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For the Unity of Marxists, or the Unity of the Dispossessed?

Sophia Burns responds to DSA Convention: Fog and Storm and For the Unity of Marxists: Response to Fog and Storm. You can support her work here.

Up close, DSA Bread and Roses (the “centralizers”), DSA Build (the “decentralizers”), and Marxist Center look pretty different. What do a unified social-democratic faction, a loose opposition alliance, and an aspiring cadre party have in common?

Step a few feet back, though, and their distinctions lose significance, like the different-colored dots of an Impressionist painting blending into a coherent whole.

Class is everything. A libertarian professor of economics and a radical professor of women’s studies may hate each other, but they both make five times as much as the janitor who cleans up after them – and more importantly, they spend their lives in the same educated, affluent milieu.

Despite its egalitarian pretensions, the US political system is run by the middle class for the benefit of the ruling class. There is effectively no political culture outside of those classes (a very few isolated and localized examples notwithstanding). As Bernie Sanders said, poor people don’t vote, let alone protest or form political organizations. Of course, the dispossessed do resist their dispossession, all the time – but they do so outside of the political system (and usually, in limited and decentralized ways, everyday oppression and everyday resistance tending towards a socially-stable equilibrium).

US socialism is a fringe of the official political culture. Its class makeup reflects that. It is college-educated, affluent (or at least with affluent parents), and attuned to the concerns of middle-class professionals and students in general. Whether they’re door-knocking for Bernie, waving anti-imperialist placards for the cameras, or running brake-light clinics, it’s the same people from the same backgrounds mobilizing each other.

In other words – should they arrange themselves into a centralized electoral front, a federation of autonomous activist hubs, or an ideologically united party? Shouldn’t they first prove why they, as a subculture, matter in the first place? Normcore social democrats and social-reproduction-theory feminists both claim to represent the authentic working class. If that’s true, why do both sides seem to be made up mostly of journalists and humanities postdocs?

Where are the call-center workers? Where are the home health aides? Where are the McDonald’s fry cooks? Everyone talks about them, but when was the last time you saw one running an activist meeting? How many of the working poor have you ever seen at a leftist event – other than the venue staff?

Traditionally, Marxism draws a line 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 (the truly dispossessed, the mass of workers and unemployed whose “unskilled” status makes their labor more-or-less interchangeable from capital’s point of view). The latter, not the former, carries the revolutionary seed, both because it owns no means of production (not even professional licenses and training!) and thus has no stake in preserving class distinctions and because the logistically-socialized, large-scale economy it operates makes it possible to raise everyone’s standard of living. Now, intellectuals can contribute to the great work of organizing the proletariat for power, but only by immersing themselves in its life. They must make their struggles their own.

These days, US leftism has lost that awareness. To hear any faction of DSA (or Marxist Center) talk, K12 teachers, college professors, and even professional athletes are proletarians. Instead of dedicating their lives to serving the masses, intellectual-class radicals would rather band together with each other and creatively redefine the proletariat to include themselves. But while they may fool each other, they can’t fool the larger social process of class struggle. In terms of their historical and economic context, all their factions are variations on the same theme as MoveOn, the National Organization for Women, and for that matter, Young Americans for Liberty. They’re all ideologically-defined middle-class protest movements.

Now, as an individual, there’s nothing morally wrong with being an intellectual. That’s my class background, and if you’re reading this there’s a better-than-even chance it’s yours too. Intellectuals can contribute plenty – they have administrative, research, fundraising, and bookkeeping skills (from higher education), extra time and energy (from middle-class jobs), and better physical health in general (from better healthcare access). If intellectuals go to the proletariat, immerse themselves in it, dedicate their lives to it, and help organize struggle committees in low-wage workplaces and slumlord-owned buildings, they can be a truly valuable part of the class struggle. And historically, red unions and communist parties have always attracted their fair share of radical-minded intellectuals. Many of them have brought social-scientific and historical knowledge that’s helped break the stability of the oppression-resistance equilibrium, opening up new space for class struggle.

However, the US’s actually-existing socialist groups are there for their own sake, not as supporting organizers for struggle committees. Their understanding of “mass” as “anyone who shows up to protests” (and “vanguard” as “anyone who agrees with this list of ideas”) help keep their concerns and membership middle-class and insular. So does their commitment to the US’s political process – and even the ones with the most revolutionary posturing are still committed to participating in that process, albeit via protest rather than lobbying. It comes out the same either way.

Revolution does not mean “sweeping social change” in some abstract sense. Sure, it involves deep and systemic changes, but those are an after-effect, not the thing itself. Revolution means overthrowing the government. It’s literal. Similarly, socialism doesn’t mean “Liz Warren’s policies but more so” (and flawed as my four-tendencies typology was, I stand by “government socialists” for those whose “socialism” means taking progressive Democrat ideas and extending them just a few degrees further than John Oliver). Socialism means the proletariat (not the liberal-democratic state) owns the economy and runs it according to a central plan, not an ad-hoc collection of welfare programs and “socially-conscious” nonprofits. Creating that will take a full-blown revolution, not a gradual build-up of legislative reforms, because the liberal-democratic political process will never allow socialism. It never has and it never will because it was designed from the get-go to make that impossible. It does that not by banning dissent but by giving it a venue to express itself and lobby the government (or protest it!), thereby taming it into a perpetual loyal opposition.

That’s why any socialism that’s bound to the political process is self-defeating in the end. However, class is thicker than ideology, so any movement based in the middle classes will always bend back towards the political process.

Inasmuch as it’s more than a buzzword, base-building contains a kernel of the right idea. Socialist intellectuals can engage with proletarian tenants and workers in a mutually-transformative process, accumulating experience one struggle committee at a time. That process can eventually rekindle the mass socialism that the US hasn’t had for generations. However, the thrust of that organizing must always be away from and against collaboration with the government. That means not lobbying it, participating in its elections, taking its money, or – and this is what almost no activist figures out – protesting it. Part of the normal function of a liberal-democratic government is to be periodically protested; why else do you think it’s in the Bill of Rights? Liberal states are stable in part because they work like lightning rods, attracting dissident anger and channeling it harmlessly into the ground.

Instead, the way forward is to steadily and patiently gain experience with class struggle, gradually cultivate a base among the dispossessed, and eventually begin to develop the necessary forces to establish revolutionary sovereignty: not joining the official political realm but creating an entirely new one, an insurrectionary proletarian state (“dual power” the way Lenin meant it).

I spent years in the middle-class, activist Left, including as an early Marxist Center organizer. I don’t write this to set myself up as embodying some kind of virtue that others lack; everything I’m critiquing here, I was doing myself two years ago. When I call it a dead end, I’m not talking from ignorance.

But I left. I changed the type of organizing I’m involved in and, more importantly, the constituency towards which I orient. I invite you to do the same. Would you rather spend the next ten years rehashing the same debates as the last ten with the same people from the same class background (voting or consensus? Smashing windows or holding banners? Democrat or Green?), while history continues to leave you behind?

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A Road Towards Workers’ Solidarity in the Indian Subcontinent

Nafis Hasan writes on the current strikes in India and Bangladesh and the history and possibilities for worker solidarity between Indian and Bangladesh workers and beyond. 

The beginning of 2019 has seen the workers rise up in the Indian subcontinent. While the 200 million strong general strike in India has gotten much attention, especially in the US Left media, little importance has been given to the strike by ready-made garments (RMG) workers currently taking place in Bangladesh. The RMG workers, protesting against wage discrimination and pay inequality, have taken to the streets beginning Jan 11. This provides a great opportunity for solidarity across borders in the Indian subcontinent, especially at a time when ethno-nationalist authoritarian neoliberal regimes, led by Narendra Modi in India and Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh have solidified their hold on power. However, the workers should be aware of the previous history of revisionism and selling out of the communist political parties in both India and Bangladesh, especially if this strike is meant to continue. Given that Communist Party of India (Marxist, CPI-M) has led the most recent general strike and farmers have decided to join the strike, and that Communist Party of Bangladesh (CPB) in their 2018 elections manifesto revitalized a progressive program, there seems to be a glimmer of hope in that these political parties will actually stand with the proletariat of the two countries and across borders.

RMG Workers in Bangladesh vs The Ruling Class

The wage discrimination in the RMG sector is not a novel phenomenon — in 2016, RMG workers had also taken to the streets to protest against the lack of increase in their wages, and as a consequence, hundreds were fired from their jobs. Any act of resistance against the owners of the garment factories who form the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers & Exporters Association (BGMEA), has been met with police violence, often aided by the state apparatus, and indiscriminate attacks on workers, especially union organizers. The same is true of the current protests — striking workers have been met with batons and water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas. Similar to 2016, hundreds of workers have been fired and union leaders have been arrested for agitating the workers. Similar to 2016, hundreds of workers have been fired and union leaders have been arrested for agitating the workers.

It is easily understandable why the state would use such repressive tactics against RMG workers: the BGMEA is clearly part of the ruling class (ex-BGMEA presidents Anisul Haque and Tipu Munshi became Mayor of Dhaka North City Corporation and the Commerce Minister, respectively), and the RMG sector is the most profitable industry of Bangladesh (valued at $30 billion dollars) and has largely been responsible for the continued economic growth in the country despite mass corruption. The RMG industry, considering that at least half of its workforce comprises of women, also serves as the beacon of women empowerment in the region, a claim that has gained the Bangladesh government accolades among the neoliberal elites of the Western world. The BGMEA has actually threatened to lock out the garment workers if the strikes continue because they are aware of the impunity and state protection they enjoy. In order to pacify the BGMEA, and also to keep the RMG workers subservient and maintain the status quo as the second largest exporter of RMG in the world, the Bangladesh government employs special police force in the Export Processing Zones (EPZs) where foreign companies enjoy tax benefits and low labor costs, and the Bangladesh army maintains a special division on the RMG sector.

Bangladesh revolutionary Siraj Sikder

Communist Solidarity Across Borders: A Brief Overview

Communism in the Indian subcontinent, especially in India & Bangladesh, followed along either in orthodox Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, or Maoist lines depending on the era. Of course, ideological differences have led to many splits in the existing political parties, but the two main lines of thoughts that currently exist in the power structures are orthodox Marxist (CPI-M, CPB) and Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML, also gave rise to the Naxalite movement in 1967). In Bangladesh, while there are several small parties tied to the communist cause, they have recently grouped together under the banner of Left Democratic Alliance and has revitalized a socialist program that was initially adopted by the first Bangladesh government in 1972.

Cross-border communist alliance and solidarity were at their height during the Naxalite movement in the late 60s and early 70s. The Naxalites, tired of the electoral games of CPI-M and the stagnation of CPI-ML, decided to implement Mao-Tse Tung thought against the ruling class and class collaborators. Led by Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, etc, in West Bengal, and Siraj Sikder in East Bengal, also known as East Pakistan pre-1971, and the East Bengal Proletarian Party/Purbo Banglar Sarbahara Party, the Naxals politically agitated the peasants and indigenous tribes that were facing land grabs by the Bengali ethnic majority. However, following a brutal suppression of the Naxal movement by both Indian and Bangladeshi military and paramilitary forces, the Naxalites who survived resigned from the cause and joined the CPI-ML to fight electorally in the Indian Congress. The death of Siraj Sikder meant the end of revolutionary communism in Bangladesh. It should be noted that the CPI-M was complicit in the murder and torture of the Naxals as it threatened their status quo, especially in West Bengal (for a more detailed analysis, look here).

Over the decades, while Maoist guerrilla groups have fought against the neo-imperialism of the Indian government as it sold off indigenous land to multinational companies for bauxite mining, especially in Central India (see Walking with Comrades, Arundhati Roy), the CPI-M and CPI-ML have done little to fight against the ruling Congress. In Bangladesh, the mainstream communist parties joined in the protests against the military dictatorships in the 80s by forming alliances with neoliberal political parties that have been squabbling over petty differences over the last two decades. In the most recent election, the CPB and other small leftist groups formed the Left Democratic Alliance (LDA) which ended up joining in a bigger alliance with the increasingly authoritarian Bangladesh Awami League, that has returned for a third time to power.

Why does this history matter? It is because it goes on to show that while communist political parties do exist in India & Bangladesh, the political ideology exists only in name and has actually worked actively against the interest of the working class in both countries by putting their political and personal ambitions first. Therefore, any international solidarity should keep in mind the historical roles these communist parties have played and should be directing their support to the workers, and not the parties.

Bangladesh garment workers on strike clash with police

The Significance of the Current Protests

The strikes across the borders in India and Bangladesh portray the rising dissonance of the workers with the ruling class. The ruling class in both India and Bangladesh have profited enormously from the global capitalist economy, and the effects are acutely felt by the working class. Given that the biggest cash cow for the ruling class in Bangladesh, the RMG industry is now in revolt over wage discrimination and policy failures since the Rana Plaza tragedy to protect the workers, and that in India, the 200 million strong strike comes right after the Kisan Long March in 2018 led by farmers, the proletariat in the subcontinent is on the rise again. Elsewhere, the tea workers in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, who have been historically exploited, are organizing in syndicates led by the Bangladesh Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation, and can play an important role in building solidarity with the Muslim population in the Assam region of India, who face the risk of displacement as they have been left out of the draft citizenship list.

Western leftists should take note of the political tides in the Indian subcontinent in this global economy. Any socialist revolution should constitute internationalist solidarity with workers around the world. Even more, given the role that the workers from the Indian subcontinent play in the global economy, in particular, the RMG workers in Bangladesh, it is important for the labor movement to stand in solidarity with their struggles.