There is a particular situation that working-class organizers should be looking out for right now. This is the scenario where your community has an urgent need for leadership in our popular struggles, whether on tenant organizing, combating ICE, or any other issue, and your local DSA simply isn’t going to fill such a role. As time goes on, it’s becoming more common to see this visible contradiction between DSA’s superficial proclamations about being a vehicle for “socialism”; and the reality of just how useless this org is within the class war. This will become even more clear when the workers next jump into action; which absolutely will happen given how the cycle of class struggle works, but we don’t yet know if the workers will have the infrastructure they’ll need to win.
The only constructive response to this problem is to step in, and build an independent source of popular organizing. This is intuitive for somebody who’s already internalized the Bolshevik mentality on an ideological level. But to improve our skills in Bolshevism, and bring more of the workers to this mode of struggle, we’ll need to recognize how the process of radicalization works; namely through direct experience with the realities of class warfare. We’ll have to anticipate which situations can bring the members of these movements, including those who are currently in reformist orgs like DSA, towards a genuinely revolutionary position.
I have observed organizers who’ve at one point identified with reformist tendencies; yet when reformist politics have failed them, this has only pushed them more into our type of politics. This is the experience of many if not most American communists today, the bulk of whom were once Bernie Sanders supporters. When you see the more liberal people in your organizing sphere start heading in this direction, keep in mind that you can’t raise class consciousness simply by preaching to somebody, but you should combat certain confusions that will inevitably be there. One of these lingering kinds of liberalism is what Lenin described as solely recognizing the class struggle, which is also known as the “economist” error:
Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the Kautskyites (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Why did Lenin warn against only thinking about the class struggle when, as Marx clarified, all of history has itself been class struggle? Because the dogmatists who Lenin is talking about here interpret this fact in a lazily reductive way. To act like all you need to focus on is the workplace struggles, or another specific part of the movement, is to ignore what Marxism actually means. There are many good community organizers who specialize in their own areas of struggle, but if you identify as a Marxist, you need to make these projects part of a much larger power-building task.
Marxism is about revealing a society’s historical processes, and drawing out its contradictions; which in our time means the central task is to defeat the capitalist state, and establish a system run by the producers. To think any smaller than this is to concede the class war, while justifying this by saying it’s necessary in order to win one battle.
The reformists who seek to pull newly radicalizing individuals back into their orbit will assert that their politics is actually helping bring us closer to revolution, because fighting for reforms is always something that revolutionaries do at a certain stage. Yet these actors don’t intend to use their reforms to bring the war to completion; anyone whose end goal is to gain office within the bourgeois state does not want real working-class victory.
The problem we’re facing right now is that the DSA’s tendency has many times more pull than ours does; which is partly because of DSA’s establishment backing, but you must always look for where you may be falling short. American communists could be doing better at reaching the masses, with our main task being to go into the workers struggle and show we can do what the reformists can’t. Part of this means fighting for reforms in a way that actually gives the workers greater independence. As MarxistLeninists.org summarizes, the Leninist position opposes both reformist gatekeeping and dogmatic rejection of all reforms; which puts us in the maximum position of strength, if we can practice what we believe:
Unlike revisionists and left-wing phrase makers rejecting to fight for reforms at every situation, Lenin says; " everywhere the Marxist workers are ahead of the liquidators, in the direct, immediate, “day-to-day” activity of agitation, organisation, fighting for reforms and using them. " (Page 18)
Marxist Leninists " has always included the struggle for reforms as part of its activities." (Page 126) But unlike reformists, ML " subordinates the struggle for reforms, as the part to the whole, to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for socialism. " (Page 126) In the same way, Lenin states that the "Marxists are working tirelessly, not missing a single “possibility” of winning and using reforms, and not condemning, but supporting, painstakingly developing every step beyond reformism in propaganda, agitation, mass economic struggle, etc. " (Page 18)
"" Those who refrain from making efforts in this way... make the liberals dominate, hand over the political education of the workers to their hands and leave the sovereignty in the political struggle to the leaders of the bourgeois democracy in the final analysis. ”(Page104)
Within the vast majority of towns or even cities, the DSA chapters fall into this category of do-nothing left sects, because they won’t gain any power; the socdem politics of the Zohran era can only win in the big metropolitan areas. As long as no alternative emerges, the face of “socialism” will be this liberal recapture vehicle that courts woke ultra-leftist circles. That we’re so against this opportunism does not mean we should totally dismiss the people in these circles; the nation’s sentiments are headed in a more moralistic direction, and we should get ahead of the reformists in appealing to this moral trend. Branding and brand-building must be the secondary part of how we try to capture the masses, though; our foremost priority is to build on the ground, and give our communities the mass fighting power they need.
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