It’s clear that the European governments desire an expanded conflict with Russia, as shown by their recent efforts to prime the region’s people for this. In the working-class movement’s response to the next big war, one area we need to pay attention to is the conflicts within the DSA’s camp, which will be brought to unprecedented severity by whatever geopolitical rupture comes next. Because it’s exactly this kind of development, where our ruling class has multiplied its own troubles and can no longer rule in the old way, that will force the reformist organizations into a direct split; a split that sees those who side with opportunist pro-imperialism remain above-ground, while their principled counterparts are forced into direct confrontation with the state.
This confrontation is inevitable because for anybody who opposes these next war escalations, the penalties from the imperial state will be greater than anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. This is what will happen if and when we get a proper third world war: our rulers will throw out the constitutional rules, and imprison or kill a large number of people. In this scenario, the members of DSA factions like Marxist Unity Group will have to either acquiesce or break from the DSA, and enter an alliance with those who are building a communist party outside the Democrat umbrella.
It will be the logical conclusion of the conflict within DSA that happened after the “progressive” Democrats assisted in Biden’s 2022 rail strike breakup, and MUG responded by clarifying its intention to build an actual workers party:
We recognize that forging an independent path will take time and effort on all our parts, and we are prepared to begin laying the groundwork ourselves. The Marxist Unity Group is determined to build an independent socialist movement. In the leadup to DSA’s 2023 convention, we are working with our allies to build a pro-party coalition in DSA. We held a panel on April 8th to discuss this project and another on May 20th. We hope that these will be the first of many public events. We have already submitted convention resolutions (see here) to begin transforming DSA into a principled, self-reliant, democratic membership party.
When the circumstances become far more urgent, and people with left-wing positions start being frequently detained or assassinated, the inherent flaws in this strategy will become much easier to see. But we shouldn’t wait until after the most dire stage to start bringing movement members out of the reformist trap. We also shouldn’t join or carry water for the DSA, as if assisting the enemy would somehow help our cause. The real path forward is to relearn the mass organizational skills which communists lost during our movement’s retreats in the 20th century; the skills that were explained by the great trade unionist William Z. Foster.
What we have to do, starting now, is expose how the reformist “socialists” are already actively allying with the right; this became undeniable when Sanders began working with Steve Bannon against AI. We must put forth an alternative for the activists and unorganized workers who won’t accept this kind of betrayal, as Foster explained during a parallel situation in 1928:
The characteristic of the present situation is that the right wing and the degenerated progressives (Hillman, Fitzpatrick, etc.) flounder further to the right, bankrupt in the face of the offensive of the employers, while growing numbers of confused but sincere progressives tend to break with them and to develop a program of resistance. This tendency is exemplified typically by the growing opposition to Fitzpatrick in the Chicago Federation of Labor. The general tendency will increase as the crisis, intensified by the growing industrial depression, sharpens in the trade unions and among the unorganized workers.
In the deep crisis following the shopmen’s defeat the right wing was able to demoralize and capture the progressives with its glittering “higher strategy of labor” which it put forth with blowing trumpets as a saving panacea. But in the present still greater crisis, they have nothing substantial to offer. Mere whipping up of their discredited intensified class collaboration program and clinging terroristically to union control will not prevent the breaking away of the more sincere and militant progressives. The trend of these is towards the left. To give them a program and to draw them and their extensive following under the general leadership of our Party and its auxiliaries is a basic task in the present situation, a major consideration for halting the capitalist offensive, for preventing the disintegration and devitalization of the trade unions, for organizing the unorganized, and for giving our Party a real mass following.
The MUG people, and the other DSA members who identify as Marxists yet persist in staying with DSA, use the defense that they’re opposed to the reactionary actions of the socdem movement’s leadership. To which we can say: if you’re against the leaders, why are you in their movement? When a tendency is clearly opposed to what you fundamentally stand for, the logical move is to leave. The disillusioned former Trump supporters understand this, as evidenced by how many of them have stopped calling themselves “MAGA”; the recently resigned former PSL members understand this; the communists who formed my party (the ACP) understood this when they left CPUSA, and refused to keep appealing towards a leadership which will never respect their democratic will. We’re three years into an extermination that the DSA’s tendency has still failed to oppose in a sufficient way, and I suspect many of the anti-Zionists in DSA would share this assessment. So why stay inside of it?
A big reason why many of them haven’t left DSA, which we need to be fair about, is that they don’t see anything else going on where they are. This is partly our fault; we should have started building local collectives before we did anything else, because a party’s foundations are the strongest when you already have dual power within your communities. But many of us within the party had needed to find our way out of radlib orgs which didn’t treat this task seriously, so of course we would be behind. To avoid wasting time, like many of us did during that era, we’ll need to apply Foster’s practices to our present conditions.
We’ll need to bring the unorganized working masses, and the people in these lame orgs who desire a workers party, into projects that build the independent working-class strength they’re looking for. And we absolutely can do this in the age of transient workers, even though Foster was writing for an industrial era when unions were much bigger. It’s a matter of going into the traditional unionized spaces that still exist, while organizing a broader population that’s increasingly de-classed.
It’s these lumpenized, purpose-lacking individuals who our government is tailoring its army propaganda to, and it’s their continued atomization that the ruling class relies on to advance its goals without popular backlash. To reach them, we’ll need to do more than point to the hypocrisy of the “socialists” who are collaborating with the right-wing; for those who are detached from political organizing or discourse, revolutionary appeal comes from showing how to coalesce against the establishment. Because these declassed masses already want to do this; the bulk of the people have now gotten behind anti-imperialist and anti-regime views, they just don’t have any institutions for fighting back. We must use every bit of time we still have to build this institutional power, providing an alternative to the false working-class leadership in the way that Foster’s tendency did.
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