Whose Democracy?: An Introduction to Oligarchy in the United States

The United States is a mockery of what democracy is supposed to be. J.R. Murray unpacks the reality of a corrupt system that is designed to empower the rich against the working class majority.

In the eyes of global elites and much of the populations they govern, liberal democracy’s defeat of Fascism and Communism in the 20th century has left it the only viable political system. Many now assume Liberal Democracy sits among humanity’s crowning achievements – with no greater advocate than the United States. But for all the mythology around the concept, 21st century liberal democracy suffers from a crisis of legitimacy. Right-wing populism and its violence exercise power in a growing number of countries with the intention of preventing select populations from taking part in democratic processes. Simultaneously, Marxism, considered defeated and marginal, is seeing a modest resurgence.

Meanwhile, the United States, the wealthiest and most powerful liberal democracy in the world, experiences outrageously high inequality, stagnant wages, an abysmal healthcare system, a housing crisis, routine acts of police violence, and impending ecological catastrophe. The majority of people in the country are suffering with no end in sight. Shouldn’t a democratic political system address those problems? If so, then why are they only getting worse?

The fact is that the capitalist class erects such enormous obstacles to actual democracy that most people can’t or won’t participate in the token democratic processes that do exist. Liberal democracy is, as Lenin once said, “democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich.”

This is an overview of anti-democratic characteristics and institutions of the U.S. political system, the standard-bearer of democracy for the minority.

Voter Suppression

The United States, historically and presently, systematically suppresses votes. Black Americans, enslaved until the mid-19th century and then openly terrorized, segregated, and disenfranchised through the 20th and 21st centuries, did not get the vote until the 1960s due to various legal, illegal, and quasi-legal methods. Additionally, (white) women could not vote until 1920, and up to the mid-19th century, voting was commonly restricted based on property. Today, measures which produce voter disenfranchisement are still in place.

To start, election day is not a national holiday, but a regular workday. Working on election day makes it incredibly difficult to find time to vote. Higher income voters may be able to take time off, but the poorest workers cannot, and with polling places closing between 6pm and 8pm, it is impossible for some to get to the voting booth. Liberals accept early voting as an acceptable solution to the problem but some states enacted laws restricting early voting. For many, the chance to vote remains subject to the whim of employers.

But voter suppression goes deeper than simply making it hard for workers to find the time to vote on election day. Conservatives, in a cynical plot to suppress the votes of the poor, spread the myth of widespread voter fraud and use it to enact repressive voter identification laws in many states. Such laws restrict the types of identification polling stations will accept– work, college, and public assistance IDs are among the types not accepted. Those restrictions disproportionately affect minorities, immigrants, and the poor—populations which may not have the money, transportation, or time required to obtain appropriate identification.

Of course, voter ID laws are an obstacle only for registered voters. In some states, like North Carolina or Florida, state officials purge the roles of registered voters under spurious accusations of voter fraud. Up to 51 million eligible voters in the United States aren’t registered to vote, and right-wing lawmakers are attempting to make it more difficult to register. The simple solution is to automatically register everyone to vote, but the political capital to do so is nonexistent.

Only the working class faces myriad obstacles to cast their ballots, and the poorer the worker, the more obstacles appear before them.

Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is essentially the redrawing of voting districts by a political party to gain an electoral advantage. It is a concept easier to understand with a visual (from the Washington Post):

The party in charge of drawing congressional districts can divide the map any way they want, which often means cutting up known progressive population areas into little pieces and then grouping those pieces with larger conservative districts. This essentially dissolves the left-leaning vote. Notice how absurd the shapes of these districts get:

In the 2014 midterm election gerrymandering allowed Republicans to retain control of the House, despite being outvoted. Mother Jones provides a good visualization of the 2014 election here:

In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats took the House, but by a smaller margin than expected due to gerrymandering. It’s clear that the process is both deeply bureaucratic and anti-democratic, but as long as those who benefit are in charge, it will continue.

The Electoral College

Presidential elections are just as bureaucratic and convoluted as legislative ones. On election day it appears that you are casting your vote for president, but really it’s more complicated. While drawing up the Constitution, there was a major disagreement centered on whether to have Congress or all land-owning men elect the president. They compromised by creating the Electoral College.

The Electoral College works like this: before the presidential election, a slate of “electors” are nominated by each political party. When you cast your ballot you are not voting for a candidate, but a political party’s electors. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors, with 270 forming a majority. All but two states have a “winner takes all” system. For example, the state of New Jersey has 14 elector spots to fill or 14 “electoral votes”. If a majority of the population votes for the Democratic Party, then all 14 elector slots go to the Democratic Party electors, who vote for the Democratic candidate at a later date. This occurs in each state until one party has 270 electoral votes. Everyone who voted Republican in New Jersey? Their votes never make it to the Republican candidate. Everyone who voted Democrat in Texas? Their votes are effectively thrown out.

To simplify– each state counts for a certain number of points. NJ 14, Utah 3, California 55, etc. Whichever party gains the most votes in California receives 55 points for their candidate. Your vote does not actually count toward your preferred candidate. Instead, it decides which candidate gets the points your state has to offer. This means that the President of the United States is not chosen by popular vote. This has serious consequences. There are presidents who have lost the popular vote but won the election—most recently, Donald Trump and George W. Bush.

The Merger of Capitalists and the State

While it’s necessary to examine individual policies that restrict democracy, it’s also important to analyze anti-democratic social and economic structures the policies operate within. A simple explanation of capitalism illuminates and contextualizes these structures.

The world can be divided into two broad groups of people: those who own the things necessary for society to function and for people to survive, and those who do not own these things. The first group, the capitalists, owns everything from factories to transportation infrastructure, farmland to real estate, and everything else used to produce our society. The rest of us—the workers—write the code, drive the trucks, stack the shelves, work the call centres, serve the food, pack the packages, and ensure that the things capitalists own operate correctly. It is not a symbiotic relationship, but an exploitative one. The workers own only their labor power, which they sell to a capitalist in exchange for wages. But wages are always less than the profit that workers produce for the capitalist.

One way that the capitalist class maintains this exploitative system is through the state.

The state’s primary function is as a tool used by one class to suppress another. Under feudalism, it was used to exploit and oppress serfs for the benefit of lords. In modern society, it is used by capitalists to exploit and oppress workers.

We are conscious of this when we speak of “money in politics“. U.S. elections, presidential or otherwise, are primarily funded by wealthy individuals and corporations. “Citizens United”, the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to funnel a previously unheard of amount of money into political campaigns via “Super PACs,” is the most famous example. But even if Citizens United were repealed the rich would continue to buy our democratic process. Besides individual capitalists bankrolling entire political campaigns, billionaires own the media whose job it is to report on elections, coordinate with and fund influential think-tanks that shape policy, and even draft legislation.

Lobbying by capitalists is particularly detrimental to authentic democracy. Each lobby organizes by industry to convince lawmakers to enact profitable legislation for that industry. Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, defense manufacturers—every single industry—have powerful lobbyists in Washington. In what amounts to bribery, lobbyists treat members of Congress to expensive dinners, sporting events, and expensive vacations where they plead the case for their industry. During these one-on-one meetings, politicians are often promised jobs as lobbyists if they comply with the industry’s demands. The transition from public servant to private lobbyist comes with a pay raise and mostly consists of calling in favors from old friends and colleagues to influence policy. This “revolving door” permeates through all levels of government from high ranking officials to congressional staffers and bureaucrats.

This “revolving door” is a clever metaphor masking a more insidious truth—capitalists and politicians are identical. Legislators, cabinet members, and administration bureaucrats all slide effortlessly between the role of a public official and companies like Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobile, and Lockheed Martin. This is most explicit in the Trump administration, where former CEO of ExxonMobile ran the State Department, and the Environmental Protection Agency is currently run by a former coal lobbyist. And this is not to mention Trump himself, a billionaire real estate developer.

The interchangeability of capitalists and government officials is not unique to the current government, but a fact of every presidential administration. After his stint in government former Attorney General Eric Holder, who chose not to prosecute any of the big banks after the 2008 financial meltdown, rejoined Covington & Burling, a law firm that represents the largest banks on Wall Street. Holder now works alongside Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005–2009. Chertoff is the co-founder of the “Chertoff Group”, a risk-management and security consulting company that employs former members of the U.S. government including Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA; a man responsible for Guantanamo Bay, CIA black sites, government surveillance, and countless extrajudicial killings abroad.

The Chertoff Group is far from the only influential business employing former government officials. Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA from 2009-2013 now works for Apple. The former director of the Domestic Policy Council, Melody Barnes, sits on the board of directors for the defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. Obama’s former Deputy Chief of Staff, Mona Sutphen, went on to work for UBS, a global financial services company. She was also a partner for Macro Advisory Partners, whose purpose—which is clear even when coated in sterile language—is to develop strategies for corporate clients to exploit the global poor. Rich Armitage, Deputy Director of the Bush administration’s State Department, is a board member for ManTech International, a defense and national security company whose other board members include a former CIA official who helped assess intelligence information during the lead up to the Iraq war, the head of an investment management firm, and a retired Lieutenant General. Samuel Bodman, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Commerce from 2001-2004, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury from 2004-2005, and Secretary of Energy from 2005-2009, joined the board of directors for the chemical giant Dupont shortly after leaving the White House.

The list stretches on forever. Every administration official, senator, representative, and congressional staffer comes from or moves onto powerful law firms, lobbying firms, think tanks, NGOs, defense contractors, transnational corporations, or other powerful private institutions.

These are the people socialists refer to as “the ruling class”, and they cannot be voted out of power. If a congressman loses an election he merely becomes a lobbyist and gains even more influence. If the term limit of an administration ends, the individual functionaries and bureaucrats join institutions that hold enormous power over the state. No election can rid the state of capitalist interests; no election can force the state to work in the interest of the working class.

Two-Party System, One-Party State

In 1956 W.E.B. Dubois explained his refusal to vote, “I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say”. Dubois’s analysis is still applicable. The Democrats and Republicans are factions of the same party—the capitalist party. The division between the two occurs over a difference in strategy, not a difference in goals.

Each party is ultimately beholden to the special interest groups funding them, all of whom wish to maintain capitalism and ensure their industry benefits from its maintenance. A base of committed voters must be catered to, but only within the boundaries set by elites. If possible, all debate is restricted to “culture war” issues that, while important, are debated in a way that refuses to confront capitalism. Additionally, while it is generally true that people suffer more under Republican administrations, people continue to suffer immensely under Democratic ones. Both parties are culpable in creating the conditions for misogyny, racism, poverty, exploitation, and all the ills of capitalism.

Republicans appeal to the economic interests of small business owners and the most backward elements of the working class to cut social programs and attack minority groups, while the Democrats appeal to urban professionals and progressive sections of the working class, to surreptitiously implement policies with similar consequences. Democrats helped lay the groundwork for the Trump administration’s worst authoritarian excesses. Some examples include mass deportations, expanding the war on terror, prosecuting whistleblowers, expanding mass surveillance, increasing fracking, and regime change.

Despite not being banned outright, third parties face various anti-democratic measures ensuring their defeat at the polls. During a presidential election, the Electoral College represents the most blatant obstacle to democracy. A candidate, third party or otherwise, can gain 49% of the vote in a state and receive no electoral votes. First past the post voting extends downwards to most congressional and state elections, guaranteeing a loss of representation for everyone who did not vote for the winning candidate. Third party candidates often can’t be voted for at all. In the 2016 presidential election cycle, the Libertarian Party was the only alternative party with ballot access in all 50 states. The Green Party gained access in 45. This was possible because they had the money and full-time organizers to petition for ballot access. Explicitly socialist parties do not have the resources to navigate the complexities of gaining access to the ballot.

First past the post voting and ballot access aside, it is still an uphill battle for alternative political parties. Campaign funding reimbursement is only available to parties who receive 5% of the popular vote during federal elections. Any prospect of obtaining it is hindered by poor media coverage and the 15% poll requirement to gain entry into national debates, which are run by an organization completely dominated by the Democratic and Republican parties.

The Executive, the Senate, the Supreme Court

Every U.S. civics textbook explains that the government is built upon a series of “checks and balances”. The Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government balance power between themselves and check the power of any branch hoping to gain an advantage over the other two. It is said that these checks and balances are necessary to sustain democracy, and yet, as we have seen, we live in a deeply undemocratic society. The reality is that each branch of government is itself undemocratic, and the most democratic of the three, the legislature, has the most checks restraining it.

The Executive Branch

The Executive branch is a sprawling bureaucracy (headed by a president selected through an undemocratic election process) that gains more power every decade. Each department of the executive branch unfolds into a vast bureaucracy of unaccountable functionaries. The Department of Defense alone encompasses the office of Secretary of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of the Navy, Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, and accounts for 21% of the federal budget. On election day voters elect one candidate, and that one candidate appoints and oversees this military bureaucracy.

The Executive controls almost all aspects of foreign policy with this endless bureaucracy. The Executive’s power in this regard is made clear by the numerous “conflicts” it has initiated over the heads of Congress since the invasion of Vietnam. Congress, allegedly vested with the sole power to declare war, hasn’t done so since World War Two. Under Obama, the executive branch improved and formalized its ability to kill anyone around the world at will. Congress was unable to prevent the Trump Administration from tearing up the Iran Nuclear Deal. Now the administration threatens to take military action, likely without approval from Congress. There are no checks or balances on the United States war machine.

Of course, this is simply one section of the sprawling Executive branch. Every section of the branch is similarly large and complex. Here is the Department of Justice:

And this is the Department of Commerce:

These bureaucrats are far removed from any democratic accountability, and as we have seen, often use their positions to make themselves rich and advance the interests of their capitalist friends. Bureaucracy is not inherently undemocratic, and when managing a country of 350 million people some form of it is necessary, but minor checks on Executive bureaucracy do nothing to hold it accountable to voters.

Additionally, the President appoints unelected “czars” to coordinate between different departments. In this way, the Executive unifies its bureaucracy around different issues in an attempt to bypass Congress. Writing for Dissent magazine, Mark Tushnet explains,

Presidents appoint czars to deal with new policy problems that cut across regulatory areas, like managing the recent automobile bailout. In a different political environment, presidents might send legislation to Congress. Believing that to be pointless, however, most presidents have decided to appoint czars to pull together everyone who has existing statutory authority in a particular field of policymaking. The czars have no power to develop new regulations, but their prominence and White House credentials give them enormous influence over those who do the regulatory work—and this helps enact presidential policies without congressional oversight.

Ostensibly, it is the purpose of the Legislative and Judicial branches to hold this vast, powerful, bureaucracy accountable, but the Executive has checks on these branches too. Popular legislation passed by Congress can be vetoed by the president, ending the democratic process with a single signature. Additionally, the president nominates which judges sit on the Supreme Court, and no president will nominate a judge keen on limiting executive power.

However, Executive checks on the Legislative and Judicial branches are not the root cause of their ineffectiveness. The two branches are internally dysfunctional and authoritarian on their own.

The Senate

The Legislative branch is the most democratic of the three branches. Unfortunately, this means very little. The Executive branch constantly bypasses Congress, which is evident in the creation of policy czars, the top-down bureaucracy, and the “deep state” that it represents. It is further compromised by the two-party system and the revolving door and is subject to the same voting restrictions and voter suppression detailed above.

Beyond these limits and restrictions, the Legislative branch resists popular demands all on its own. Much of the blame for this falls at the feet of the Senate, the most reactionary, undemocratic, elitist institution of any modern liberal democracy. Its existence is predicated entirely on suppressing the more democratic House of Representatives.

The Senate does not abide by the democratic principle of “one person, one vote”. Instead, it practices “one state, one vote”. While states send representatives to the House proportionate to their population, the Senate is selected on the premise of equal representation of all states. Wyoming, population 584,000, has the same number of votes in the Senate as New York’s almost 20 million people. This is how Senators representing a small minority of the country block the will of the majority. The anti-democratic mechanisms are so blatant that a political party receiving more votes than its opponent won’t necessarily gain more Senate seats. Senators representing sparsely populated states effectively hold democracy hostage not only through voting down popular legislation but also through filibustering, which allows 41 Senators representing less than 11% of the population to block legislation from being voted on at all. Any legislation passed by the House can be rejected or altered by the Senate. It has veto powers over executive appointments and treaties. Two-thirds of the Senate is required to pass a constitutional amendment.

The Senate is a powerful minority ruled institution, with members bankrolled by capitalists, acting as a bulwark against popular progressive legislation. As such, it plays an important part in the Right’s domination of American politics. Daniel Lazare, writing for Jacobin, explains:

Over the next decade or so, the white portion of the ten largest states is projected to continue ticking downward, while the opposite will occur in the ten smallest. By 2030, the population ratio between the largest and smallest state is estimated to increase from sixty-five to one to nearly eighty-nine to one. The Senate will be more racist as a consequence, more unrepresentative, and more of a plaything in the hands of the militant right.

As time goes on the Senate will become more dominated by populist white nationalists at the expense of popular working class demands.

The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is the final interpreter of the U.S. Constitution. It can overturn legislation passed by Congress through the power of judicial review. Each justice is nominated by the Executive Branch and confirmed by the Senate, and every justice serves for life. The House of Representatives has no power in the process of selecting justices.

For a moment, in the 20th century, liberals viewed the Supreme Court as a vehicle for positive social change. But lasting social change only comes from below. It cannot be handed down from the courts, and so the brief time of progressive rulings inevitably passed. Despite occasional small gains won by the Left, the Supreme Court remains what it was meant to be—a reactionary servant of power guaranteeing the destruction of left-leaning legislation.

The Supreme Court is the greatest threat to legislation born from a mass working-class movement. Popular legislation passed by Congress and signed by the President can be overturned in part or in full by an unelected body of nine people, serving a life term, tasked with upholding and interpreting an outdated and inherently undemocratic document.

If Bernie Sanders is elected in 2020 and manages to shepherd Medicare For All through the House and the Senate, the risk of the Supreme Court ruling the law unconstitutional would remain. If this occurs there would be little recourse. A constitutional amendment is the only way around the Supreme Court, and the requirements are so onerous it took the Civil War to implement recent meaningful amendments.

If all other restrictions on democracy fail the Supreme Court serves as the ultimate negation of popular policy. It is the final backstop against the will of the majority.

A Workers’ Republic

Similar to feudal lords who owned the land and the serfs forced to work it, today a few wealthy capitalists own the means of production that wage workers must work. If the serfs were allowed, through a convoluted process stacked against them, to vote for their lords, would we call that democracy? True democracy is only possible when workers have control over their lives, their communities, and the means of production.

Our economy is not a democracy. Workers have no say in how companies are run, how resources are allocated, or how production is arranged. Political democracy is meant to be a consolation for economic dictatorship— at least we are free to pick our leaders. But in the “Land of the Free” even political democracy eludes us.

The working class is the majority of people in the United States. An average worker spends most of their life producing for society, making society function. And yet the working class has no control over the society that depends on them to survive. What we are living under is the dictatorship of the capitalist class. They control the means of production and use the state to maintain that control. The tyranny of CEO’s, Wall Street executives, corrupt politicians, and bureaucrats decide the fate of the majority.

What is needed is a “dictatorship of the working class” i.e. a dictatorship of the majority in the form of a “workers’ republic”, a true democracy where workers have wrested control of the state from the capitalists, control the means of production, and democratically plan the economy. Democracy, freedom, liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness are all impossible while the majority of people are ruthlessly exploited and have no control over their lives, where they are denied even the most basic political freedoms promised by liberalism. Humanity’s potential cannot be fulfilled without the emancipation of the working class. Until that day comes democracy is a reality only for the ruling elite and remains an illusion for the rest of us.

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The Retrograde Left

J.R. Murray argues that the left must abandon the micro-sect form of organization derived from a false reading of the true meaning of Bolshevism, or else we will continue to exist in an endless cycle of self-marginalization.

It was only 28 years ago that liberal democracy triumphed and the fall of the USSR ushered in “The End of History”. In subsequent decades the U.S. working class was subjected to a neoliberal onslaught which dismantled an already weak welfare state and eroded worker power. But today, after the 2008 financial crisis, the ensuing global recession, the Occupy protests, a specious economic recovery, the overall stagnation and disillusionment of the Obama years, and the rise of Donald Trump, liberal democracy is threatened to a degree that would have felt unimaginable in 1991.

The American bourgeoisie has no solution for continued economic and social inequality, climate catastrophe, or the alienation of everyday life. The logic of capitalism compels the ruling class to roll back every concession the working class gained since the New Deal. The same tunnel vision is on display in the militarization of the southern border, mass deportation, and stoking of nationalism and xenophobia. In a way, this is just practice for the coming mass migrations spurred on by ecological collapse. The United States is rapidly becoming a police state for its poorest inhabitants, who suffer the worst deprivations of capitalism and the climate catastrophe it has unleashed while having their political rights eviscerated, their lives meticulously surveilled, and their movements constricted. For most people the present is unsustainable and the future is bleak. The working class, especially young workers, are looking for an alternative, and socialism’s appeal is re-emerging. One result of this re-emergence has been the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the modest growth of “Leninist” socialist organizations such as Socialist Alternative (SAlt), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the International Socialist Organization (ISO), before its dissolution earlier this year.

Since Donald Trump’s election, the DSA’s popularity has risen above and beyond what their Leninist cousins could ever hope to achieve. While the DSA suffers from serious problems, it still offers hope for a renewed socialist movement. On the other hand, the Leninist sect exemplifies an outdated organizational structure that featured so prominently in the failures of 20th-century socialism. Indeed, just recently the ISO voted to dissolve itself in part due to scandals and abuses that tend to flourish in the top-down sect structure. Critical analysis of the Leninist sect and its failures was necessary before the ISO collapsed and is even more necessary while we sift through the debris.

To understand the structural failures of the sect and the poor strategy this structure engenders we need to locate the key historical assumptions that are routinely invoked as a justification for incompetent political and organizational positions. This is an imperative first step if we wish to move beyond ineffectual sects and toward a radically democratic mass party as the vehicle for the working-class seizure of power.

Lenin & Today’s Bolsheviks

Socialist organizations across the ideological spectrum justify a myriad of positions by invoking Lenin and the Bolshevik party. But which Lenin are they praising? The Lenin of 1905 who believed the Russian Revolution would be a bourgeois revolution, or the Lenin who wrote the April Theses? The Lenin that helped to ban factions within the party or the Lenin who, at the end of his life, warned his comrades of the rising bureaucracy? Lenin the living, breathing, man, or Lenin the body, mummified and forced to lie in a mausoleum against his wishes? Lenin is no deity. He invokes inspiration because of his courage, dynamic range of thought, brilliant timing, and careful use of Marxist analysis. But today, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy sifts through Lenin’s work, interpreting it for their own ends, cutting and pasting pieces of it to justify their existence.

The leading “revolutionary” socialist parties fashion themselves after the Bolsheviks of 1917. But their conception of the Bolshevik party is like their conception of Lenin: flat and ossified. In reality, nearly every self described “Leninist” organization today is descended from the post-1921 Bolshevik party — a bureaucratic, top-down apparatus disconnected from the people it claimed to represent.

In 1921 the Bolsheviks were in a desperate situation, floundering after the failure of revolution in industrialized Europe and reeling from the one-two punch of World War I and their own brutal civil war which left their economy destroyed. Worst of all, members of the Russian working class were either dead, demoralized, or fleeing to the countryside. At the start of the 20th century, Russia was a nation of peasants just beginning to take steps toward industrialization, and by 1921 they had taken steps backward; if the working class was small before the wars, now it barely existed. In his massive biography of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher summarized the situation:

Thus a few years after the revolution the nation was incapable of managing its own affairs and of asserting itself through its own authentic representatives. The old ruling classes were crushed; and the new ruling class, the proletariat, was only a shadow of its former self. No party could claim to represent the dispersed working class; and the workers could not control the party which claimed to speak for them and to rule the country on their behalf.

Whom then did the Bolshevik party represent? It represented only itself, that is, its past association with the working class, its present aspiration to act as guardian of the proletarian class interest, and its intention to reassemble in the course of economic reconstruction a new working class which should be able in due time to take the country’s destinies into its hands. In the meantime, the Bolshevik party maintained itself in power by usurpation. Not only its enemies saw it as a usurper—the party appeared as a usurper even in the light of its own standards and its own conception of the revolutionary state.

The Bolsheviks of 1921 existed to perpetuate their own existence as regents of the absent working class. Almost 100 years later, revolutionary socialist organizations cannot offer the same excuse. There is no reason for U.S. socialist organizations to copy emergency structural reforms put into place by the Bolshevik party in the early Soviet Union. An enormous working-class suffering indignity and exploitation surrounds the U.S. Left and yet barely comes into contact with it. These socialist parties hang suspended in mid-air, gazing down at the working class below, never close enough to meet it for more than a moment.

Bureaucratic Centralism

Just as socialist parties remain separated from the working class, the leadership of socialist parties stays separated from their rank-and-file members. Assuming they toe the party line, certain individual activists are allowed into the leadership circle. But the leadership itself remains small and powerful. Decisions are often made without consulting the rank-and-file, and bureaucratic maneuvering dominates the politics of decision making. The ruling clique controls the party from the top down, enforcing its ideological program and ensuring a constant stream of new recruits to replace previous burnt out cadre.

Hal Draper would describe the current Leninist parties as “bureaucratic sects”. He explained the basic strategy of these sects in his pamphlet “Anatomy of a Microsect”:

The sect mentality typically sees the road ahead as one in which the sect (one’s own sect) will grow and grow, because it has the Correct Political Program, until it becomes a large sect, then a still larger sect, eventually a small mass party, then larger, etc., until it becomes large and massy enough to impose itself as the party of the working class in fact. But in two hundred years of socialist history, this has never actually happened, in spite of innumerable attempts.

The sect wishes to recruit members in the ones and twos with the hopes that, one day, it will be large enough to superimpose itself onto a working class movement.

Because of its relation to the proletariat as the perennial other, a sect may be completely unaware of the working class’s needs, concerns, and demands. Draper elaborates that the sect instead “counter-poses its sect criterion of programmatic points against the real movement of the workers in the class struggle, which may not measure up to its high demands.” Rather than expressing the will of the working class, a sect demands that the working class bend to its will.

Draper described the bureaucracy’s strategy in a sentence, “…their organizational road to power is the formation of an elite band of Maximum Leaders which holds itself ready to bestow its own rule, at a propitious movement, on an elemental upsurge of the people.” For a sect, the party is not a vehicle of working class power and a means for workers to emancipate themselves; instead, the working class is a wave upon which the party rides into power.

Within the modern sect, intra-party democracy is suppressed and, as always, Lenin and the Bolsheviks are invoked as justification. The defenders of the sect-form claim to practice the same democratic centralism as the 1917 Bolsheviks, but their stunted understanding of the party structure that helped make the Bolsheviks’ successful in 1917 prevents them from recognizing their actual organizational forebearers: the post-civil war Bolshevik party.

By 1921 opposition parties were effectively banned. By many accounts this was not an ideal which the Bolsheviks worked to achieve, but rather a reality forced on them through dire circumstance. Deutscher shares an anecdote by the Menshevik Sukhanov which highlights this point:

Sukhanov relates that three years later after the Bolsheviks had banned all the parties of the opposition, he reminded Trotsky of his pledge not to lend himself to the suppression of any minority. Trotsky lapsed into silence, reflected for a while, and then said wistfully: “Those were good days.”

Deutscher’s description of the internal debates leading up to institutionalized one-party rule reinforces how important internal democracy was to early Bolshevism. He depicts the party at a crossroads where “…Bolshevism suffered a moral agony the like of which is hardly to be found in the history of less intense and impassioned movements. Later Lenin recalled the ‘fever’ and ‘mortal illness’ which consumed the party in the winter of 1920-21.” The Bolsheviks had intended one-party rule to be temporary, possibly lasting several years, possibly a couple of decades, but never lasting forever. The logic of banning opposition in the Soviets inevitably led to the banning of factions within the party itself, deepening an anti-democratic trend and setting the stage for Stalinist bureaucracy to flourish.

The socialist parties of today are direct descendants of that bureaucratic party-form, and they have fewer qualms than their Bolshevik ancestors about silencing dissent. As far back as 1969, Ralph Miliband was critiquing the farcical internal democracy of official communist parties:

…Communist parties were greatly unhinged by alternating bouts of sectarianism and opportunism and, indeed, quite commonly, by both simultaneously. The extreme tensions which this produced inside these parties were contained, but never subdued, by a bureaucratic application of the principle of ‘democratic centralism’, which made so much room for centralism that it left little or no room for democracy. One result of this bureaucratic deformation was a catastrophic ideological impoverishment and the transformation of the Marxism these parties professed into a vulgarized, manipulative and sloganized phraseology, which greatly affected their capacity for ‘raising the level of consciousness’. In short, their whole historical tradition has powerfully limited the effectiveness of their role and left a vast gap between their actual performance and the kind of ideological and political effort required of revolutionary formations.

These Communist parties are a genealogical link between the Bolsheviks of the 1920s and the Leninist organizations of today. Because of this, our modern day parties suffer from the same flaw, namely, they do not practice democratic centralism, but bureaucratic centralism. Within contemporary parties, decisions are made at the top and passed down to the rank and file. Cursory nods are made to democracy while centralism is strictly enforced to crush meaningful debate.

If the Bolsheviks’ decision to ban factions within their party was difficult, it is because the party was largely democratic beforehand. Certainly, the Bolsheviks of 1917 were leagues more democratic than the current-day socialist parties who claim their legacy. In Trotsky’s “The Crisis of the German Opposition”, he recounts how the party operated before the ban on factions:

Whoever is acquainted with the history of the Bolshevik Party knows what a broad autonomy the local organizations always enjoyed: they issued their own papers, in which they openly and sharply, whenever they found it necessary, criticized the actions of the central committee. Had the central committee, in the case of principled differences, attempted to disperse the local organizations … before the party had had an opportunity to express itself — such a central committee would have made itself impossible.

This way of operating a party is unheard of today, especially among the explicitly revolutionary groups. Multiple papers published by a single organization are rare, and within a single paper opposing views are few and far between. Local organizations are subjugated to the tyranny of the national leadership. Dissent is barely tolerated and public dissent is perceived as an existential threat. Slate voting means elections are more indirect, and it makes it harder to recall individual leaders from power. Public ballots allow leadership to intimidate rank-and-file members. A myriad of policies and norms like the above examples all combine to reproduce an unaccountable monolith.

That mixture of an undemocratic culture and practice led by an entrenched bureaucracy sets the stage for an infinite number of splits. Without proper channels for dissent and debate arguments cannot be resolved, and members often leave to form their own sect or are forced out via intimidation and purges. Mike Macnair in his book Revolutionary Strategy observes that “the overall effect of the purges [is] to increase the power of the party bureaucracy as such over the rank and file…”

The existence of multiple sects disconnected from the working class, dominated by an entrenched bureaucracy, and plagued by high turnover, create an environment in which competition for dues-paying members flourishes. This competition requires the strangling of democracy, which then props up the bureaucratic leadership. The process is a feedback loop. Macnair further explains:

The members, though active, are active in doing what the leaders tell them, and cease to be really active citizens of their party. The leaders become a firm selling a brand… Dissent — especially dissent about fundamentals — becomes the enemy of ‘activism’ and the ‘activists’ themselves resent the dissenters who are ‘stopping them getting on with the job’. In this framework, serious disagreement inevitably leads to a split.

The result is decades of petty sectarianism, activist burnout, and total irrelevance.

While surveying the sorry state of the revolutionary left it is important to remember that there are alternatives. Hal Draper presents us with the critical component to any healthy socialist movement:

The key question becomes the achievement of a mass base, which is not just a numerical matter but a matter of class representation. Given a mass base in the social struggle, the party does not necessarily have to suppress the internal play of political conflict, since the centrifugal force of political disagreements is counterbalanced by the centripetal pressure of the class struggle.

The process of rebuilding a mass base within the class we claim to represent is the best way to guard against bureaucratic leadership and move beyond the Left’s own endless self-marginalization.

Hal Draper’s critique of the micro-sect from the 1970s are still relevant

Rebuilding

While many organizers and activists are from sections of the working class, the parties and organizations that make up the movement lack a base within it. Instead of focusing on building deep ties to the working class along the lines of the Bolsheviks in 1917, the Left continues to focus on political theater, i.e. marches and demonstrations.

Mobilizing is not inherently unproductive: it can be useful for putting pressure on government officials, intimidating the Right, and raising morale among the Left, but it is useless in a vacuum. Macnair elaborates, “the point is that these tactics, which may be appropriate under various conditions, do not amount to a strategy for workers’ power and socialism.” We hold march after march, we present our demands over and over, and then we go home empty-handed. We chant that these are “our streets” after asking the state for proper permits. We claim that “this is what democracy looks like” while surrounded by police. Decades of marching and we are as powerless as ever. It is crucial that we move beyond this cycle.

Much has been written about the necessity of socialists returning to workplace organizing, but organizing a workplace is not enough. Socialists must begin to organize whole communities in a way that directly confronts capital and the ruling class. The working class is more dispersed than it was even fifty years ago. In the United States workers are no longer concentrated in factories where they can easily rub shoulders with Marxist organizers. Organizing new or often ignored sections of workers, such as care workers, Uber drivers, service workers, tenants, ex-prisoners, veterans, immigrant workers, etc., must be a priority. The best way to do this is by organizing workers’ communities. In this way we organize across employment sectors, we organize the young, the old, the unemployed, the homeless, and everyone in between. In short, we create a situation in which the answer to the question “whose streets?” is truly “our streets”.

Soup kitchens, clothing drives, reading groups, free classes, tenants unions, solidarity networks against ICE and other law enforcement agencies, and health clinics can all be built and should be built by socialist parties. These institutions offer socialists a real connection and a tangible base within the working class while simultaneously building the power of working-class communities. Instead of parties claiming to represent working-class interests and fighting on their behalf, these institutions, in addition to workplace organizing, will cultivate a socialist Left of and for the working class. Without this type of organizing there can be no mass party.

It may take a long time, and it will require patience, but there is no shortcut to working class power. Lenin, speaking after Russia’s 1905 revolution, explained how socialists had successfully led the revolution of that year: “Do you think, my dear sirs, this came all of a sudden or was the result prepared and secured by years and years of slow, obstinate, inconspicuous, noiseless work?” Our entire existence should be the preparation for the day when the working class can take power. If socialists ignore the long and challenging task of building a base then we give up any hope of winning power, and if power is not our aim then we truly are irrelevant.

Beyond Myth

Deutscher’s description of the Bolshevik of 1921 feels familiar today: “Acting without the normal working class in the background, the Bolshevik from long habit still invoked the will of that class in order to justify whatever he did. But he invoked it only as a theoretical surmise and an ideal standard of behavior, in short, something of a myth.” The working class remains a myth to U.S. socialists. We hear about it, speak about it, write about it, but it is not a class which we engage with or have roots in. Without organizing a base in our communities socialists will always be considered an “other”, forever disconnected from those they claim to represent, peering out into a sea of working class discontent but unable to join with it.

It is necessary to stop our mythologizing and engage with reality. The workers’ movement and the socialist movement are almost completely severed. Our task now is to reconnect the two. We must merge them through the slow and steady work of building a mass base alongside a radically democratic party free of onerous bureaucracies and ruling cliques. Without an accountable leadership, open factions, and freedom of debate, the socialist Left will remain in the periphery, continuously splitting and squabbling with one another. If we continue our attempts to build the negligible power of the sects we pledge allegiance to while ignoring the task of building working class power, then we have no hope.

2019.01.092020.08.03

“Left” Anti-Immigration: A Chauvinist Disorder

Border control offers nothing to the working class and must be actively opposed in favor of a roadmap to a borderless society, writes J.R. Murray.

Toward the end of 2018, Angela Nagle, leading partisan of the “anti-identitarian” Left, wrote a piece called The Left Case Against Open Borders, published in the right-wing journal American Affairs. It received a lot of attention, as contrarian takes often do, because it flies in the face of over a century of Marxist theory and strategy. Nagle puts forth the following argument: historically, the socialist Left has been pro-borders and anti-immigration. The Left has only recently adopted it’s anti-border position. We have done so as a knee-jerk reaction to the rise of Trump and the nativist Right, and because the elites have duped us by “wearing a mask of virtuous identitarianism.” Mass migration is an exploitative system which causes brain drain in developing countries, the exploitation of immigrants as cheap labor in developed countries, and is used by big business to drive down wages and attack unions. Since certain sections of the capitalist class support open borders, this means the anti-border Left is tacitly giving its support to and aligning itself with the capitalist class. Mass migration is unpopular for all of the above reasons and if the Left ever wishes to take power it will have to make a choice between embracing popular pro-border sentiment or allying with libertarian capitalists to suppress the masses and open the borders. In the end, immigration and open borders serve the rich elite, and the only way to end mass migration is to end global inequality, anti-labor free trade deals, and the imperialism of both global finance and the Pentagon.

This argument is not a “left case against open borders” but an essay-length dog-whistle written in an attempt to attract working-class elements of the far-right to social democracy. It knocks down straw men, misinterprets the Marxist position on borders, ignores nuance, and falsifies history. What follows is a debunking of Nagle’s claims and an argument for the abolition of borders.

Socialists Internationalism is inherently antagonistic to border walls

Revisionist History

Nagle asserts that “the transformation of open borders into a ‘Left’ position is a very new phenomenon and runs counter to the history of the organized Left in fundamental ways.” It’s a bold claim, in that it is barely even a half-truth. The ambiguity of the term “organized Left” allows for Nagle to construct a false narrative of U.S. labor history. What Nagle means by the “organized Left” is unions, specifically anti-socialist unions like the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

Unions are a powerful tool that have helped to extract massive concessions from the capitalist class and protect workers from the worst excesses of the capitalist system. But the union movement is ideologically broad. The AFL (now the AFL-CIO), the largest union confederation in the United States, has been anti-socialist since its founding. The Left calls these types of organizations “business unions.” Business unions are run by bureaucrats set on partnering with employers to stave off labor unrest. A major project for socialists in the United States today is to wrest power back from these bureaucrats and/or build entirely new organizations. Nagle’s argument is essentially a defense of the worst politics to come from the right wing of the labor bureaucracy. Despite all the talk of universalism from “anti-identitarians” like Nagle, her argument exists in contradiction to the more universalist approaches to class struggle. She puts forth the domestic American worker as the historical subject of U.S. labor organizing despite a rich history of socialist solidarity with immigrant workers. She erases this history to advance the erroneous claim that the entire left has been pro-border until a misguided turn to identity politics.

Historically, there has been an alternative to business unionism, such as the IWW and the CIO, the former being decidedly socialist and internationalist. Additionally, the working class has not only organized itself through unions but also through a number of different political parties that aimed to bring the working class to power and end capitalism. It is only by ignoring radical unionism and working class parties while narrowly focusing on anti-socialist business unionism that Nagle can make the argument that the organized Left has been anti-immigration and pro-borders. One can trace the importance of internationalism and the abolition of borders from Marx to Debs to Lenin to Luxemburg, American Trotskyist parties, Che Guevara, Fred Hampton, and all the way to socialists today who have fought and continue to fight for immigrant rights. It is not a new phenomenon, and certainly not merely a reaction to Donald Trump.

Political cartoon criticizing immigration restrictions via literacy tests

Useful Idiots

Nagle wholeheartedly approves of business unions’ perspectives on immigration. She argues:

From the first law restricting immigration in 1882 to Cesar Chavez and the famously multiethnic United Farm Workers protesting against employers’ use and encouragement of illegal migration in 1969, trade unions have often opposed mass migration. They saw the deliberate importation of illegal, low-wage workers as weakening labor’s bargaining power and as a form of exploitation. There is no getting around the fact that the power of unions relies by definition on their ability to restrict and withdraw the supply of labor, which becomes impossible if an entire workforce can be easily and cheaply replaced. Open borders and mass immigration are a victory for the bosses.

Employers often do use undocumented immigrants to break strikes, flood the labor market, and drive down wages, but Nagle completely misdiagnoses the root of the problem. The distinction between legal/illegal labor, only possible through the existence of the border, is a powerful weapon in a capitalist’s arsenal. Undocumented workers live in fear of being arrested and deported. Employers use this fear to bully and threaten these workers into accepting lower wages. If they try to organize for better pay or working conditions, their undocumented status becomes an enormous liability — the workforce can simply be deported and replaced. The ease with which undocumented workers can be exploited by their employers undercuts legal laborers (both organized and unorganized) and breeds nativism in their ranks. It is a wedge used to divide the working class. The solution is not to be against immigration, but to organize all workers, regardless of legal status, and fight for an end to the legal/illegal distinction. Immigration and open borders are not a victory for the bosses; in fact the opposite is true: the abolition of borders would entail the end of the illegal/legal distinction that employers wield to keep workers divided and wages down.

Nagle ignores this common socialist argument and instead chalks up socialists’ pro-immigrant/anti-border stance to a misguided moral impulse:

With obscene images of low-wage migrants being chased down as criminals by ICE, others drowning in the Mediterranean, and the worrying growth of anti-immigrant sentiment across the world, it is easy to see why the Left wants to defend illegal migrants against being targeted and victimized. And it should. But acting on the correct moral impulse to defend the human dignity of migrants, the Left has ended up pulling the front line too far back, effectively defending the exploitative system of migration itself.

Nagle believes the U.S. deportation machine and Fortress Europe are obscene, but she cannot see that ICE, the mass drownings in the Mediterranean, and detention centers are all the direct result of borders and the criminalization of immigration. There is no middle ground here; as long as the border exists people crossing it will be deemed criminals.

She continues this accusation that we are simply bleeding hearts unable to rationally analyze border policy:

Today’s well-intentioned activists have become the useful idiots of big business. With their adoption of “open borders” advocacy—and a fierce moral absolutism that regards any limit to migration as an unspeakable evil—any criticism of the exploitative system of mass migration is effectively dismissed as blasphemy. Even solidly leftist politicians, like Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, are accused of “nativism” by critics if they recognize the legitimacy of borders or migration restriction at any point. This open borders radicalism ultimately benefits the elites within the most powerful countries in the world, further disempowers organized labor, robs the developing world of desperately needed professionals, and turns workers against workers.

Recognizing the “legitimacy of borders” and migration restriction as a way to protect domestic laborers and reserve access to parts of the welfare state, real or desired, for American citizens only, is nativism by definition. If the term “useful idiot” is being thrown around, then it should be applied to Nagle and her cohort who provide cover for far-right nationalists. Socialists support immigrant rights, including demands like open borders, not because the left has abandoned labor for “social justice” issues, but because they must organize the working class, millions of whom are immigrants. The question is not merely one of moralism but of the necessities of class struggle and organizing the working class as a class.

It would be interesting to hear Nagle answer the question “what makes borders legitimate?” To recognize the legitimacy of borders means accepting everything that comes along with that legitimization. If borders exist, then they must be defended. In order to defend the border, force must be used. A closed border is a militarized border, and a militarized border is a place where poor people are terrorized, brutalized, and even murdered. Borders can only be maintained through the use of fences, guns, deportation, and detention centers. By arguing that any call for an alternative to this system is just “moralism” is to ignore the possibility of a world beyond this system of terror.

Nagle consistently refers to mass migration as an “exploitative system” that bleeding heart moralizing leftists are propping up. But mass migration is not a system. It is a social phenomenon, a consequence of imperialism, the creation of a global market in labor, and climate change. Nagle contorts the stance of supporting victims of these consequences into the stance of supporting the consequences themselves. For her, to support open borders means supporting the exploitation of cheap labor by employers, supporting brain drain from the third world, supporting the tragedy of people having to uproot their lives and move to the United States. But we support open borders precisely because we recognize the tragedy and horrors that imperialism, global inequality, and climate change produce. Immigrants leave their homes because they are forced to. We demand that their trauma is not compounded by the violence inherent in maintaining a border.

Nagle assumes that the demand for an open border exists in a vacuum. She lists a set of demands in place of open borders:

Reducing the tensions of mass migration thus requires improving the prospects of the world’s poor. Mass migration itself will not accomplish this: it creates a race to the bottom for workers in wealthy countries and a brain drain in poor ones. The only real solution is to correct the imbalances in the global economy, and radically restructure a system of globalization that was designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. This involves, to start with, structural changes to trade policies that prevent necessary, state-led development in emerging economies. Anti-labor trade deals like NAFTA must also be opposed. It is equally necessary to take on a financial system that funnels capital away from the developing world and into inequality-heightening asset bubbles in rich countries. Finally, although the reckless foreign policies of the George W. Bush administration have been discredited, the temptation to engage in military crusades seems to live on. This should be opposed. U.S.-led foreign invasions have killed millions in the Middle East, created millions of refugees and migrants, and devastated fundamental infrastructure.

In fact the anti-border Left agrees with all of these demands. The hard truth is that the above terrible things are happening and socialists must fight to defend people fleeing the from the resulting poverty and violence. Why would we support the border security apparatus that harms people fleeing from the violence and inequality that we demand an end to? Nagle gives us insight into her reasoning when she states,

But whether they like it or not, radically transformative levels of mass migration are unpopular across every section of society and throughout the world. And the people among whom it is unpopular, the citizenry, have the right to vote. Thus migration increasingly presents a crisis that is fundamental to democracy. Any political party wishing to govern will either have to accept the will of the people, or it will have to repress dissent in order to impose the open borders agenda. Many on the libertarian Left are among the most aggressive advocates of the latter. And for what? To provide moral cover for exploitation? To ensure that left-wing parties that could actually address any of these issues at a deeper international level remain out of power?

Instead of doing the work to convert chauvinist, nativist elements of the U.S. working class to internationalism and socialism, Nagle hopes to harness their racism as a way to build electoral support for social democracy. It is a cynical calculation: if Corbyn or Sanders simply take a right-wing view on immigration, then they will get more votes.

Nagle asserts that a political party wishing to govern will have to choose between accepting the “will of the people” or repressing dissent in order to enact open borders. This is a false dichotomy that must be rejected. Socialists have the responsibility of explaining our position and convincing the U.S. working class of their shared interest with immigrants in fighting the capitalist class, working toward socialism, and abolishing borders. To become a class that can govern in the interests of all humanity, the working class must go through a protracted process of political struggle and education, transforming itself as a class in the process. Chauvinism within the working class is not something revolutionaries should bend to, but fight against. This is not elitist — it is chauvinist ideology that is elitist.

In a particularly cynical move, even by this piece’s standards, Nagle warps Marx’s words in defense of her pro-border position:

Marx went on to say that the priority for labor organizing in England was ‘to make the English workers realize that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.’ Here Marx pointed the way to an approach that is scarcely found today. The importation of low-paid labor is a tool of oppression that divides workers and benefits those in power. The proper response, therefore, is not abstract moralism about welcoming all migrants as an imagined act of charity, but rather addressing the root causes of migration in the relationship between large and powerful economies and the smaller or developing economies from which people migrate.

Here is Marx’s original letter that Nagle quotes. Marx did point out that low paid migrant labor is bad for domestic and migrant workers, but he did not advocate for the legitimacy and maintenance of borders as a solution. Instead, Marx wrote about the necessity of the working class residing within two different nation-states uniting to fight their common oppressor. This would entail the English working class fighting alongside the Irish working class for the end of English colonialism in Ireland. It would also include Irish workers residing in England uniting with English workers to fight for better wages, working conditions, and socialism. This is the same strategy advocated by the anti-border Left today.

“Workers of the world Unite” isn’t just an empty slogan.

A socialist, borderless, future

Abolishing borders is essential to building socialism. Unfortunately, Angela Nagle and the milieu around her have no intention of building socialism. Their goal is the creation of a reformist electoral party that can win elections and implement social democracy. They dream of universal healthcare and free college tuition for every American citizen while keeping everyone else out through deportation, fences, and an e-verify system that ensures no undocumented worker will find employment. Of course, they pay lip service to ending imperialism and global inequality, but these are essential features of capitalism, which social democracy cannot transcend.

To build socialism we must first build a working-class party with a political program. In our program, we will need to lay out and patiently explain our position on immigration. Our position should not be to maintain borders while we try to end imperialism and global inequality. Our position should be to smash the capitalist state apparatus, replace it with a workers republic, and begin the process of abolishing all borders — not as an idealist fantasy but as a necessary part of building socialism.

At a minimum our program should explain that a workers’ government will immediately:

Abolish ICE and CBP
Abide by the internationally recognized asylum process
Abolish all immigration quotas and limits
Eliminate all fees associated with applying for a green card or visa
Give amnesty to all undocumented immigrants currently residing within the United States
Grant citizenship to any permanent resident living in the United States for at least a year

Additionally, our program should explain our long term goals regarding borders and immigration. Examples include signing agreements with future socialist governments, ending all border and travel restrictions between these countries, and working towards a common citizenship shared by residents of all socialist countries that recognizes universal rights for all humans of the world, working towards a notion of global citizenship as a step toward abolishing the concept of citizenship altogether (which is tied to the sovereignty of the nation-state).

These demands are not, and will not, be made in a vacuum no matter how hard Nagle wishes to characterize them as such. Socialists must organize documented and undocumented workers alike, as well as recognize the special revolutionary potential of migrants, whom Badiou calls the “nomadic proletariat.” Immigrant workers carry traditions of labor activism with them and are often at the vanguard of class struggles. Mass migration is part of what makes the working class a class with no country. The struggle against borders is a class struggle, one that goes beyond mere economic implications. Socialists must make connections and work with workers’ organizations in other countries, end foreign coups and occupations in foreign countries, end funding, training, and arms sales to despotic regimes, appropriate and redistribute money and property from the capitalist class, etc. Fighting for and eventually building socialism will go hand in hand with abolishing borders. It is a unitary process. The moment the two are separated is the moment socialism is no longer a possibility.