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“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:

  1. Abolish ICE and CBP
  2. Abide by the internationally recognized asylum process
  3. Abolish all immigration quotas and limits
  4. Eliminate all fees associated with applying for a green card or visa
  5. Give amnesty to all undocumented immigrants currently residing within the United States
  6. 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.

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Double Agent in Detroit: Anti-Communism at the Local Level

Looking at anti-communism before the McCarthyist era at the local level, Joshua Morris dissects the career of an industrial double-agent William Gernaey. We publish this not only for its contribution to the history of the US Communist Movement and industrial organizing and counter-organizing but also for its depiction of the internal day-to-day operation of the CPUSA in an era of intense class conflict and anti-communism.

The history of anticommunism in the United States in the post-war era is well documented.  Recent scholarship and the availability of newer data from primary sources in the past five years, however, has made it possible to examine the extent to which anticommunism during the interwar years influenced and set the stage for the postwar Red Scare. These developments in the historiography owe much to the work of Ellen Schrecker, whose examination of anticommunism in film, media, and academia helped dislodge the history of American Communism from a history of subversives acting for foreign interests. We now know that this history of radical political and labor activism had extensive domestic roots.  Newer scholarship specifically focusing on anticommunism, such as Jennifer Luff’s and Donna Haverty-Stacke’s works, help shed light on the domestic roots of resistance to communist organizing extending as far back as the early 1920s. This new research seeks to explore the domestic nature of anticommunism and its roots in an era prior to the Cold War era, where Communism as a foreign rival dominated US politics. 1 

According to Jennifer Luff, what we think of as “anticommunism” was a mix of decades-old resistance stemming from antiradical labor activists within the American Federation of Labor between 1921 and 1939 and anti-New Deal Republicans from 1936-1952 that took on the form of a social and political monolith. 2 The FBI’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation (BI), had, as early as 1921, conducted regular checks on known Workers’ Party associates as well as non-Party communists.  While many civil libertarians protested the procedure of the BI, the Department of Justice viewed it as “the best way to avoid the snail’s pace of the courts” and allowed the investigations to continue throughout the late 1920s and 1930s.3 Anticommunism has roots in local communities across America, with many of its most effective organizers merely acting as informers and reporters for corporate or government bodies. One way the BI succeeded in localized operations was by relying on private companies that already had the means of infiltrating unions and shop committees. Such was the story of William Gernaey from Detroit.  Gernaey’s experience helps unveil the complex nature of both anticommunist industrial espionage as well as communist entryism tactics during the peak of the Depression and the early stages of the Popular Front.  Both industrial informants and communist infiltrators understood “the skill of semi-illegal methods of work” to avoid being discovered as well as building relationships with fellow workers on the basis of trust and cooperation.  In turn, they acted as class collaborationists to help limit the success of communist activism in industrial parts of the nation.

Born in February of 1903, Gernaey grew up the son of a tool and die maker near the east side of Detroit.  After graduating from Eastern High School in 1919, Gernaey worked a series of intermittent jobs until deciding to attend Detroit Business University, which eventually landed him a position at the Detroit Independent Oil Company.  There, his manager exposed him to Taylorism and efficiency management, as well as the growing effort to extend managerial oversight over the workforce in the midst of a growing national labor consciousness. Gernaey was a typical conservative-minded working class American and believed that the growing labor movement represented a threat to the life his parents worked hard for.  He was proud to learn about efficiency management and believed he was helping to make American workplaces both safer and more efficient, thus leading to lower prices and more available products for the average American. Through this process, Gernaey became adept at pointing out ineffectiveness and discrepancies in worker output and managerial authority. He was also popular among the workers; he gave workers the benefit of the doubt in most scenarios and called out the inefficiency of management when he saw it necessary.  After the company changed owners in July of 1925, Gernaey received an “anonymous” phone call asking if he would be interested in efficiency work for a private company.4

Gernaey in middle of photo with tan clothing.

Created in the early years of the 20th century, the Corporation Auxiliary Company (CAC), also sometimes called the Corporation Auxiliary Service, functioned as an administration of industrial espionage that hired organizers and efficiency experts to sabotage industrial organizing efforts and hubs of suspected radicalism dating back to the early 1910s.  The CAC particularly built hubs in cities like Chicago and Detroit, focusing on the parts and supply companies for the auto industry. Unlike other espionage agencies that hired gunman and violent strikebreakers, the CAC focused “exclusively on spying.” By the mid-1930s, from ’33 to ’36, the Chrysler Corporation provided the bulk of CAC’s funding, amounting to $275,000 over the course of three years.  The CAC’s promises to its clients were to penetrate union leadership positions and lower-ranking union member meetings to stimulate “racial antagonism in the union ranks” as a means to “undermine strike solidarity” and turn over the names of leading organizers to the company.5Most company spies, including Gernaey, faced exposure by sit-down strikers in 1937 and were identified to their union as company stool pigeons, effectively ending the highly influential role of the CAC on business practices in industrial cities.  Those hired by the CAC and left without a job typically turned to management services for companies such as Ford, or to the federal government and subsequently employed by the FBI.6

One such effort by the CAC in the mid-to-late 1920s involved the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and an investigation as to the extent to which communists influenced local labor union halls in cities such as Detroit and Chicago.  This was during an era of the evolution of early anticommunist strategy that attempted to rationally combat the movement as opposed to placating it publicly as a pariah. Individuals like Gernaey were “not paid to help build the Communist Party, but rather to help, in whatever way possible, to break it down.”  To facilitate this espionage, the CAC’s spies infiltrated local union efforts under the auspice of a genuine industrial worker; a tactic nearly identical to the 1920s unionist method of “entryism” promoted by leftist, syndicalist, and communist groups. Informants had to “gain the confidence of the people within” and most importantly “gain leadership” as a means to combating the persistent search for “stool pigeons.”7  When convincing employers to accept contracts, the CAC assured them that their informants and subversives would “get acquainted” with the workforce and “engineer things so as to keep organization out.”  Should this first effort fail, the informant would then “become the leading spirit and pick out just the right men” to lead the organization so as to assure its inevitable failure.8

Gernaey found his way to the CAC headquarters located in the Hoffman Building at Woodward and Sibley.  Hired to perform “efficiency work” on behalf of the local business community, Gernaey was told that his employment would be contractual with individual clients.   The company admitted to gathering data on his work with Independent Oil via their own internal sources and expressed promise in his ability to navigate between the sentiments of management and workers.  For his first assignment, the CAC sent him to Shell Oil, followed by the Wayco Oil Company. While given a position and a manager to report to, Gernaey’s managers were never made aware of his role as an efficiency expert.  Working the factory under the auspice of an average worker, Gernaey “wrote daily reports of activities, sentiment of the employees, supervisors, etc.” Gernaey also tried to imbue his fellow workers with etiquette, routinely instructing them on “how to conduct the work, give service, [and] courtesy.”  In under a year, Gernaey performed exceptionally for various oil companies in the city through CAC. He even prevented the loss of around $50,000 in oil after discovering a secret plan to steal oil reserves. To perfect his skills as a subversive efficiency expert, the CAC sent him semi-weekly lessons on “Time Study and Efficiency Detail.”  After working for the company for two years, he was given an assignment that would change his life forever.

In early 1927, the CAC tasked Gernaey with infiltrating the Chrysler plant in Highland Park just Southwest of Detroit.  After obtaining an assignment on the line, Gernaey began his observatory work and his reporting of inefficiency; such as reporting foremen who pushed workers to the point that they quit, criticizing workers who slowed down the line and encouraging fellow workers to avoid loss of material.  Like many of his previous jobs, Gernaey found it easy to get along with his fellow workers and showed little favoritism over efficiency issues. He also avoided reporting certain incidents such as theft and petty grievances because to do so would threaten his nature as a subversive for the company.  Gernaey worked in the plant for two years, until being laid off in the spring of 1929 due to the early stages of the Depression. His managers could not make an exception for the very simple fact that they were unaware of his role in the company. This did not deter his employers, however, who desired to see him continue his work in another way:  They asked him to infiltrate the local Detroit communist movement.

In 1929, the American Communist movement was emerging into its “Third Period” of organization where its goal was to contrast the goals of socialism against so-called “progressive” and “social-fascist” organizations such as the Socialist Party and segments of radicals who left the CPUSA on the grounds of their support for Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky.  In Detroit, the CPUSA focused its efforts on organizing the factory and auto workers as well as combating discrimination of non-whites. The CPUSA’s national tactic for organizing was the creation of radically-led communist unions under the umbrella of its Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), headed by CPUSA Presidential nominee William Foster. In many cities, however, such as Detroit and Chicago, the local scene of labor dictated the what path the communists would follow as opposed to the national leadership of the Party’s preferences. In the case of Detroit auto workers, entryism, or “boring from within,” was the preferred tactic.

As far as domestic anticommunism at the time, recent research suggests a pattern between the development of “armchair anticommunism” who worried about the “social anarchy” of revolution and labor anticommunists who sought to curb the political influence of radicals in both the unions and in broader society.  On the whole, however, American Communism “held little appeal for Americans” and thus the efforts to resist it as a movement were more of an attempt to expose the presence of communists as opposed to counter their methodology or philosophy.9  Most average Detroit citizens believed that “communists were all foreigners or Russians with beards and bombs” and had caricatures in newspapers to sustain this image.  The business community of Detroit was likely aware to some degree of the presence of communist organizers, but certainly not to the extent to which they had influence among the local workforce by 1929.  To find the extent of communist presence and expose it, business leaders turned to companies like the CAC and men like Gernaey because they were effective but more importantly expendable units in the effort to identify communist organizers.  

Gernaey was instructed by his adviser to attempt to join the CPUSA by “hanging around communist halls,” which he learned quickly was a mistake.  His first attempt at mingling with workers in labor-oriented bars “showed [him] that every communist is suspicious of a stranger.” To get involved, Gernaey needed a direct in and he needed more than just placement to obtain it.  He needed to build a character, and role play, with a background and an identity that gave purpose and meaning to an affinity for communism. Once he was ready, he attended a “youth mass meeting” at Grandy Hall on Theodore Street where he met Max Shapiro and Joe Siroka and two other organizers, who were the only men attending the “mass meeting.”  Gernaey told the local CPUSA and Youth Communist League (YCL) organizers that he was “a beraggled young fellow without a home, job or means to get a meal.” As the only attendee of the meeting, the four men sympathized with Gernaey, fed him, and gave him instructions on where to find the next meeting.

The next night, Gernaey went to 2984 Yemens Street, where an underground restaurant was hosting a meeting for the local CPUSA district.  In the restaurant, CP organizers and YCL leaders were spread out at different tables, talking amongst themselves about their hopes and plans for the coming months.  Once the meeting started, Gernaey learned a few things about his local communist scene, namely that “plans [were] rarely carried out” and the district local was more talkative than it was effective at agreeing on what to do.  When asked openly by the district leaders why he decided to join the CPUSA, Gernaey responded by saying “a new broom always sweeps best.” Gernaey’s commitment to his role resulted in precisely what the CPUSA wanted to hear: acceptance of the new Third Period program, rejection of the old ways.  As far as the district leader Joe York was concerned, Gernaey “was in.”

Despite “losing” his job with Chrysler, Gernaey ate for free while working with the local CPUSA, and was also offered places to stay rent-free.  At the first meeting and in subsequent months Gernaey made friends with Mary Hemoff, a Central Committee member for the Michigan CPUSA and member of the National Secretariat of the YCL.  In less than a month, the CPUSA sent Michigan leader Joe York to the Soviet Union to study labor theory, and Gernaey was handed the job of organizing Hamtramck and Northern Detroit and keeping watch on the local YCL.  Within a few weeks, Gernaey noticed common trends within the Detroit CP, such as high turnover rate for membership but low turnover for leadership. Additionally, because the CPUSA remained isolated and removed from the broad masses of Detroit amidst its shifting base membership, the leadership formed “a bureaucratic clique.” Within his local YCL meetings, he noted a tendency for the members to prefer study periods over discussions about activism. This sort of general malaise among local communists is not unknown; numerous examples of the CPUSA’s limited organizational capacity exist in the historiography, such as future CPUSA leader John Gates’ preference for attending reading seminars at college instead of organizing local workers.10 Due to his tenacity as a newer member, Gernaey was offered the chance to attend the Lenin School in the Soviet Union, but turned it down.  While accepting his role within the CPUSA as necessary for his goal as an informant, he felt that by accepting formal education in a school of Marxism he would undo his self-respect and become too caught up in the bureaucracy of the movement.11

In February of 1933, Gernaey and the local Detroit CPUSA found their first major moment when the employees of the Briggs Manufacturing facility went on strike over a wage cut.  Nationally, the CPUSA reported the strike as the result of Briggs workers suffering as “the most exploited in the entire auto industry” throughout the early years of the Depression.12 The company refused to negotiate with the strike committee on the grounds that they were communists.  Workers, in turn, denied the charge and emphasized their use of American flags and the exclusion of communists from committee leadership positions.13 Gernaey, however, reported that the Party not only had operatives within the plant including himself, they also were voted to the shop committee leadership.  As the strike committee’s lead organizer, Gernaey led “in all discussions on maneuvers and policy” and litigated employees on how to carry out the committee’s demands.14  A local radical publication, the Detroit Leader, responded in turn by telling Briggs factory workers to recognize “the class struggle” and accept that “the interest of the workers and the employers are never identical.”15 Again in 1934, because of his work during the Briggs strike, nation CPUSA leader William Weinstone gave him a chance to attend the Lenin School, and again, Gernaey turned the offer down.

From then on, Gernaey set his aims at breaking up the YCL and the overall effectiveness of the CPUSA at the community level.  To accomplish this, he took steps to disrupt the attempt of the Party to engage with the public. His first attempt occurred on May 30th, 1935, when the district CPUSA organized an anti-war demonstration in Grand Circus Park.  Gernaey told his YCL district to instead act as “nuisances” and ordered his comrades to remain isolated, avoiding the baseball crowds and masses marching for Memorial Day. Instead of marching on Grand River, where the CPUSA desired the members to be active, Gernaey held his YCL parade several blocks from the main boulevard, and began at 1pm “when the crowds [were] at their weakest.”  Gernaey also redirected pro-labor parades away from downtown regularly and avoided organizing near the major Dodge plants.16 Despite numerous successful attempts to split and slow down the local effectiveness of the YCL, Gernaey retained his leadership position until by the end of 1935 he was formally brought into the CPUSA, given the title of district organizer for the Labor Sports Union (LSU), and a weekly salary of $5.  Gernaey continued to command the local YCL as well, but his covert activities did very little to tip off local and national CPUSA leaders.17

At LSU, Gernaey met and worked with George Kristalsky and Jack Mahoney in Hamtramck to staff a local unemployment council.  Unemployment councils were the bread and butter of the early-to-mid 1930s American Communist movement. Organized as a local response to the conditions of the depression, their history was rooted in an effort to “organize the unemployed” and the semi-joint effort of the CPUSA, the Socialist Party of America (SPA), and the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA).  Between 1930 and 1932, the councils found common ground to build what they called a united front against unemployment. While never as successful in terms of policy as they were in numbers and popularity, the councils did serve as the basis for maintaining a cooperative alliance between Leftist groups in the early 1930s despite the Third Period ideology of resisting cooperative work.  In other cases, they served to further divide Leftists as was the case in Chicago, 1932.18  By 1935, the councils served as a membership recruitment system in industrial areas like Detroit.  This process began after the Socialists refused to support the CPUSA’s banners and symbolism in 1932, and as the depression worsened to increase evictions across the nation.  Gernaey watched as his YCL local became infused with numerous new “young ruffians” who turned to militant radicalism and wanted to physically resist the efforts of landlords. To maintain his leadership, Gernaey did little to stop the younger members from putting the furniture back into homes after evictions and climbing telephone and electric poles to reconnect houses to the grid.  By 1935, however, the CPUSA was beginning to change and so was their dependent unemployment councils.

Many organizations the CPUSA tacitly or overtly supported prior to 1935, such as the Ukranian Women’s Club and the Russian Workers’ Club, were liquidated to streamline meetings together and tighten up the local Detroit membership.  The Detroit Unemployment Council was renamed the Workers Alliance Local and communists were instructed to direct their attention toward the organization of Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers. To secure their control over local unions, such as Teamsters Local 830, communists on the shop committee placed fellow comrades into the best positions and delegated the most difficult work to workers who refused to join.  While the union attracted numerous WPA employees who were desired for their skilled labor, communist shop leaders ensured that initial meetings were mixed with an effort to encourage involvement in local CPUSA politics. Through his work with the WPA employees, Genaey found that communist organizers were exceptionally skilled at performing their “semi-illegal” activities while simultaneously embodying the idea of an “elite” Communist Party member.  Likewise, the most active and visible communists within a union local or a community had “very little time for amusements.” As representatives of their national Party, they went from meeting to meeting, event to event, dressed as professionals and financed by the Party to appear as the most successful of workers.19

Gernaey’s work with the CPUSA continued unabated until spring of 1937 when two men entered the CPUSA office in Detroit and handed him a call letter to testify to the La Follette Committee in Washington.  At the time, the La Follette committee was exposing the work of numerous CAC informants at various levels throughout Detroit. After agreeing to testify, Gernaey was told to leave Detroit. It was the belief of his non-communist associates that the labor movement would only continue to organize and retain communists in leadership positions, effectively limiting Gernaey’s ability to remain active.  He returned all of his union-related property, such as his typewriter, books, and stationary, and severed his ties with the local CPUSA. Quickly, the union issued a request to hold a public trial of Gernaey as a possible spy, which he avoided. Only a few days after the trial, Gernaey was told that the CAC was going out of business as a result of the continued exposure of its informants. When Gernaey pressured his boss to explain how the union became aware of his testimonies, he was told that the union or the local communists likely went through his mail or had figured out a discrepancy in post office box numbers between union members and Party members.  The local CPUSA responded in full force, placing Gernaey’s photograph in the pages of the Daily Worker and labeling him and all company informants as “rats.”  Also in less than a year, Gernaey’s wife left him for a family friend and filed for divorce.20

The early work of William Gernaey is a watershed moment in the research of early American Communism and the roots of domestic anticommunism.  Gernaey went on to testify before the Dies Committee, work as a subversive within the Ford Motor Company, and eventually hired by the FBI. What is compelling about Gernaey’s story is the way it highlights anticommunism as a localized effort, and more importantly one that extends from specific business communities as opposed to industry or politics at the national level.  Such a development took the onset of the Cold War and the rampant tensions of postwar Europe. It also helps further understand domestic anticommunism as a phenomenon taken up by both companies and individuals for personal reasons. For the CAC, anticommunism was business and throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, business was exceptionally good. Gernaey’s testimony helps to show that for individual informants, much of their work was seen as a natural extension of their skills and passion for the ideals of capitalism.  It is important, moving forward, to understand anticommunism as both endemic of the postwar Cold War, but also rooted in domestic, localized business interests in terms of controlling and swaying workers’ sense of ideological commitment.

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Why Have a Political Program?

Parker McQueeney lays out the case for building a party around a minimum-maximum program. 

Every party pursues definite aims, whether it be a party of landowners or capitalists, on the one hand, or a party of workers or peasants, on the other… If it be a party of capitalists and factory owners, it will have its own aims: to procure cheap labour, to keep the workers well in hand, to find customers to toil harder—but, above all, so to arrange matters that the workers will have no tendency to allow their thoughts to turn towards ideas of a new social order; let the workers think that there always have been masters and always will be masters… The programme is for every party a matter of supreme importance. From the programme we can always learn what interests the party represents.

—Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky,
The ABC of Communism, 1920

In the Autumn of 1891, Germany’s socialist party—the Social Democratic Party of Germany, or SPD—had only the world to win. Just one year prior, the party’s chief prosecutor and preeminent tyrant of the European continent, Otto von Bismarck, was forced to resign. The Reichstag refused to renew Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist laws, which had shut down dozens of newspapers, trade unions, and socialist meetings. This all happened within the span of a month. It is safe to say that when the party met for its Congress in Erfurt, they were bolstered in a manner that European socialists had not been since the rise of the Paris Commune twenty years before. The Erfurt Program is notable for a myriad of reasons, not least of which includes the declaration that:

The German Social Democratic Party… fights for the abolition of class rule and of classes themselves, for equal rights and equal obligations for all, without distinction of sex or birth… it fights not only the exploitation and oppression of wage earners in society today, but every manner of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, party, sex, or race.1

The Erfurt Program asserted, as Marx had, that socialists must fight for democratic rights within bourgeois society. With historical hindsight, it seems clear enough that capitalism cannot be abolished via a socialist party simply winning elections in a bourgeois government. In Bolivarian Venezuela, Mitterand’s France, and Tsipras’s Greece, the governing socialist parties were able to sit behind the wheel of a liberal democracy, yet none of these countries were able to meaningfully disrupt capitalism. This does not mean that basic bourgeois-democratic rights have no use to even the most revolutionary of socialists; the SPD learned under Bismarck that universal suffrage, the right to free assembly, the ability to form unions, and the abolition of censorship are all helpful to a proletariat undergoing a transformation into a “class-for-itself”. Although winning these reforms are not the first step on the path to socialism, they do clear debris that blocks the entrance. “If all the 10 demands were granted,” Friedrich Engels speculated in his critique of the Erfurt Program draft, “we should indeed have more diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no [way] have been achieved.”2

Karl Kautsky, the primary theorist behind the Erfurt Program.

The more lasting legacy the Erfurt Program had on socialist thought was in its popularization of the minimum and maximum program—though these were abstracted from Karl Marx and Jules Guesde in their program for the French Workers’ Party, eleven years prior.3Since Erfurt, the program has been the focal point for every party of the class. As Bukharin and Preobrazhensky argue in The ABC of Communism, “The programme is for every party a matter of supreme importance. From the programme we can always learn what interests the party represents.”4 Theoretically, the minimum program, which was the party’s reform platform, would win over a mass base of workers by improving their immediate conditions. When enacted in full, it would give the party the necessary mandate and class power to enable its maximum program, or the revolutionary measures required to actually eradicate the dictatorship of capital and begin the process of developing a socialist mode of production. In reality, the SPD—along with the other parties of the Second International—eschewed their maximum programs as they became gradually more entrenched into the bourgeois constitutional order. Whether in the trade union bureaucracy, the universities, or the Reichstag, the Second International’s loyalty to the capitalist state and nation eventually led the majority of its parties to abandon internationalism by siding with their respective home countries during the outbreak of World War I. It is a tragedy often lamented on the Left.

Although the term amounts to welfare state liberalism today, the social democrats of Erfurt were largely Marxists. Nevertheless, as a nominally social democratic movement appears to be re-emerging onto American politics for the first time in the life of many of its participants, what can contemporary socialists in the United States learn from the original social democrats? In many ways, the US Left is in a similar position that German social democrats found themselves in around the time of the Erfurt Congress. Both had recently come out with some unthinkable—at least to the ruling class—victories after decades of suppression and neither had ever meaningfully seen power. More importantly, the 1891 SPD and the 2018 American Left share a common primary task: the consolidation of workers into a class-for-ourselves, cognizant of our common condition and interests.

What were the minimum demands of the Erfurt Program? The first seven dealt exclusively with securing and expanding democratic-republican rights. Perhaps shockingly, many of their demands would still be progressive gains 127 years later: legal holidays on election days, ending voter suppression, popular militias in place of standing armies, free meals for school children, gender equality in the legal sphere, elected judges, and the end of capital punishment. The first seven demands read:

  • Universal, equal, and direct suffrage with secret ballot in all elections, for all citizens of the Reich over the age of twenty, without distinction of sex. Proportional representation, and, until this is introduced, legal redistribution of electoral districts after every census. Two-year legislative periods. Holding of elections on a legal holiday. Compensation for elected representatives. Suspension of every restriction on political rights, except in the case of legal incapacity.
  • Direct legislation by the people through the rights of proposal and rejection. Self-determination and self-government of the people in Reich, state, province, and municipality. Election by the people of magistrates, who are answerable and liable to them. Annual voting of taxes.
  • Education of all to bear arms. Militia in the place of the standing army. Determination by the popular assembly on questions of war and peace. Settlement of all international disputes by arbitration.
  • Abolition of all laws that place women at a disadvantage compared with men in matters of public or private law.Abolition of all laws that limit or suppress the free expression of opinion and restrict or suppress the right of association and assembly. Declaration that religion is a private matter. Abolition of all expenditures from public funds for ecclesiastical and religious purposes. Ecclesiastical and religious communities are to be regarded as private associations that regulate their affairs entirely autonomously.
  • Secularization of schools. Compulsory attendance at the public Volksschule [extended elementary school]. Free education, free educational materials, and free meals in the public Volksschulen, as well as at higher educational institutions for those boys and girls considered qualified for further education by virtue of their abilities.
  • Free administration of justice and free legal assistance. Administration of the law by judges elected by the people. Appeal in criminal cases. Compensation for individuals unjustly accused, imprisoned, or sentenced. Abolition of capital punishment.

It is important to note that although these were serious, immediate demands, some were not “realistic” nor “winnable”. Women’s suffrage was not granted in Germany until nearly 30 years after the Erfurt Program was drafted. Replacing the standing army with a militia was perhaps the most radical of all their demands: the Prussian state was highly centralized, and to eradicate the standing army would have amounted to a revolutionary rupture within the state. When drafting a political program, even when demanding reforms, it’s important for socialists not to limit our horizons to what bourgeois politicians and their apologists tell us is possible; otherwise, we are liable to again tail their inevitable sprints to the right. Ideally, a socialist program would include measures that, once undertaken, will not only improve the condition of the working class, but begin to dismantle the dictatorship of capital.

Cover of Erfurt Program, 1892

The next group of demands were in the economic sphere, and included free healthcare, burial, a progressive tax, a series of labor demands surrounding unions, the work-day, the creation of a department of labor, etc.:

  • Free medical care, including midwifery and medicines. Free burial.
  • Graduated income and property tax for defraying all public expenditures, to the extent that they are to be paid for by taxation. Inheritance tax, graduated according to the size of the inheritance and the degree of kinship. Abolition of all indirect taxes, customs, and other economic measures that sacrifice the interests of the community to those of a privileged few.
  • Fixing of a normal working day not to exceed eight hours.
  • Prohibition of gainful employment for children under the age of fourteen.
  • Prohibition of night work, except in those industries that require night work for inherent technical reasons or for reasons of public welfare.
  • An uninterrupted rest period of at least thirty-six hours every week for every worker.
  • Prohibition of the truck system.
  • Supervision of all industrial establishments, investigation and regulation of working conditions in the cities and the countryside by a Reich labor department, district labor bureaus, and chambers of labor. Rigorous industrial hygiene.
  • Legal equality of agricultural laborers and domestic servants with industrial workers; abolition of the laws governing domestics.
  • Safeguarding of the freedom of association.
  • Takeover by the Reich government of the entire system of workers’ insurance, with decisive participation by the workers in its administration.

The reason these demands were worth fighting for was twofold. Most obviously, things like political enfranchisement and universal healthcare alleviate some of the alienation caused by capitalist society. Perhaps more crucially though, these demands were posited by a working-class institution with a working-class awareness.

What is a working-class institution? Historically, they may mirror republican civic institutions, but within the class party. A good example of an institution within the SPD was its party school. Every class party needs political education, recruiting the working masses is a foolish endeavor without internal political clarification and cadre training- not to unquestioningly accept party dogmatism, but to properly apply the historical materialist methodology and critical analysis to the daily struggles of workers. In her piece on the SPD party school for the British Left magazine The Clarion, Rida Vaquas writes:

…the best demonstration of what the Party School could achieve of a project comes not from the words of its teachers, but from the legacies of its students. In a 1911 retrospective of the Party School after 5 years of its existence, Heinrich Schulz recorded the debts students owed their school experience: “A trade union official observes that he learned how to conceive of phenomena in economic life better through his school instruction, another gained a deeper insight into the whole political and trade union life, a third traces back his greater confidence against political and economic opponents to the school”. The school, when it succeeded, was a training in how to think, not what to think.5

Working class institution can take forms not only of political education but of what some socialists label “dual power” (though not in the way Lenin used the term). They have taken the form of free health clinics, breakfast programs for school children, housing, and worker cooperatives, or any number of things, but they need to be part of a larger project of working-class political struggle: the class party.

Despite the innovations of the Erfurt Program, the SPD, along with most of the parties from the Second International, voted for war credits in 1914 causing a traumatic rupture in the international socialist movement. There were, however, a few examples of the classical social democratic parties that retained their internationalist class solidarity. One of these was a party that contemporary American socialists can and should study, and it’s one of our own ancestors: the Socialist Party of America. The 1912 SPA platform, adopted in May at a congress in Indianapolis, follows a similar format to the Erfurt Program. The 106-year-old document is chillingly relevant. The introduction of its minimum program plainly states its ultimate goal:

As measures calculated to strengthen the working class in its fight for the realization of its ultimate aim, the co-operative commonwealth, and to increase its power against capitalist oppression, we advocate and pledge ourselves and our elected officers to the following program…

It starts with several paragraphs outlining the broad goals of the Socialist Party—its maximum program—declaring the nation to be “in the absolute control of a plutocracy which exacts an annual tribute of hundreds of millions of dollars from the producers.” It declares unilaterally that capitalism is the source of destitution in the working class, that “the legislative representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties remain the faithful servants of the oppressors”, and any legislation attempting at balancing the distance between classes “have proved to be utterly futile and ridiculous.” It says plainly that

there will be and can be no remedy and no substantial relief except through Socialism under which industry will be carried on for the common good and every worker receive the full social value of the wealth he creates.

The minimum demands of the 1912 SPA platform constitute a significant improvement compared to the Erfurt Program. Instead of two sections—one political, one economic—the SPA platform includes four sections: collective ownership, unemployment, industrial demands, and political demands. The collective ownership section only reinforces the point that the socialist platform when enacted should create a rupture in the class character of the state:

  • The collective ownership and democratic management of railroads, wire and wireless telegraphs and telephones, express service, steamboat lines, and all other social means of transportation and communication and of all large scale industries.
  • The immediate acquirement by the municipalities, the states or the federal government of all grain elevators, stock yards, storage warehouses, and other distributing agencies, in order to reduce the present extortionate cost of living.
  • The extension of the public domain to include mines, quarries, oil wells, forests and water power.
  • The further conservation and development of natural resources for the use and benefit of all the people . . .
  • The collective ownership of land wherever practicable, and in cases where such ownership is impracticable, the appropriation by taxation of the annual rental value of all the land held for speculation and exploitation.
  • The collective ownership and democratic management of the banking and currency system.

It is clear that the nationalization of the bourgeois state’s institutional levers of power; banks, currency, natural resources, land, distribution centers, transportation, and communications, would catalyze the disintegration of capitalist class rule. It’s important to note that these were the very first things listed on the platform.

The next section dealt with a universal jobs demand. Unlike the Erfurt Program, here the American socialists remind themselves of who their ultimate enemy is in evoking the maximum program and capitalist class “misrule”:

The immediate government relief of the unemployed by the extension of all useful public works. All persons employed on such works to be engaged directly by the government under a work day of not more than eight hours and at not less than the prevailing union wages. The government also to establish employment bureaus; to lend money to states and municipalities without interest for the purpose of carrying on public works, and to take such other measures within its power as will lessen the widespread misery of the workers caused by the misrule of the capitalist class.

This isn’t a radical demand in 2018; it’s even looking likely that Senator Bernie Sanders will make it a key point in the next presidential campaign, and he is often the first one to admit his positions are not radical. In 1912 however, before the Wagner Act of 1935 was passed, “employees… [did] not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract”. The Wagner Act, also known as the National Labor Relations Act, which had legalized strikes and union organizing as well as guaranteed the right to collective bargaining, was severely gutted twelve years later under the Truman administration.

The SPA’s industrial demands contain standard labor issues that American socialists had been calling on for years, mostly dealing with workplace safety, reducing work hours, child labor laws, establishing minimum wage, etc. One calls for an establishment of a pension system. A few demands stand out, however, one prefiguring prison abolitionism calling for “the co-operative organization of the industries in the federal penitentiaries for the benefit of the convicts and their dependents.” Another calls for “forbidding the interstate transportation of the products of child labor, of convict labor and all uninspected factories and mines.” Perhaps their most creative and radical demand was “abolishing the profit system in government work and substituting either the direct hire of labor or the awarding of contracts to co-operative groups of workers.” It’s hard to imagine events like the Iraq War or the recent human disaster in Puerto Rico happening the way they did without the juicy private contracts (although there is nothing about a worker cooperative that inherently prevents it from taking part in imperial plundering).

The political demands section proposes a broad outline for transforming the state:

  • The absolute freedom of press, speech and assemblage.
  • The abolition of the monopoly ownership of patents and the substitution of collective ownership, with direct rewards to inventors by premiums or royalties.
  • Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.
  • The adoption of the initiative, referendum and recall and of proportional representation, nationally as well as locally.
  • The abolition of the Senate and of the veto power of the President.
  • The election of the President and Vice-President by direct vote of the people.
  • The abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of the legislation enacted by Congress. National laws to be repealed only by act of Congress or by a referendum vote of the whole people.
  • Abolition of the present restrictions upon the amendment of the Constitution, so that instrument may be made amendable by a majority of the voters in a majority of the States.
  • The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia with representation in Congress and a democratic form of municipal government for purely local affairs.
  • The extension of democratic government to all United States territory.
  • The enactment of further measures for the conservation of health. The creation of an independent bureau of health, with such restrictions as will secure full liberty to all schools of practice.
  • The enactment of further measures for general education and particularly for vocational education in useful pursuits. The Bureau of Education to be made a department.
  • The separation of the present Bureau of Labor from the Department of Commerce and Labor and its elevation to the rank of a department.
  • Abolition of an federal districts courts and the United States circuit court of appeals. State courts to have jurisdiction in all cases arising between citizens of several states and foreign corporations. The election of all judges for short terms.
  • The immediate curbing of the power of the courts to issue injunctions.
  • The free administration of the law.
  • The calling of a convention for the revision of the constitution of the US.

Here the Socialist Party lists some serious alterations to the existing governmental structure. They call for the abolition of the Senate with its overrepresentation for people in less populous states, the electoral college, the presidential veto, and judicial review. They demand a process for popular recall of politicians and legislation. They even call for a new constitutional convention. All of these things would be improvements and are predicated on a big enough success of the Socialist Party to implement them (otherwise, a constitutional convention could obviously be disastrous). These demands on their own however do not constitute a rupture with the bourgeois state. It is the political demands in combination with their collective ownership demands that do, by first eviscerating the major sources of economic power from their capitalists. These measures would only constitute the beginning of a revolutionary rupture from the capitalist class rule, as the last part of the platform states,

Such measures of relief as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole powers of government, in order that they may thereby lay hold of the whole system of socialized industry and thus come to their rightful inheritance.

The socialist magazine Jacobin, which is heavily associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (and its largest chapter in New York City) has seemingly adopted as creed what Andre Gorz named “non-reformist reforms”. Gorz believed the dichotomy of the pre-war era between militant revolution or reform no longer existed. Now that armed insurrection was forever a relic of a simpler time, Gorz argued that the only route to socialism was by pushing reform that couldn’t be usurped by capital. Like many in his generation, Gorz saw the development of a postwar middle class and concluded that class struggle would forever be muted in the imperialist countries. The logical basis for this assumption can only be one thing: by entering the middle class and becoming propertied homeowners (among other things) first-world workers transitioned into a social category where revolution was no longer in their interests. As the onslaught of austerity and neoliberalism has proven, class struggle is not mutable, and to proclaim so is the gravest abandonment of the historical materialist methodology. Today, the  question of reform vs. revolution is just as relevant as when Rosa Luxemburg wrote:

Legislative reform and revolution are not different methods of historic development that can be picked out at the pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. Legislative reform and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other, and are at the same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and proletariat.6

Truly “non-reformist reforms”, like those in the SPA platform of 1912, do not discount the possibility of a class social revolution, they depend on it. The current use of the term repeats all the same mistakes of Bernstein’s evolutionary socialism that Rosa Luxemburg famously polemicized.

The major “non-reformist reforms” today seems to be shaped around a few key maxims, not dissimilar to some of the demands from the earlier German and American socialists: “tuition-free public universities”, “Medicare-for all”, and more recently, “abolish ICE”. But how did these demands develop? They were not produced organically by working-class institutions. They were touted by individuals claiming to be democratic socialists, running on the Democratic Party ballot line. First by Bernie Sanders, next through Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Immediately they were taken up by Jacobin and the DSA.

Could socialists temporarily use the Democratic ballot line, where third party campaigns are untenable until the mass base for an independent socialist party is built? Perhaps, though this is a debate for another time. But should this really be how socialist demands are developed? Instead of echoing demands scribed by politicians, they should be echoing our demands. And our demands should be in service to the ascension of the proletariat as a politically independent class actor, and towards a rupture with the capitalist nature of the state.

The most prominent socialist group in the US, Democratic Socialists of America, lacks any real political program. Its chapters are too federated, and the biennial national conventions are not frequent nor far-reaching enough for it to be a force for class struggle on a wide scale. How can there be “non-reformist reforms” without a class organization with unified goals pushing them? Instead of allowing independent politicians with support from socialists to steer the conversation with demands like  “abolish ICE”, we should be giving our demands to them. The Immigrant Justice Working Group of the Central New Jersey DSA provides for us a good example of what 21st century socialist demands look like:

  • An immediate end to all detentions and deportations, and dismissal of all related charges.
  • Abolition of ICE and all other military or quasi-military border forces.
  • Unconditional right to asylum to be granted upon request to anyone coming from a country that has been negatively impacted by US military or economic policies, or the policies of US corporations.
  • Citizenship and full rights (such as access to entitlement programs) upon request to anyone who has lived or worked in the US for at least six months.

The modern United States is not the Prussian state of 130 years ago, nor are its socialists facing the same conditions they faced in 1912. Demands that socialists make must reflect the realities of contemporary capitalism and its world system: nobody wants to merely recreate the old SPD or SPA. Still, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Socialists should be making demands that go beyond reverting to Bush-era normalcy: they should be pushing demands that the bourgeois parties tell us are impossible, and a political program is the only way to do so. These demands should aim to build class power both in the economic and political spheres. If DSA chapters started internally adopting programs with a little vision, they could eventually map one onto the national organization. DSA needs to become part of an organization with real class power independent of the Democrats, and it will never do that without first adopting formal demands at the national level that differentiates itself as a party divested from the interests of the capitalist class. Without a political program, we have no way of seriously posing an alternative to the established parties of capital, and articulating a vision of society for the democratic class rule of workers.