, might productive unity be established? While this disorder is to be expected of a young and eclectic mass organization, it can occasionally be difficult to see the significance of these semantic battles for those of us not involved in DSA. Regardless of one’s ideological commitment, by examining the fault-lines exposed by these latest exchanges within DSA and the ensuing debate reverberating throughout the wider socialist milieu, we can begin to tease out the essential contradictions which define our current moment. 

Attempting a critical perspective from within the organization, Pierre and Simone frame the 2019 conference as a debate over internal structural questions, predominantly defined by the conflict between “centralizers” – the tightly-organized social-democratic core, supported by Jacobin magazine and prioritizing an electoral strategy – and “decentralizers,” from smaller and newer chapters and largely represented in the Build and Libertarian Socialist Caucuses. While the bulk of their analysis relates to internal and procedural decisions (which dominated the weekend, as many attendees observed), the authors note with approval the steady growth of the “decentralizer” camp and look forward expectantly to its ascendance: “if the elections to the National Political Committee are any indication, the DSA is moving in a broadly leftward direction, with around half of the incoming NPC placed somewhere left of the DSA center.” In this paradigm, the primary contradiction within the socialist movement is confined to DSA’s internal politics, specifically in the conflict between a consolidating “government socialist” pole, and a progressive opposition seeking to build a socialist base among the working-class. Pierre and Simone are optimistic, suggesting that the organization’s reformist elements will be gradually won over as “‘decentralizers’ or basebuilders continue their growth on the frontier of the working classes.” From this sentiment, we can already identify three underlying assumptions: 1) that the pursuit of basebuilding, as a self-contained strategy, represents an intrinsically progressive tendency capable of reversing opportunist drift, 2) that decentralizers embody this basebuilding approach in practice, and 3) that the DSA, were it only to build a working-class base “to more closely mirror the composition of the class as a whole,” could feasibly become a “radical organizing center.” 

For a rejoinder to this analysis, we turn to Parker and McQueeney, who aptly critique the shortcomings of this simplistic narrative. First off, they complicate the reductive picture of decentralizers (LSC and Build) as a cohesive left opposition bloc, noting discrepancies in which “the decentralist coalition found itself sharply to the right of its opponents.” Merely reacting against organizational centralization, even if the national core is indeed firmly electoralist, will be not enough to counter reformism. More critically, they assert, we cannot put blind faith in basebuilding as a productive development in socialist strategy: “for all the pretenses of [basebuilding] being a meaningful strategy for the left, it has no real strategy. basebuilders do not lay out a path for taking power but focus on what is essentially community organizing because they are desperate to avoid the real ideological differences among them.” On its surface, this is a point well-made. It is true that, stripped of a political vision, basebuilding refers only to the tactic of expanding a movement’s support throughout a given population. Pursued as a strategic end in itself, basebuilding falls short, collapsing into a pseudo-spontaneism: just keep organizing the unorganized into new structures of power, and wait for the day these institutions will at some point acquire critical mass to challenge state power of their own accord. 

Parker and McQueeney justifiably highlight the tempting slide into movementism that can arise from elevating basebuilding to a strategic horizon, an error undoubtedly exhibited in Pierre and Simone’s analysis as well as numerous DSA manifestos declaring their fidelity to “mass action” or “mass mobilization.” Rather than take seriously the real contradiction that basebuilding aspires to resolve, we lose this important political context. In search of lost political coherency, Parker and McQueeney instead fall back upon a tired slogan retrofitted with new theoretical packaging: even if it is presented here in contradistinction to brands of fetishized theoretical or organizational unity, a turn towards “programmatic unity” amounts to a return to the blind-alley sectarianism they simultaneously claim to transcend. After all, who stands to deliver on this political program? Furthermore, who is even watching? Shared consensuses between Marxists around a “clear set of demands” have been formed before, trotted out by dozens of committed revolutionary groups over the decades – our revolutionary tradition bears no shortage of demands. We demand the world, but this road leaves us in the cold, shouting into the void. For a socialist intelligentsia largely cut off from the wider working class and lacking meaningful structures of counter-power, programmatic unity puts the cart before the horse. 

Circling like vultures over a carcass, we’re left feverishly vacillating between autopsies of our movement, coping with a mounting unease by reverting to old habits. On the one hand, a navel-gazing fascination with fragmentation, obsessed with numbering, naming, and cataloguing the factions which divide us, and on the other, a sentimental fetishization of socialist unity, that elusive mirage which might just finally materialize if we could only ever agree on where we want to go. Both analytical tendencies – each the other’s photographic negative – articulate mirror images of the same pervasive anxiety which currently haunts the socialist left. Experienced positively as fracture and fragmentation, or negatively as an absent, ineffable unity, this malaise ultimately derives from the persistent inability to adequately address a fundamental problem: the socialist movement remains a resolutely “middle-class” phenomenon, while the working class remains dishearteningly disorganized. Resolving this primary contradiction is of utmost importance and key to any strategy for class independence. 

Beyond Basebuilding

In her response “For the Unity of Marxists, or the Unity of the Dispossessed?” Sophia Burns re-centers this contradiction in polemic fashion. The US socialist movement at its current stage of development remains one geared towards protest within the liberal-democratic paradigm, not building effective counter-hegemony to challenge it. This tendency emerges not from its ideological failings, but from its class composition: “class is thicker than ideology, so any movement based in the middle classes will always bend back towards the political process.” Until we can bridge the gap between intellectuals (“professionals, technicians, and all those whose specialized training and knowledge gives them a uniquely strong position in the labor market”) and the proletariat proper, any socialist project (regardless of any sort internal unity, programmatic or otherwise) is doomed to either marginalization or opportunist cooptation. The turn to basebuilding aspires to address this primary contradiction, creating situations where “socialist intellectuals can engage with proletarian tenants and workers in a mutually-transformative process” and “gradually cultivate a base among the dispossessed.” 

To take Burns’ program seriously is to acknowledge the inescapability of basebuilding as a prerequisite for creating a truly revolutionary movement. Nevertheless, we can still recognize that “basebuilding” itself is only a signpost which, while indicating the nature of the challenge that confronts us, provides no blueprint for implementation. As a slogan, “basebuilding” literally expresses only a need: a base must be built. To theorize how exactly social revolutionaries can build bases among the masses, we will need a more robust conceptual framework that incorporates the lessons of past movements, takes into account the particularities of the current moment, and remains open to future advances to be discovered through the laboratory of class struggle. Where does this leave us, and what does this mean for our current efforts? To this, Burns offers no easy answers. It’s tempting to walk away from her intervention with a pessimistic interpretation – your organizing efforts with other socialists are in vain, strike out on your own or give up. At this crossroads between adventurism and nihilism, socialists should seriously embrace a “new return” to the organizational form which has undergirded generations of successful revolutionary struggle: the cadre model.

The Task Before Us

It is not enough to set tasks, we must also solve the problem of the methods for carrying them out. If our task is to cross a river, we cannot cross it without a bridge or a boat. Unless the bridge or boat problem is solved, it is idle to speak of crossing the river. Unless the problem of method is solved, talk about the task is useless.” 

– Mao Zedong, Be Concerned with The Well-Being of the Masses, Pay Attention to Methods of Work (January 27, 1934)

Before there is a revolutionary party, there are committed cadre patiently organizing in the liminal spaces where class struggle is at its most acute and alternative institutions are most needed. Deeply integrated and working steadily in their community, the cadre formation serves two purposes: building proletarian power through education, agitation, and organization, and fostering the growth and development of the cadre themselves. Through the dialectical, transformative nature of mass work, communists become cadre, continuously radicalized through shared praxis and analysis. They facilitate in turn the transformation of those with whom they organize and empower organic leaders to take active roles in their community. 

When communists organize as cadre, they associate based on commitment to a shared political vision and radical practice, endeavoring to establish structures of real working-class power: tenant unions, neighborhood associations, cop-watching collectives, community self-defense trainings, youth programs. Through rigorous social investigation, cadre members identify the needs and desires of the community, building alternatives not to grandstand and proselytize but out of service in solidarity – not to propagandize but to empower. The end is not to drive recruitment towards a party, or to explain to community members that what they really want is called socialism. Instead, communist cadre prioritize, as an end in itself, the creation of autonomous mass organizations capable of collective action to further class power. The cadre understand that the most oppressed and marginalized of the working class – those with nothing to lose but their chains – engage in collective action not when persuaded by subcultural appeals to values, principles and promises, but when action has proven capable of addressing deep-seated needs, providing a path to reclaim the basic dignity and agency that they’ve been denied. Appreciating the radical power of collective action to develop critical consciousness, cadre empower individuals to re-center themselves as revolutionary subjects, through self-managed struggle and autonomous organization.  

Widespread organizing on the granular, micro-political scale opens the door to new strategic questions, possibilities, contingencies: Which mass organizational forms will best nurture the radical consciousness of its members? Along which fronts will we deploy our forces, and what kinds of training can we facilitate among them to ensure their success? How will we coordinate with dozens of other independent cadre formations that emerge, and what opportunities for collaboration might present themselves? What might a densely organized, nodular, and militant working-class look like? Considering the increasingly networked and interconnected nature of the socialist left, we stand on the threshold of a potential rupture, an opening towards new strategic terrain. Only cadre formations, declassed and engaged alongside the dispossessed in building new, autonomous mass organizations stand to resolve the primary class contradiction of our moment. Rather than wait for a single mass party to present itself, to build up an autonomous network of socialist proletarian power requires that we begin to construct its framework today ourselves. 

The post Beyond Basebuilding: Towards a Declassed Socialist Movement appeared first on Regeneration Magazine.

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Content Warning: the concept/term “cr*zy” is used throughout this piece. As you will read, the author does this to better understand and defang the term as someone diagnosed with a disorder. The effect of calling someone cr*zy, whether it be the polite rhetoric of “mental illness” or the aforementioned unsophisticated slur, is the obfuscation of the fact that we exist in relationship, it is systemic gaslighting in effect if not necessarily intention. The goal of defining cr*zy is to re-reveal this relationship.

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland party attacked the young climate activist Greta Thunberg for being “crazy”. In a world that has ten years to avoid catastrophic climate change caused by the chaos of a market economy, yet resists all calls for a planned economy, she does seem to be at odds with the values needed to preserve and reproduce our present socio-economic order. When mainstream media outlets reported on Jameek Lowery’s death, they mentioned that he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, in all likeliness to undermine the credible claim that the police would kill him. If you have engaged in socialist base-building, or working class social organization that forms different social structures (such as unions, co-ops, tenant groups, mutual-aid groups) to advance material and cultural gains for its constituents, you have probably been called crazy. What does it mean to be crazy in a world that denies, in rhetoric and meaningful action, problems such as climate change, white supremacy, and poverty?

The Scottish Psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote that sanity and insanity were determined between two persons by “common consent” in his book, The Divided Self. In other words, if I see myself as a kind person, but you see me as cruel, you would be justified in considering me insane for considering myself kind. This insanity occurs irrespective of whether I actually am kind or cruel. This is not to say that there is not objective truth. You act kindly or you don’t. So what gives us reason to see people differently and ourselves differently.

We see our ruling class differently than they see themselves and vice versa which is a useful starting point for understanding where insanity is often conceived. Our political economic system is what gives power to our popular understanding of sanity. Sartre’s infamous example of a waiter who is supposedly acting “in bad faith” for being an excellent waiter despite not wanting to be a waiter elucidates how actions are incentivized under capitalism. Similarly, actions can be disincentivized (see Scott Warren of No More Deaths could receive 10 years in prison for giving water to immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico Border). 

In the eyes of the capitalist class, Warren is irresponsible. Trump calls the influx of immigrants an “invasion”. If we take Trump at his word (though we absolutely shouldn’t), Warren is helping an enemy force hostile to the U.S. This makes sense as interracial working class solidarity is a threat to a ruling class that uses interracial conflict to prevent outright class warfare which in the long-term is in the interest of the working class. However, some reactionary working class individuals do not see interracial solidarity through class struggle in their own material interest. In the eyes of Sartre, the waiter is not being true to himself. In the eyes of the waiter, he is coerced. To some degree, most of us internalize both of these contradictory messages. What does it mean to live in a world where many people do things that they hate because it gives them money which they need to survive and receive punishment for doing things they like.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggested that an existential “double-bind”(1) was what produced what we observe as schizophrenia (and possibly other psychoses) in people. A double-bind is when someone is given a command that they cannot do, because it is inherently contradictory. A simple example would be “be spontaneous”. In order for these commands to be taken seriously, coercion has to occur. There have to be consequences and rewards for sets of behaviors.

By simply adding a secondary economic incentive to work rather than working for its own sake (as well as working to have the fruits of our labor stolen from us), we produce a double-bind. Those with service industry experience know the emotional labor inherent to this work, forcing yourself to smile despite being unhappy. We can hold ideals about environmentalism while working in a shop that creates massive amounts of plastic waste. One way to avoid this double-bind and find sanity in this world is to deny that any of this is happening so that we can continue to find meaning in our work and make a living. The easier it is to live, the easier it is to deny that something is wrong.

How does this denial manifest itself in our health system and media? Marginalized groups are often at greatest risk for psychotic disorders because of this oppressive system. For instance, Black men in the UK are ten times more likely to develop a psychotic disorder than white men. If we take the chemical/medical argument at its word, we are letting down not only ourselves as people who want to critically understand the world around us, but marginalized groups who experience the brunt of suffering under capitalism. Studies that try to establish a link between genetics and psychotic disorders fail to do so despite ongoing attempts since the 1980’s (to say that the shift in focus of the psychiatric industry during the Reagan Era is coincidence is a cognitive dissonance in psychiatric jargon). 

When we call something mental illness, we should ask: what is a mind? It’s a metaphor that we use to help us understand human behavior, but can you touch a mind? Have you ever seen one? How can an abstraction be sick? In her work Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici documents how Descartes’s conception of the mind and body arose out of a bourgeois need to imbue the proletariat with an inner work-discipline(2) (as opposed to the externally-imposed model that Hobbes suggested). The mind is what was supposed to discipline the body and within the capitalist conception of the mind, it is necessary to medicalize anything that did not conform with that self-discipline. The bourgeois gaze acts like the iron bed of Procrustes, eviscerating anything that doesn’t have to do with how it thinks a human being ought to be, stretching people where it considers them inadequate, cutting off what is unacceptable. We internalize this gaze and do capital’s job for itself. This is an evolution of the self-conception of body and soul, which we can still see remnants of in phrases like “they’re dealing with their demons” or “they’re a good soul”. In light of the inadequacies of a moralistic analysis of human behavior and a mechanical analysis of human behavior, how do we move forward?

Rather than conceptualizing what we call mental illness as a disease of the mind, we should look at it as a strategy with goals in mind that does not achieve the results that its user seeks to attain. A person who screams in pain is not screaming because there is something wrong with their brain, they are screaming because that is what we do when we need help. Embedded in our language are words like lazy, that essentialize and misrepresent what is actually a lack of motivation. To be respectable within our political and economic climate we have to use its language, and if its language will always reduce our ability to represent and understand ourselves as we actually are, or as we see ourselves, then that language will impede our liberation. By being critical of the way that we look and talk about human behavior we can better understand the needs of our community and people that we organize with. If this gaze is necessary to maintain capitalism, it also represents a vulnerability within the capitalist class: we can understand existential problems and relate to others better than them because our definition of humanity is less limiting.

However, this perception is not limited to solely how we see ourselves or how the capitalist class sees us. In 1968, two groups of psychiatrists were shown a monologue of an actor. One group was told nothing and the other group was told “[the actor] was an interesting man, because he looked neurotic, but was actually quite psychotic.” The group that was told nothing ascribed no diagnoses to the man while 60% of the second group diagnosed him with mental illness. What this means for us as organizers is that we can be dismissed with a simple epithet. We can have our tone policed at the risk of being called crazy. This is a social mechanism that needs to be overcome or ignored, not supplicated to. An intensification of criteria for what it means to be mentally ill will not help because the people who we organize and talk to will never have the time or motivation to understand the arguably unintelligible criteria for what constitutes mental illness. If trained psychologists cannot identify it, why should any of us be able to? The specious nature of a term like “mental illness” should be even more worrying when we consider that the far-right Trump administration’s fixation on combating “mental illness.” This is not to say that people do not behave irrationally or delusionally, but that “craziness” does not describe irrationality or delusion per se.

A dialectical approach to the problem of insanity is necessary for us to have confidence in ourselves. We should look towards traditions like Gestalt that seeks to see the individual as a part of a conglomerate whole. We should look at organizations like The Icarus Project and Hearing Voices that seek to define human suffering on the terms of the people who experience it. The mind is an abstraction that we use to explain human behavior. Those who engage in meditation understand your thoughts and feelings are as much a product of the world around you as they come from whatever our “self” is. Unless you want to say that society, which is a conglomerate of individuals, is a pathogen to the individual, we ought to do away with the idea of “illness” if we want to remain honest. Otherwise, we risk validating the idea that we should simply incarcerate people who express dissent because they are diseased and they need to change, not the world around them. If someone is expressing emotional pain, they are already agitated, we need productive ways of channeling that agitation that creates results that remedy the initial cause. In Che Guevara’s interview with U.S. Socialist reporters, he said “you have to be crazy” to start a revolution and take power. Malcolm X noted that John Brown was considered crazy by Malcolm’s white contemporaries. By rejecting this craziness, by medicalizing it, are we suppressing potential revolutionaries in our own movement? Rather than dismissing it, we need to seek to understand it further on our own terms.

Our meta-double-bind is that we live in a society where we are given little choice over our environment, but held responsible for much of it. As base-builders trying to build a new world, we need to give people a different way to understand themselves, and in order to do that, it needs to be built in the language of the people who this world is for. What that means is that we cannot use the language of antagonists (the capitalist class) to describe ourselves and our allies. If we see ourselves as being murdered by capitalists, we need to delve deeper into what we need and dispel our own doubts that we have delusions of persecution.

We need to move beyond seeing ourselves as vulnerable and into recognizing that we have the power to take care of ourselves and each other. We don’t need to ask Bernie for a better system because it’s the working class itself which mustbuild this system in the first place. In fact, things are never given to the working class – they are conceded and then presented as a gift to us.

For base-building, if something is not built for us but is “given” to us, we understand that something else is being taken away. When we are “given” accommodations for what is called mental illness, what is being said is “you are the problem but we are nice enough to accommodate you.” This gentle scape-goating is done to put a curtain over what the oppressor is doing. Franz Fanon, a Martiniquan psychiatrist talks about a European sector and native Sector in colonial Algeria in his book The Wretched of the Earth. He says that the European sector:

is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed of leftovers. The colonist’s feet can never be glimpsed, except perhaps in the sea, but then you can never get close enough. They are protected by solid shoes in a sector where the streets are clean and smooth….” Meanwhile in the native sector “you are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonized sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light. The colonized’s sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate.” (3)

Would you prefer to live in the sector of the Europeans or the Algerian Sector? If you lived in the European sector, how would you justify your well-being? Fanon explains that

Consequently the Algerian Doctors who graduated from the Faculty of Algiers were forced to hear and learn that the Algerian is a born criminal. Moreover, I remember one of us in all seriousness expounding these theories he had learned and adding “It’s hard to swallow, but it’s been scientifically proven.” (4) These theories included that “the normal African is a lobotomized European,” “the Algerian is an habitual killer” and that the behavior of Algerians is the result of being at a different stage of evolution than the white settlers

The people suffering anguish in Algeria came to these doctors, trained in Colonial Algerian schools. These schools taught doctors that the economic oppression of whites over algerians was justified because algerians were inferior. Algerians and white people suffering the psychic trauma of colonialism who came to these doctors were given more justifications for an inhumane system, but which came first? The system or the justification? Of course it was the system. Colonialism was motivated by the exploitation of resources and justified itself by proclaiming the necessity of “civilizing” native populations. What is consistent within the defense of colonialism is the need for colonial nations to continue exploiting resources even if the justifications change over time. There can be no genuine reflection on better strategies for helping an indigenous population because that would entail calling colonialism itself into question.

What will come first for us as base-building revolutionaries is our fight back and organization. We might not always be able to explain why it is justified for us to take power, and in our world, we will feel crazy when we do build our own institutions. I canvass twice a week, and I still sometimes feel crazy for doing so, but how are you supposed to feel otherwise in a world that demands that we understand ourselves as insane when we reject capitalist values? Self-consciousness might be an inevitability, but it’s clear that if we do not own our own institutions, the ones provided for us as concessions will never provide us with a dignified way of understanding ourselves. 

We have to move forward, we have to understand that, yes, we are crazy, but only because we have nothing to express ourselves, no instruments of our own to help ourselves. We have books that teach us how to understand ourselves with no time to read. Online media is owned by capitalists and creates artificial conflict between leftists. Until we have our own tools and institutions, we are going to be crazy no matter what. We have to embrace our insanity and trust it to make a better world. Trying to look like a capitalist, trying to act like a capitalist, and trying to earn the respect of a capitalist in order to make gains for the working class will not give the working class confidence.

To combat social alienation, we can fight for community to combat sadness and spaces to process and validate trauma, we can fight to have more time for ourselves by reducing the workweek. The capitalist class would prefer we remain isolated rather than committed to change a world defined by misery. We are building something new, something without any legitimacy from an abusive state. We need to build systems of governance that come from us, not ask for appendages from a government built on the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Black people, and the exploitation of other racialized peoples. We cannot be afraid of being called crazy- we should yell back that you’re crazy if you’re not crazy!

  1. Bateson, Gregory. Towards an Ecology of Mind
  2. Federici, Sylvia. Caliban and The Witch, p. 149-151
  3. Fanon, Franz. Wretched of the Earth, p. 38
  4. Fanon, Franz. Wretched of the Earth, p. 297

The post The Necessary Insanity of Dual Power appeared first on Regeneration Magazine.

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The Philadelphia Socialists have cohered a new tendency on the U.S. left, known as the Marxist Center (MC). This coalition of local groups focuses on “base building.” This essay will take a critical look at this strategy.

Base building is very broadly defined by the Marxist Center. It includes organizations of struggle such as tenants’ unions or workers’ unions, but also self-help organizations such as food banks and car repair workshops, or even urban gardening and yoga classes. 

The MC’s emphasis on socialists engaging in struggles for reforms is welcome. They correctly oppose the Democratic Party and attempts to change it from within, since socialism will only come through revolution. Most revolutionary socialist groups agree with the MC on these points—and in fact are already engaged in building organizations of struggle. 

The problem lies in the specifics of the MC’s approach to base building. This essay will look at three aspects: 1) Self-help; 2) Lack of broad political focus 3) Hierarchical approach

Is Self-Help Revolutionary?

Given the depravity of capitalism, various forms of self-help arise and will continue to arise. Their effect is contradictory. They ameliorate the problems of capitalism without teaching people that the way to bring real improvements to their living standards is through class struggle (taking back the wealth workers have created). Self-help teaches people that even under capitalism, human needs can be met by collective cooperation. This can encourage collective action—but also create illusions in the reformability of capitalism.

Marxists stress the centrality of class struggle for two reasons. First, it is the most effective way to improve conditions under capitalism. Because it takes resources from the capitalists and gives them to the workers, class struggle improves conditions for the working class as a whole rather than re-distributing poverty within the class. Class struggle also sets the precedent for further re-distribution of capitalist wealth.

Most importantly, it strengthens the confidence and organization of workers, who begin to trust their own strength to resist and ultimately overthrow capitalism. Socialist revolution is the culmination of class struggle: Instead of just winning back some of the wealth that capitalists have stolen, workers take it all back and use it to meet the needs of humanity. Self-help is most effective where it is used specifically to facilitate struggle, such as building strike funds. This is equally true of Marxist education whose aim is to make class struggle more effective. 

Class Struggle Limited to Economics

Julian Guerrero describes Base Building as follows:

Base building is about a sustained political-organizational engagement with a specific community/demographic/sector of the working class over certain issues at the site of the struggle or discontent. Capitalism reproduces itself and its social relations of workers/employer, exploited/exploiter at most sites of social life.

But effective class struggle cannot just be about economic questions. Workers and tenants have interests outside the workplace or home: health care, the environment, war, democratic rights, etc. 

Just as important as these issues are the issues of oppression. No working-class movement can be successful at defending the interests of the class as a whole if it leaves behind the most oppressed. The unity necessary to challenge and finally overthrow capitalism must be built by workers confronting all forms of oppression.

Revolutionaries try to convince unions and other working class organizations to actively oppose racism, sexism, etc. These are not issues to be put off until after the revolution, or even until after we first build up struggles around immediate economic issues. 

In What Is To Be Done, Lenin wrote that a revolutionary politician must be a “tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears.” The development of working-class consciousness requires that workers respond to every instance of oppression, no matter what class it affects. This applies to socialist organizations today.

The need to educate and organize workers around oppression is a good example of the importance of the battle of ideas. Winning workers to particular political viewpoints will help to facilitate the class struggle. Not to do so is to leave important ideological roadblocks in place.

This applies to issues of internationalism as well. Marx noted that the key weakness of the English working class was its prejudice against Irish workers. His companion Friedrich Engels wrote, “A people which oppresses another cannot emancipate itself.”

All action is organized on the basis of ideas. Winning workers to Marxist ideas will help facilitate victory in their struggles. How Marxists participate in struggle is as important as that we participate. If all we do is focus on immediate economic questions, we are not promoting the historic interests of the working class. 

Lenin laid out this approach clearly in What Is To Be Done?, a polemic against the “Economists.” The Economists only supported economic struggles by workers, believing these would develop into political struggles without a conscious intervention by revolutionaries. 

The MC’s base building is influenced by some of the same ideas that motivated Economism. While the MC acknowledges the importance of issues of oppression and other political issues and sometimes raises these in its publications, its organizing strategy is at odds with this acknowledgement. It focuses so squarely on immediate economic issues that other political issues are downplayed. “People join unions and coops out of enlightened self-interest,” Sophia Burns writes. This is similar to the approach outlined by Julian Guerrero:

interest in discussing socialist politics divorced from struggle can quickly dissipate as the value of these politics in action is missed because the politics remains abstract.

This overemphasis of economic questions can mis-train socialists and make it harder to take up political issues later.

To be fair, Philly Socialists have been involved in at least some struggles around broader political issues. Besides winning “just cause eviction” through their work in the Philly Tenants Union, they initiated a coalition against ICE. However, even the Philly Socialists have not established a major orientation around broader political issues. Regneration magazine reflects the MC’s weakness on this, with few articles about big political questions.

This underemphasis of general political issues is a weakness. Broad numbers of youth are fighting climate change. The Women’s Marches drew out millions. In 2006, immigrants shut down large sections of industry in the U.S. In 2003, millions turned out against the Iraq War. Occupy drew thousands in over 100 U.S. cities.

Thousands and thousands of working-class people have been and are involved in these movements. Millions of people are now open to socialist ideas. Over 60,000 people have signed up as members of the DSA. The pool of those who could join revolutionary Marxist organizations in the U.S. is larger now than at any time in over 45 years.

This is strategically important. Different issues radicalize people. Workers are not just concerned about wages, nor are tenants only interested in rent. This is true of the most oppressed as well as the rest of the working class. Think of the large demonstrations around Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights, etc.

Important reforms have been won by mass movements most that did not follow the MC’s base building method—from civil rights, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage, to ending the Vietnam War. In the course of these struggles, thousands became revolutionaries.

Some supporters of the MC’s base building strategy are very dismissive of movements like this. Sophia Burns, for example, claims that “March for our Lives and the Women’s March ultimately only benefit the (Democratic) party itself.” She refers to leftists who engage with these movements as “ambulance chasers.”

Supporters of the MC’s base building tend to characterize the rest of the Left inaccurately. Most Leftist organizations are in fact involved in both propaganda and agitation. They don’t just go to rallies or support candidates. In many cases, they are involved in grass-roots organizing around issues of exploitation and oppression. 

Burns and other supporters of Base Building go so far in focussing on specific campaigns that they nearly totally reject the role of revolutionary propaganda. The MC’s base building approach is too narrowly focused on economics and not enough on broad politics.

A Hierarchical Model

Base building can be based on a hierarchical model. The “Party” (in this case the Philly Socialists or other MC groups) sets up and leads particular “mass” movements, and it continues to dominate them politically even when the other organizations become “independent.” This is the traditional model of front groups, rather than the united front approach followed by the Bolsheviks, and the early Comintern .

With a united front approach, revolutionaries work with reformists on issues that both agree on. In the words of Leon Trotsky, they “march separately but strike together.” Revolutionaries try to win workers to their politics in the course of the struggle, by displaying in practice that Marxist strategies and tactics are effective, but also using revolutionary propaganda. In a real united front, revolutionaries never expect to have sole leadership all the time. 

In non-revolutionary periods, the vast majority of workers are not revolutionary. This is true even of workers currently engaged in struggle. Therefore, a mass working-class base cannot be a revolutionary base—at least outside of a revolutionary situation. Due to the ups and downs of struggle, united fronts are temporary. Unity in action between revolutionaries and reformists cannot last over long periods, given that reformists inevitably betray struggles 

Workers are radicalizing. Millions are becoming socialists. The point is to win as many socialists as possible to Marxism and to organize them. We do not yet have a revolutionary socialist vanguard party, i.e. a relevant section of the class convinced of a Marxist strategy and committed to leading millions. Our aim should be to contribute to the formation of the cadre of a future party. We can best do that by forming socialist organizations that can intervene in struggle as well as engage in propaganda.

What does this mean in terms of strategy? Instead of setting up front groups dominated by a particular political tendency, we need to intervene in actually existing struggles. These interventions can take the form of coalitions, rank-and-file caucuses in unions, women’s groups, etc. 

Our goal should not be to set up and dominate front groups that are only engaged in economic struggle. Instead we should build broad fronts of struggle that include people with different political views. We struggle along side them and only win political leadership to the extent that we win people politically, not through bureaucratic dominance.

Conclusion

The MC’s opposition to the Democratic Party is welcome, as is its insistence on the need for revolution. Its emphasis that Marxists need to be involved in organizing and not just propaganda is also important However, its adherence to a particular form of base building—almost exclusively oriented on immediate economic questions, to the near exclusion of propaganda and engagement with broader political issues—is a weakness. The base building strategy is no replacement for a strategy of organizing the most politically conscious workers in a socialist vanguard party which, in a revolutionary situation, can lead the working-class struggle for power.

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