Without a Party, We Have Nothing

Donald Parkinson responds to Taylor B’s Beginning’s of Politics: DSA and the Uprising, arguing that a workers’ party is necessary to advance an emancipatory politics.

The past eight months have been unlike any other. Political strife in the Democratic Primary had already been taking place when the Covid-19 pandemic brought about a massive health crisis coupled with economic dislocation that led to historic levels of unemployment. It was only a matter of time before mass unrest began, with the murder of George Floyd by the police state acting as the spark that set into motion months of protesting and rioting. In these months countless Americans had their first taste of collective political action. The intensity of the wave of struggles for many felt like a rupture with the past. Politics was no longer confined to the plaything of property owners and technocratic experts but something contested by the plebian masses in struggle.

This feeling of a decisive break, of a new qualitative situation, is what leads Taylor B to declare the rise of democratic socialism through the Sanders campaign and the mass protests of Black Lives Matter as a “birth of politics”, a singular event that in its own processes of social mobilization create new possibilities for a future communist horizon. This feeling of a qualitative break leads him to see these events as singular, as heralding a new creative process that will break from all the old muck of the past and create new forms of organization. It is this approach that leads Taylor B to mistakenly declare that in this singular process we must instead declare our fidelity to the spontaneous energies of the event, to see where it goes and what it creates rather than trying to impose our own ideas upon it. And the most dangerous of those ideas is the notion of the workers’ party, which Taylor B declares to be a force of neutralization in the current conjuncture.

What we find here is a logic of movementism and spontaneism where the energies unleashed by social movements and mass actions are seen organically leading to a higher form. This is essentially the argument of Rosa Luxemburg’s Mass Strike – that the workers’ movement in struggle will find the solutions to its problems and develop new forms of organization that can apply these solutions. The arguments were taken to a greater extreme by the council communists like Anton Pannekoek, who eventually rejected the party as a force of neutralization much like Taylor B does in Birth of Politics. As Mike Macnair has pointed out, these ideas have far more in common with the political approach of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin than his main rivals of the time in the First International, Karl Marx and Engels.

The appeal of spontaneism and movementism is a common and popular reaction to the reality of countless sectarian Leninist groups who claim to be holders of the true wisdom of Marxism that will organize and lead the proletarian revolution. When the inability of these sects to consciously engineer a revolutionary movement from above into existence is clear, the appeal of a solution from below is seductive. The masses, uncorrupted by the sectarian dogmas of the failing left, will bring a new sense of energy and vision into play and overcome the forces of the old, bringing the new politics of the genuine social movement to the fore. The failure of the socialist sects to find a solution to the problems that socialists face today makes hope in the purity of social movements and their spontaneous motion almost common sense in the activist left.

The problem with this approach is that it contradicts the very goal of communism itself. Communism, at least in part, can be understood as the conscious planning and democratic control of the producers of over society. Capitalism creates forms of domination and control that appear as impersonal forces of the market throwing us around according to the whims of profit. The anarchy of capitalism, or its lack of planning, means that our social and productive processes dominate us (the human species) as an arbitrary force, just as religious fetishizations dominate traditional religious communities as forces beyond their control. It is for this reason that the conscious planning of society in communism is not an incidental feature but a part of its very nature as a social system.

The party, an instrument of conscious political vision, is counterposed to the spontaneous unconscious energies of the mass movements unleashed by the Bernie campaign and Black Lives Matter. It is no wonder that Taylor B sees Black Lives Matter as containing more potential despite its admitted domination by the petty-bourgeois; while Black Lives Matter is technically a non-profit foundation with its own organizational existence, it’s clear that the energy of the movement is in the uncontained moments of rebellion where street fighting against the cops. The amount of energy expressed by the masses in the street is nothing to write off, and it is easy to see why so much of the left invest more hope in these moments of unmediated attacks on the state than the sloganeerings of sects selling newspapers. In moments like this, it is tempting to say, as Taylor B does, that the masses in struggle are more politically advanced than the various leftist sectarians.

Yet if we understood communism to be a project of humanity talking conscious control of its own conditions of existence, then placing hope in the unconscious spontaneous energy of mass actions is not sufficient. Yes, we can find levels of organization emerge from the movements of the crowd, with the formation of assemblies, affinity groups, and even new nonprofits as initiatives from activists. It would be a mistake to deny the obvious creativity that arises from mass movements like the ones we saw this summer. Yet it would be an even bigger mistake to declare that this creativity can produce the organization and class consciousness needed to transform the existing class struggle into one that can transcend capitalism.

If we accept that the conscious planning of social-productive processes to meet the needs of the human species is a defining quality of communism, then we should also be willing to apply this principle to communist politics. As partisans of communism who believe that we have a duty to fight for our ideas, it is necessary that we develop an analysis of our situation, determine what is needed to further advance the struggle for communism, develop a plan of action based on this analysis, and put it into practice. We look at the social forces that promulgated these dynamics, but it is necessary to also analyze how our situation fits in a broader historical struggle of the proletariat throughout history. We cannot develop an entirely new form of struggle or organization for any given conjuncture but instead look to our past for insight into how we can best act and develop a strategy that can help us spearhead the class war towards communism. After all, the current conjuncture isn’t something simply unfolding before our eyes as passive observers. We can analyze the situation and collectively act in ways informed by our analysis to influence its unfolding.

But who is this ‘we’ that I speak of? Is it whoever jumps into the crowd with a hope for liberation or a desire to break with the current order? Is it only other leftists? Other Marxists? To ask the strategic question of ‘what is to be done?’, there needs to be a collective ‘we’ that can act as a subject. Otherwise ‘we’ are simply acting as individuals, an affinity group in the streets, a nonprofit, or a temporary general assembly that will only last as long as people can stay in the streets. Questions like “should we focus on building unions or elections, should we oppose the war, should we form a coalition with this party, should we organize nation-wide demonstrations, should we form an armed struggle?” all only make sense when the ‘we’ in question is some kind of organized collectivity that already has unified around a certain goal. Otherwise one is simply shouting at the atomized masses hoping they will follow.

The ‘party’ is simply this organized collectivity that allows a ‘we’ to form and act in a decisive way. This is to say nothing of what a party looks like, which I have said more about in other places. In this instance, I am focusing on and arguing on a more abstract philosophical level about why the party is necessary. This is not the imposition of an abstract historical model completely foreign to the conjuncture as Taylor B claims. The call for a party is instead a call for strategy and the capacity to put it into practice through forming a political subject, a ‘we’ that can pose and answer questions through collective action.

I do not doubt that Taylor B accepts the need for strategy and an organized political subjectivity that can put it into practice. The problem is that he sees the current political sequence as a singularity that exists in a break with the past so radical that it will herald a completely novel form of political subjectivity, leaving us incapable of learning from the accumulated lessons of the past. There supposedly has been such a radical break in history that these accumulated lessons can only be the “traditions of generations weighing on us like living nightmares”. Arguments like this can be found everywhere, from ultra-left proponents of the immediate communization of society like the journal Endnotes to left-populists like Laclau and Mouffe. The old forms of worker identification and the corresponding forms of organization such as the party and union were expressions of a historically specific era that is long gone. Today we will see new forms of subjectivity and organizational forms, and those who raise the old forms of a bygone era are simply imposing a nostalgic past onto the present. Or so the argument typically goes.

I like to call these types of arguments the ‘appeal to novelty’. The version of it that Taylor B cites is an essay by Sylvain Lazarus, “Lenin and the Party, 1902 – November 1917”. Its argument is worth summarizing before dissecting, as it gives us a sophisticated version of the ‘appeal to novelty’ argument. Lazarus begins by saying that the notion of ‘the party’ is the basis of politics in the 20th Century, which is an innovation marked by Lenin’s What Is To Be Done in rupture with the previous conception of politics which centered on the insurrection of the class, exemplified by the Paris Commune and the ideas of Marx. Lenin’s development of the thesis explicated in What Is To Be Done is seen as a break from Marx’s idea of the class as the revolutionary subject:

In What Is to Be Done? Lenin broke with the thesis of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1848) with regard to the spontaneous character of the appearance of Communists within the modern proletariat. In contrast to the Marxist thesis that can be stated as “Where there are proletarians, there are Communists,” Lenin opposed spontaneous consciousness and Social Democratic (that is, revolutionary) consciousness and stretched this opposition to the limit.¹

This break with Marx is said to comprise a new sequence, the discovery of a truth that marks an era which demonstrates this truth. Yet the sequence comes to an end in 1917, as ‘the party’ is now something that becomes intertwined with the state. Now one can only speak of the ‘state party’, a force of conservatism because of its ‘standing over society’. A new sequence begins, and the word becomes ‘revolution’ rather than ‘party’. What this means is unclear beyond the fact that a new form of politics that goes beyond the party. Rather than seeking state power, it seeks its “subversion, its transitory cessation”.² In his rejection of a politics oriented around state power and the party, Lazarus goes so far as to say the signifier of ‘revolution’ should be rejected as it “is a nonpolitical, historicist notion, reducing the thought of politics, its condition of possibility, to that of an event character in exteriority, and placing this latter in a chain in which ‘party’ and ‘state’ also figure…rendered obsolete in 1968, as far as France is concerned.”³

My first reaction to Lazarus’ argument here is that he’s making a claim that’s impossible to disprove because it’s impossible to prove. Looking at history and developing a periodization can be useful. That said, one has to ask whether they are imposing a periodization by coming up with a conclusion and then reading history backward to validate that conclusion. Historical narratives are supposed to be explanatory, and the only thing that Lazarus’ narrative explains is why he thinks we need to abandon all the past concepts of Marxist politics and come up with something completely novel.

Problems with method aside, the narrative Lazarus paints is simply not true. Lenin was not breaking with the political practice or conceptions of Marx and Engels in What Is To Be Done? and wasn’t making any kind of original argument. As Lars Lih has pointed out, What Is To Be Done? Is an impressive exercise in aggressive unoriginality. Lenin’s arguments about the need for class consciousness to be brought from without due to the inadequacy of economic struggles to develop into Social-Democratic politics on their own is simply an application of Karl Kautsky’s ‘merger formula’. The merger formula postulates that socialist intellectuals such as Marx and Engels developed their applications from a study of history and political economy, while the working class by necessity organized into a labor movement to collectively defend its conditions within capitalism. The socialist intellectuals, consciously dedicated partisans of political conviction, must merge their knowledge with the working-class movement by uniting to form a party dedicated to the cause of socialist revolution that is armed with a scientific theory of social change. Kautsky based this idea on the very life and work of Marx and Engels themselves, as he shows in his pamphlet The Historical Accomplishment of Karl Marx. By heralding Lenin’s theory of the party as a radical break from Marx, Lazarus falls into the trappings of Cold War historiography as well the myths that Leninist sects tell themselves about the “party of a new type”.

What Lazarus is doing is projecting a radical break into history so as to justify that another radical break is necessary. Lenin (supposedly) broke with Marx’s view of the class as the subject of revolution with his view of the party in order to successfully seize power in October. Then the party became a source of conservatism through its merging with the state after October, meaning that if we are to truly be working in the spirit of Lenin then another break is necessary, this time with the party itself. Yet the break never really happened in the first place. Marx himself fought to form the workers’ party in his own time and struggled within it for programmatic clarity. His own life was an example of the merger formula in practice. Kautsky merely systematized it and Lenin applied it to Russian conditions.

Lazarus’ periodization is essentially just an assertion of novelty to the expense of continuity, showing history as a series of sequences where each represents a clean break from the prior where a totally different type of politics is necessitated by history. What exactly changes in terms of socio-economic conditions to produce these sequences and necessitates the accompanying break in political frameworks is left to the imagination. Against this vision of history as pure novelty, we must instead see the continuity in history so as to better assimilate the accumulated past struggles of the proletariat and oppressed, building on the years of trial and error practice passed down to us by our forebearers to produce the institutions and knowledge that exist with us today. Lenin was not simply analyzing the immediate conjuncture he faced and drawing conclusions from its immanent tendencies to produce practice. He was applying knowledge and practices passed to him by years of prior political experience.

Lenin was working with the tradition of Russian populism and its accumulated years of failure to produce a real social revolution against Czarism. Using a flawed strategy of terrorism and reliance on the spontaneous energies of the peasantry awakened by a minority of the intelligentsia, Lenin looked for solutions that at first weren’t obvious fits for his conditions. He saw one in the massive success of the German Social Democratic Party, which unified under a programme based on Marxism to build a party supported by millions of workers. The German Social Democratic movement itself existed in continuity with the traditions of Chartism, radical republicanism, and Germany’s own national history of labor struggle and peasant rebellion. All of these accumulated experiences of class struggle constitute the tradition of communist activity that not only Lenin was embedded in, but contemporary communists too, for better or worse.

It is for this reason that I reject both Lazarus’ periodization and Taylor B’s use of it to argue that “we must proceed from a break to do politics under present conditions” just as “Marx broke with the utopian socialists. Lenin broke with Marx. The Cultural Revolution can be read as Mao’s break with Marxism-Leninism to free politics from the party-state.” By positing history as a sequence of decisive clean breaks rather than a flux of novelty and continuity it breaks us off from the past generations of class struggle, forcing the left to completely reinvent politics for every historical sequence we encounter. Any concrete situation in history is a completely unique conjuncture while also embedded in a web of determinations that are the product of generations of social practices all corresponding with humanity’s need to interface with nature. Situating ourselves in the conjuncture means looking through all of history at the accumulated lessons given to us by these social practices and building on them, throwing off the muck of the past that harms us while preserving those ideas and practices that correctly orient us, continuing the work of those before us.

With this perspective, it is easy to see how it is not idealist to react to the current situation by pursuing the organization of a workers’ party. Those of us who engage in such pursuits continue the work of generations of partisans before us and carry with them their lessons and methods. To build on these methods and apply them to the conditions we face is not forcing something foreign and alien upon our current circumstances. These circumstances do not exist in a vacuum completely outside of a broader historical continuity.

What is idealist is to assume a break in history where political actors will completely reinvent the old forms and subjectivities without building upon the historical traditions they are embedded in. We are more atomized and depoliticized than ever before, so it is easier to see ourselves as disembedded from the past and in a unique historical position where we must go back to the drawing board and completely reinvent politics in order to relate to our times. Yet this disembeddedness is an illusion, as is the accompanying notion that we can reinvent politics without regard for the traditions of the past.

Any attempt to reinvent politics in such a way will inevitably be pure improvisation. Any situation requires improvisation, a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation”. But improvisation in politics requires knowledge of our methods of struggle, a body of organizational and political knowledge that serves as a basis. When we disembed ourselves from the past and seek to reinvent our methods of struggle with every new phase of history (however these phases are defined) we end up losing this knowledge and having to purely improvise in the dark. And this improvisation will fall into the dominant thought patterns of bourgeois-liberal society.

This is why Althusser spoke of the spontaneous ideology of scientists and it also makes sense to speak of the spontaneous ideology of activists.⁴ In seeking to achieve political goals, activists come upon limitations and dead ends, just as scientists come to across moments of crisis in their fields. The activist will seek to solve these problems and limitations within the ideological framework that is dominant in society, just as the scientist turns to idealist philosophy despite the realist and materialist nature of their practice. Today, when coming across the limitations of the current moment, activists will turn towards liberal and anarchist ideas unless a coherent alternative is posed. Rather than leading to an overcoming of the dominant framework, spontaneity tends to favor it.

This is why Lenin spoke of the need to “combat spontaneity”. For Lenin, the role of the party was introducing a social-democratic consciousness that was not seen as possible through the accumulation of economic struggles alone. The fact that the accumulations of economic struggles would not lead to the spontaneous generation of social-democratic consciousness was what necessitated the party. Lenin saw that communist politics requires challenging the dominant worldview, and the party allowed this to be done in a conscious and systematic way. This is the lesson of What Is To Be Done, and it should be seen as a lesson that is not particular to a certain phase of history as Lazarus would have it but rather universal to politics itself. The battle for hegemony must be a protracted and systematic struggle that pushes against the dominant ideas of society while putting forward a real alternative.

My argument is not that we don’t need change and innovative ways of thinking and organizing, but simply that we don’t fix what isn’t broken. The party-form is not itself the agent of neutralization against emancipatory potentials that need to be broken with. Rather than being the cause of bureaucratism and other sources of revolutionary degeneration, the party is the precondition for solving these problems. There is a class struggle within the party itself, between the petty-bourgeois bureaucracy and the proletarians they represent. When Taylor B speaks of the party-form as the source of neutralization, it is the victory of this petty-bourgeois stratum that is actually the source of neutralization, not the essence of the party itself. By conducting the struggle to control party bureaucracy and democratize its organizations, the proletariat itself learns how to govern society as a class.

Building the workers’ party allows us to constitute the proletariat into higher forms of political subjectivity by creating a collectivity that consciously and deliberately works to solve these problems. It allows us to actually become a force that can contest the class power of our enemies by out-organizing and out-strategizing them. To have any discussion about revolutionary strategy, develop an actionable plan, and put it into practice, a party is needed. Revolutionaries throughout history have realized this. Seeing the futility of endless street protests regardless of how militant, Huey Newton reacted to the challenges faced by struggling Black proletarians by helping form the Black Panther Party:

The movement was cresting around the country. Brothers on the block in many northern cities were moving angrily in response to the problems that overwhelmed them. New York and other eastern cities had exploded in 1964, Watts went up in 1965, Cleveland in 1966, and in 1967 another long hot summer was approaching. But the brothers needed direction for their energies. The Party wanted no more spontaneous riots, because the outcome was always the same: the people might liberate their territories for a few short days or hours, but eventually the military force of the oppressor would wipe out their gains. Having neither the strength nor the organization, the people were powerless. In the final analysis, riots caused only more repression and the loss of brave men. Blacks bled and died in the riots and went to jail on petty or false charges. If the brothers could be organized into disciplined cadres, working in broadly based community programs, then the energy expended in riots could be directed toward permanent and positive changes.⁵

Newton’s words are incredibly prescient today, as months of street protests in the US come up against the reality of the left’s actual organizational powerlessness and incapacity to provide an alternative to the existing regime. Mass actions, riots, general strikes – these are not substitutes for having the organizational capacity to govern. Even if the latest wave of protest had brought the government down, the reality would have been the military enforcing a constitutionally legal transition to a replacement government, led by the same parties that were there before.

Contrary to Taylor B, I believe that Marx did have a theory of politics. While it would take figures such as Engels, Bebel, Kautsky, and Lenin to systematize it, Marx ultimately believed that politics was about classes contesting, taking, and holding power. Communism relied on the proletariat taking power on an international scale, which required a protracted struggle where the proletariat organized itself as a class that could pose as an alternative to capitalist society. To do this, the proletariat had to form a party and learn to self-govern by organizing on the national and international scales and waging a political battle for radical democratic-republicanism and the socialization of production.

Unlike the socialist sectarians of today and of his own time, Marx fought for a party that would be based on unity around a political program, not a specific theoretical creed or philosophical dogma. Marx fought for the unity of all principled revolutionaries around a strategy for the proletariat to constitute itself as a class and fight for political power, not for the purity of a micro-sect. Many are wary of the project of party-building today because of the toxic attitudes of sectarians who promote disunity, and one should not mistake my argument in favor of a workers’ party as an argument for a new sect. What is needed is the unity of Marxists within the existing left around a program of class independence and a strategy of building a party that will organize working-class communities and contest elections. Such unity will require a breakup of sectarian identities in favor of collaboration and mergers, and will not be easily won. Yet the development of arguments like those made by the comrades in Red Star DSA show a potential for such an initiative in the left. One thing is for sure – without a party, we have nothing. Because without a party, there is no ‘we’.

2020.11.122020.11.12

Beginnings of Politics: DSA and the Uprising

Writing in August, Taylor B argues that we must look to new emancipatory forces arising in the current conjuncture instead of seeking to impose older forms of organization. We aim for this piece to be a jumping-off point for a broader debate about strategy and the party-form in our current historical moment.

Back in August, DSA New York City’s Emerge caucus joined with DSA San Francisco’s Red Star caucus for a panel discussion on the workers’ party.¹ The limits to this discussion were contained in the opening statement that contextualized the event: that in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ primary defeat and the Black Lives Matter national uprising, there is a need for an independent mass force for and of the working classes and that this force is necessarily a worker’s party. Here we see the problem: in reading the ensemble of forces that make up the current moment, Red Star and Emerge impose historical forms of organization on the conjuncture, rather than attempt to think emancipatory forms of organization through a concrete analysis.

I believe we lack a theory of politics that is adequate for our moment. To pose the problem quickly: the Marxist tradition contains a gap. It gives us critical tools to understand the capitalist mode of production, the insight that emancipation is immanent to the system through class struggle, and a concept of the transition to communism formulated by Marx as the dictatorship of the proletariat. But Marx does not tell us how to apply this emancipatory framework: this is the Marxist problem of politics that must be theorized under the conditions of the current moment, or conjuncture.

Lenin understood this problem of politics. Like a great mountain climber, Lenin proved that the Marxist tradition could serve as the basis for the correct political practices to reach the emancipatory summit. But we are situated at the base of a new mountain. The interlocking and unfolding crises of our time–global industrial overcapacity, climate change, and ecological apocalypse, a global pandemic, mass unemployment, extrajudicial state violence and occupation of communities of color at home and abroad–present a singular set of challenges to which Lenin’s map does not correspond. We must study Lenin to understand his process of map-making, not to substitute the map of his mountain for ours. As Marxists, we cannot simply read and extract an emancipatory politics from Lenin that is appropriate to our moment. To do so would deny the particular historical developments of Lenin’s moment and our own.

We need a theory of politics that can account for the formation of the DSA and prescribe practices that move us closer to achieving universal emancipation. For this theory of politics to be valid, it must be able to account for political phenomena beyond the socialist organization. This practical theory is what I want to begin thinking about here.

I propose to think of both the DSA and the current uprising as singular beginnings of emancipatory politics. As beginnings, these movements should be understood as necessarily incoherent attempts to discover the determinant, singular forms of emancipatory politics that emerge from the conjuncture. I see the process of discovery that is inherent to all beginnings of emancipatory politics as a struggle against an antagonistic force, which seeks to neutralize emancipatory forms.² If an emancipatory politics can only proceed from our present conditions, then we are fortunate to live in the “exceptional circumstances” of a world-historic uprising. We must search for emancipatory forms in these circumstances through concrete analysis and political practice, rather than impose abstract and historical models.

Conditions of Beginnings

What constitutes a beginning of emancipatory politics? First, we can say that all beginnings occur in unique ways. They must always be thought in relation to the conjuncture, which is to say that beginnings must always be thought of in their singularity. Second, we can say that all emancipatory beginnings necessarily coincide with overcoming an antagonistic force of neutralization. Thus, emancipatory politics occur in sequences, with the end of the sequence succumbing to the forces of neutralization. To conceive of a beginning, we must first understand the conditions of neutralization within our conjuncture.

The end of the Black Power era illustrates a complex set of neutralizing forces. Given the complexity of this era, I must limit myself to two broad points: First, the Black protest movement of the 1950s and 60s was the end of the last emancipatory sequence in the US. Some forces that neutralized this movement, and specifically the Black Power moment, remain active forces of neutralization in our conjuncture. Second, the neutralization of emancipatory politics must be seen as a determinate force in the state’s transition to its neoliberal form.

The forces that neutralized the Black Power era can be summarized in a very schematic way: First, an increase in federal social welfare programs under Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society. These programs not only provided assistance but unofficially doubled as a jobs program for college-educated Black workers. The result was a small but stable Black middle class from which a new political class emerged. Second, violent state repression and harassment through counterinsurgency programs like COINTELPRO that forced political radicals like the Black Panther Party to take a “pragmatic turn.”³ At its peak the Panthers were an organization of 5,000 members across 40 chapters. By the early 1970s, “50 members had been killed, 200 injured, and another 300 arrested.” Third, praise of the movement’s “political maturity” upon entering the political mainstream of electoral politics with an emphasis on “community control” through municipal elections.⁴

It is clear that entering municipal government was not sufficient for addressing issues around “housing, jobs, public education, and health care amid shrinking tax revenue, cuts to federal spending, and growing hostility to welfare as an entitlement to the poor.⁵ And why is this? Because the moment the Black Power movement “matured” and a new class of political representatives began to enter the state, a crisis of capitalist accumulation was unfolding. This crisis of profitability began in the late 1960s through productive overcapacity in the global manufacturing sector.⁶ With profits no longer secure, the New Deal consensus broke down. Both production and the state itself required reorganization. Thus we see not only the deindustrialization of American cities through a shift to overseas production via distributed supply chains, but the formation of a disciplinary state of social insecurity to reinforce the system of wage labor amidst worsening employment opportunities in an era of deregulated capitalism.⁷ Through a “double regulation of the poor,” social welfare programs were gutted as police targeted street crime along the lines of class, race, and place. While Black mothers were disproportionately harmed by generalized welfare cuts, Black men in particular urban zones were swept into the rapidly expanding penal system.

I am well aware of the fact that the sketch I have provided is extremely schematic. But I feel this rough sketch does illustrate how the emancipatory politics of the Black Power era were neutralized. The result of this neutralization was a new class of Black politicians presiding over a restructured state of social insecurity that contributed to the death of Black people, among others.⁸ While all new emancipatory beginnings must break with and struggle against neutralizing forces, I believe this rough sketch gives us an idea of what elements require further study in our current moment.

The End of the Party

There is one element of neutralization we see during the end of the Black Power era that I want to pay particular attention to: the political party. The political party was not only a form through which emancipatory politics was integrated into the mainstream during this period, it was also a determining factor in both securing the necessary federal aid to build the Black middle class and coordinating the actions and policies of the repressive state apparatuses. Political parties are clearly an active force of neutralization in our conjuncture. It is for this reason that in the United States a beginning of emancipatory politics must break with the corporate, two-party system in particular and state organizations in general.

For our purposes, we can note that the Democratic and Republican parties are barely parties in the bourgeois parliamentarian sense of the term. It would be more accurate to say they are networks of statist interest groups tangled in a complex set of pay-to-play schemes. Their control of the state is contingent on a particular set of interests taking a dominant position within these overlapping networks, but it is secured through the disorganization of working people. This disorganization is achieved at least in part through the successful neutralization of politics.⁹ As we have seen, one way in which this neutralization occurs is by absorbing representatives of emancipatory movements into its ranks. A head is created so it can be decapitated, thus killing the body.

We should also note that in addition to the corporate parties, the Black Panther Party was not only neutralized, but became a force of neutralization itself once it made its “pragmatic turn.” This is not a criticism of the Panthers; they clearly had no other option. The point I want to make is that the Panthers are just one example of a larger development in the twentieth century: the neutralization of the party-form itself.

As Sylvain Lazarus shows, the twentieth century saw “the notion of the party” become “central” to politics.¹⁰ This was inaugurated by Lenin, the theorist of the Bolshevik mode of politics, with his 1902 text What Is to Be Done?. For Lazarus, the notion of Marxism-Leninism obscures Lenin’s real break with Marx on the question of politics. The Bolshevik mode of politics that Lenin theorized was preceded by the “classist” mode of politics. The primary theorist of this mode was Marx, which had insurrection as its basis.¹¹ The classist mode, or sequence, existed from the publication of the Communist Manifesto and ended with the Paris Commune in 1871.

For Lazarus, the classist thesis is this: ‘Where there are proletarians, there are Communists.” Crucially, there is no theory of organization in Marx, nor is there a “real theory of political consciousness.” Instead, there is a “major and fundamental” theory of “historical consciousness and of consciousness as historical consciousness.” In other words, Marx’s “Communists” are made by history, rather than any organization.

Thus, Lenin breaks with Marx once he rejects this spontaneity. For Lenin, “the appearance of revolutionary militants” could not be a spontaneous occurrence, but just the opposite. For Lazarus, the “political core” of Lenin’s theory of politics is a “nonspontaneous consciousness” that is antagonistic to “the entire existing social and political order.” It is this nonspontaneous consciousness that is the heart of the party. The party is the “mechanism of realization of the conditions that will permit the emergence of a political consciousness.” For Lazarus, this is a critical development: “Lenin brings the foundation of modern politics in the fact that revolutionary politics is required to announce and practice the conditions of its existence.”

So through Lenin, we have the Bolshevik mode of politics, a politics of the revolutionary party. The sites of the Bolshevik mode of politics were the party and the soviet. This mode, or sequence, ended with the successful completion of the October Revolution. In other words, after the October Revolution, the party and the soviet were no longer active sites of emancipatory politics. This is because, upon the Bolsheviks taking power, the party and the soviets entered into a new relationship with each other and the state. The party fused with the state and subordinated the soviets to it. As Lazarus tells us: “From now on, ‘party’ would be assigned to power, to the state.” The party would now be:

an attribute of the state, or even its center. We enter the global era of state parties: Stalinism, Nazisim, parliamentarianism — multi-partyism being an interstate muti-partyism. At all events, parties exist only as state parties, which means that in the strict sense, these parties are not political organizations but state organizations.¹²

Thus, the success of the October Revolution coincided with the end of its political forms and the neutralization of its emancipatory sequence.

I believe we can see why I have equated overcoming the neutralization of politics with a break from the corporate two-party system. In the first place, a beginning of politics must proceed from a break to do politics under present conditions. Marx broke with the utopian socialists. Lenin broke with Marx. The Cultural Revolution can be read as Mao’s break with Marxism-Leninism to free politics from the party-state.¹³ Since we cannot know the forms of collective emancipation until we discover them within our conjuncture and put them into practice, we must begin by breaking with the neutralizing elements. For us, this means state organizations in general and the party-form in particular.

Beginnings of Politics

Over the last decade, there have been at least four beginnings: Occupy, Ferguson, the 2016 and 2020 defeats of Bernie Sanders Democratic primary campaigns, and the recent uprisings following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others. Each of these beginnings have their own thrusts and limits: they are structured in their particularity. Now, this is not to say that these beginnings are antagonistic or incompatible with each other: they are all beginnings of emancipatory struggles.

Since the growth of DSA is closely associated with the Sanders campaigns, I will begin there. To this point, I do not believe we have a strong analysis of the 2020 Democratic primary. I will limit myself to a few comments to continue my larger argument.

First, the 2020 Democratic primary election can only be understood in reference to Trump’s presidency and the strength of the ruling class. Trump’s violation of norms and traditions marks a discontinuity and period of adjustment for the ruling class within the two-party system, rather than the state’s weakness or new forms of governance. While discontinuity has given the appearance of a political crisis, Trump has energized an otherwise rudderless GOP and created an ideal foil for a similarly bankrupt DNC. This is the positive side of Trump’s discontinuity. From this positive perspective, the Bush and Obama administrations were the end of a sequence that played out within the ruling class. In 2016, all of the most unpopular aspects and contradictions of this regime manifested in the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who was unable to carry it forward. While Trump is a poor administrator of empire who may fail to adequately contain domestic and international crises, they do not originate with him.¹⁴

Second, far from the Trump administration constituting a new political crisis, it would seem that Trump’s presidency has functioned as the prevention of one. Trump’s mostly stylistic discontinuity with the previous regime is what makes it possible to even conceive of the DNC and GOP having any legitimacy whatsoever. Take the COVID-19 relief packages for example. The only relief the so-called “normal politicians” in Congress have provided is a one-time $1,200 check and a temporary $600 weekly boost to unemployment benefits. Trump has functioned as an incredible shield for the political establishment’s complete unwillingness or inability to respond to the pandemic.

Third, the false notion that Trump’s presidency constitutes a political crisis is the basis for Sanders’ 2020 defeat. As others have pointed out, it is with great irony that the most prominent activist for Medicare for All was defeated during a global pandemic. Sanders’ 2020 defeat was not orchestrated by an underhanded media and omnipotent DNC, though the media and DNC played their parts. The decisive force was the large turnout of Democratic primary voters who rallied to Joe Biden.

Biden’s victory was the result of a mobilization to protect “American Democracy” from the singular danger of the Genius Fascist Russian Crook Moron President. Trump’s “singular danger” to institutions, the Constitution, and the whole “exceptional” American project was reinforced time and again by both liberals and conservatives despite the strong continuity between his administration and the previous ones. Even Sanders held this position as he tried to rally voters and nonvoters to his social-democratic program. Presumably, this is why he is ending his political career campaigning for the Democratic establishment.

So while it seems that voters were failing to identify and vote for their “material interests”–public healthcare, student debt relief, etc.–we can see they were in fact voting for a different set of material interests. Biden’s primary voters chose to remove a bug from the machine they depend on for material and symbolic satisfaction. Even though the machine runs on blood and oil and cannot deliver public goods or a better life for the next generation, these voters ultimately affirmed in an exemplary way that politics is not something we can afford. The crises were too dire to consider any semblance of change or social transformation. Their decision was to right the ship, rather than begin the process to build a new one.

The Sanders Beginning

Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 defeats created surges in DSA membership growth. DSA now claims more than 70,000 members across 300 chapters. I believe these moments of growth are evidence of a beginning of politics. This is to say that through the defeat of Sanders 2016 and 2020 insurgent campaigns, truths have been produced for people that have “punched holes” in existing knowledge.¹⁵ These truths have fundamentally corresponded with the idea that the two-party system is incapable of delivering desired political outcomes on its own, and that therefore political organization is necessary in some form beyond the given bourgeois forms.

There are three points I want to emphasize. First, the reason a beginning of emancipatory politics could occur in a presidential primary is that Sanders was an insurgent candidate. To vote for him was to agree that some form of political organization was needed beyond the DNC. This is epitomized by his call for “political revolution.” Second, the fact that Sanders has betrayed his revolution by actively campaigning for Biden does not mean the beginning is over. Extinguishing a match used to light a fire has no bearing on the fire. Third, the neutralization of Sanders in 2020 that has seen him become a neutralizing force is a repeat of 2016 when he was defeated and campaigned for Hillary Clinton. What this should indicate to us is that the struggle between emancipatory beginnings and their neutralization are dynamic. Beginnings of politics can only be understood in relation to the force of neutralization.

The movement for socialism in the US is dominated by the Sanders beginning. So much so that I believe the term “socialism” in its current popular usage is the name for the recognition that additional political forms are needed beyond bourgeois ones. As a “socialist organization,” it would seem that the DSA is one of these non-bourgeois political forms. To be more specific, the DSA is neither a bourgeois form or a proletarian form: it is a political form of the petty bourgeoisie. But the economic character of the DSA is not sufficient to explain the incoherence within the organization.

As a beginning of politics, DSA’s coherence is necessarily blocked by the forces of neutralization. As I have indicated, this is because a beginning of politics is a struggle against the neutralization of politics. The struggle between this unevenly developed balance of forces is playing out in DSA within its membership between different defined and undefined tendencies. Ultimately, I believe this struggle can be located in a problem of interpretation that arises from the recognition of the need for additional and supplemental political forms in a capitalist society. Are the additional forms of political organization meant to supplement the existing two-party system as a pressure group or third party within the capitalist mode of production? Or should additional forms of political organization create an irreconcilable and radical opposition to the organizations of the US state and the capitalist mode of production? DSA is dominated by the former.

Both the “run better Democrats” and “build a worker’s party” tendencies in DSA correspond with the forces of neutralization. Why? Because they attempt to employ historical forms of politics that are emancipatory dead-ends. Since these tendencies dominate DSA, even if they can oppose each other, it is clear the DSA is constituted through an extremely unbalanced development of emancipatory and neutralizing forces. At best these strategies will only continue to block the development of emancipatory forms and reproduce our incoherence; at worst they will be coherent in their neutralization. If we are going to advance the emancipatory struggle, we must continue to fight the forces of neutralization that are consistent with our beginning by discovering the new political forms and building radical institutions.

Given DSA’s close association with the revival of “socialism,” tendencies within DSA that advocate electoralism and building the worker’s party threaten to neutralize the revival of socialism itself by stamping out its emancipatory potential. We can already see the logic at work. The failure of socialism to constitute a radical politics will likely follow the logic of Joe Biden’s primary voters: the crises we face will be deemed too great to entertain de-emphasizing electoral work or abandoning the worker’s party. Collective emancipation will be something we cannot afford. We must turn to forms that cannot deliver emancipation because it is not clear what else we can do. Once again, the ship must be righted because there is “no alternative.”

Now I realize I appear to have entered a tired debate. This is the debate that puts electoral work on one side and mutual aid on the other and ends with one person quoting Lenin’s “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” on Twitter.¹⁶ Fortunately, my argument exists outside of this problematic. Why? Because this debate is completely abstract and idealist: it supposes that we can simply choose the arena we wish to fight in based on what is strategically expedient, rather than do politics in relation to the specific ensemble of determinate forces that make up the current moment. Worse, invoking texts like “Left-Wing Communism” supposes we can extract transhistorical “wisdom” from a text written in relation to its conjuncture and apply it to ours. We cannot do either of these things. We must begin with the goal of universal emancipation and construct a theory of politics from within the conjuncture that allows us to move toward it. This must include identifying and combating the forces of neutralization. This is what Marx did. This is what Lenin did. Their specific proposals must be understood in relation to their moment instead of being imported into ours.

To this point, I believe we have made positive steps toward a concrete analysis so we can get an idea of the correct way the movement for socialism must proceed. But we cannot say we have yet articulated a concrete basis. Why? Because we must recognize that our movement for socialism coincides with other beginnings: both the Ferguson uprising and this current uprising of world-historic proportions that has been sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others. As Marxists, we cannot hope to advance the emancipatory struggle in our moment without thinking through the Black Lives Matter beginning.

The Uprising

The uprising is another singular beginning of politics. Between 15 and 26 million Americans have taken part in this uprising, making it possibly the largest protest movement in US history.¹⁷ We must note that the present uprising has not been led by any single mass organization, much less a Leninist party. We must try to understand the various forms of organizations that have been operative in this struggle, both formal and informal; we must also try to understand the uprising’s “spontaneity.” This will be essential if DSA is to make new connections and undertake organizing practices that deliver organizational forms that are appropriate to emancipatory politics.

The uprising is a beginning of politics that must be understood in its singularity. What set off this beginning? Was it the video of George Floyd’s murder? Was it the one in 2,000 deaths of African Americans due to the COVID-19 pandemic? Was it the concentration of unemployment in communities of color that are forced to live in greater numbers in substandard housing? Was it the failure for meaningful reform following Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 and the Ferguson rebellion in 2014? I think we can say the event was the moment in which these realities fused in thought for people. This fusion, this rupture, led to the discovery that a past truth is still true: that in the US, Black lives largely do not matter. And it is this truth that has led a heterogeneous mix of people in Minneapolis and around the world to take to streets to combat it: to say that if life matters, Black lives must matter.

It seems to me that Black Lives Matter is the name of an anti-racist movement against the police in particular, and the state in general. Like the socialist movement, reformist and radical tendencies have been produced within it. I should note that this simple opposition is not abstracted from the movement, but coincides with the necessary struggle between the neutralization and beginning of politics. On the one hand, Black lives will matter once police have the right amount of diversity, bias-training, and public oversight. On the other hand, Black lives will matter once the police are abolished and the carceral state is destroyed. Here we see additive and antagonistic demands coexisting as a beginning of politics.

The new demand to “defund the police” and reinvest in public goods seems to straddle the reformist and radical tendencies. This demand seems to best contain the struggle over the beginning and neutralization of politics. It can be read as both a transition to abolishing the police and a reformist move that says once the police are properly funded in relation to public goods they will finally be effective and worthwhile. Nevertheless, “defunding the police” is a reform of more radical character than requiring police to wear body cameras. It would seem the Black Lives Matter movement, from Ferguson to now, is both expanding its popularity and its radicality. I think this should be viewed as a positive development of a beginning even if it remains blocked by forces of neutralization.

Compared to the movement for socialism, it seems the Black Lives Matter movement is better positioned to resist the neutralization of politics. The development of this uprising seems to contain a more even development between the forces of politics and its neutralization. I believe the greater momentum behind the radical tendencies within the movement is due in part to the failure of reforms that emerged from Ferguson to resolve similar problems. This truth, that the police cannot be reformed, has been produced for more people through the failures to reform, thereby increasing the radical character across the whole movement. Given the movement for socialism’s primarily electoral character, it would seem that for some reform cannot yet be discounted since it has not elected a sufficient number of authentic socialists to political office to test this idea. But this is the same flawed logic we see in the reformist version of defunding the police. Both ideas in these beginnings suggest the state can be reformed once a magic number is reached: the number of socialists in government and the number of dollars going to police in municipal and state budgets.

While there is undoubtedly an economic dimension to the current uprising (mass unemployment is certainly a factor), the heterogeneous, multiracial mix of protestors does not adhere to a stable set of sociological categories or political consciousness. The forms of protest within the uprising, at first insurrectionary in character and then increasingly “peaceful,” have also shifted the longer the uprising has gone on. But this does not mean these elements have disappeared entirely. Different places are expressing their own time as they develop in their own way, with Minneapolis, Atlanta, Seattle, and Portland producing their own rhythms. I believe the key insight is this: The uprising is composed of contradictory situations that cut across different levels of the totality. Since the uprising has extended beyond US borders, with mass protests and demonstrations occurring around the world in solidarity and for their own particular reasons, it seems the totality is international in character.

Who are the people taking part in this uprising? I want to answer this question in a way that pushes back against Marxist “common sense.” I do not believe “the working-class” is an adequate category for the uprising. It would be more accurate to say that the uprising contains the working-class, petty bourgeoisie (with an emphasis on private and public salaried employees), and even bourgeois elements. This is reflected in the apparently not insignificant number of protestors who earn salaries of more than $150,000, and the support, if only nominally and cynically, by major multinational corporations. I do not think it is appropriate to say this particular beginning of politics is simply an early form of a general “class politics” that must be channeled and led by a worker’s party. We must address the moment in its singularity and resist any appeal to “Marxist” theory consistent with an abstract, Hegelian dialectic.¹⁸ I believe we must accept that the “spontaneous” and “unorganized” masses appear more radical than the largest socialist organization in the US, including many of its Marxist tendencies.

That being said, class antagonism is certainly present in the uprising. The problem is that this class antagonism seems to be expressed through a fusion of contradictory elements that take different forms of protest in different places. Marching and looting have occurred at different times of day by what appear to be different groups. Thus, the class antagonism is not reducible to a classical Marxist proletarian struggle, but appears in an overdetermined, anti-racist movement against the state that is particular to the moments of protest occurring in different places with their different rhythms. The complexity of the conjuncture shows we are in (yet another) “exceptional” circumstance.¹⁹

To make things more complicated, the class antagonism itself contains different tendencies due to the economic, political, and ideological relations of the classes involved.²⁰ Let’s take the petty-bourgeois element as an example, which we should point out is also an element that has assumed a dominant role in the movement for socialism. As Nicos Poulantzas has made clear, the petty bourgeoisie is a complex class made of groupings of subgroupings.²¹ Crucially, it has no real ideological position of its own. Instead, the petty bourgeoisie creates a “sub-ensemble” of ideology by “twisting and adapting” bourgeois ideology to its “aspirations” of mobility while simultaneously borrowing in greater degree “from working-class ideology,” which it similarly “deflects and adapts” to its “own aspirations.”²² One result of this is the petty-bourgeois “status quo anti-capitalism” that takes a position “against ‘big money’ and ‘great fortunes’ and “aspires to ‘social justice,’ through State redistribution of income.”²³ Since the petty bourgeoisie “fears proletarianization” and “upheaval,” the petty bourgeoisie

aspires to ‘participate’ in the ‘distribution’ of political power, without wanting a radical transformation of it…It aspires to be the ‘arbiter’ of society, because as Marx says, it would like the whole of society to become petty-bourgeois.²⁴

I believe the socialist and Black Lives Matter movements must combat this dominant petty-bourgeois tendency. This tendency is a force of neutralization that seeks to simply alter the state and maintain class society: it is the same force of neutralization that emerged from the end of the Black protest movement in the late 1960s early 1970s. More importantly, this “status quo anti-capitalist” tendency is obscured if we reduce the Black Lives Matter movement, or the DSA for that matter, to “working class” politics.

We can see that we must take the Black Lives Matter movement in its own terms and think about it in its singular complexity. It is still unclear what lasting political forms the Black Lives Matter movement will adopt, if any. But if the beginning of politics coincides with a break from the two-party system in particular and state organizations in general then perhaps its amorphous, “spontaneous” character makes it more difficult to neutralize. This is to say that the beginning of politics the uprising expresses is more unknown and comes with greater uncertainty as it reaches across various groups and organizations and the many people who are returning to the streets and entering them for the first time.

Where Beginnings Meet

While I have discussed the Black Lives Matter and socialist movements separately to attend to their singular beginnings, it is clear these movements meet in various ways. I believe both movements must be open to the other if they are to make the break from their beginnings and constitute an emancipatory politics.

Given that the Black Lives Matter movement has a more radical character, given that racism has proven time and again to be the stumbling block of previous movements for socialism and communism, the movement for socialism must embrace it in an emphatic way. While labor and tenant organizing, eviction defense, and unemployed councils are all great starting points for advancing emancipatory struggle, these abstract tactics must be thought through and alongside the organizations that compose the uprising and Black Lives Matter movement. Rather than turn to the historical dead-ends of the Democratic party and CPUSA, we must trust that appropriate emancipatory forms will emerge as we engage in the local, national, and international organizing that this moment makes possible.

The rally and demonstration around the ILWU’s Juneteenth work stoppage of seaports down the west coast is an excellent example of these two beginnings meeting. This demonstration brought many organizations together, including the DSA, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and others. For the DSA in particular, this was an extremely rare coordinated action between the San Francisco and East Bay chapters. Thousands turned out for the morning rally at the Port of Oakland to hear speeches from the Black leadership of the majority Black ILWU Local 10, Danny Glover, and Angela Davis. We marched in the streets shouting the names of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to Oscar Grant Plaza. We should note that “Oscar Grant Plaza” is this place’s unofficial name, and that this name began with Occupy Oakland.

What organizing projects put anti-racism at the center of our work to destroy the capitalist mode of production and the political and ideological relations it depends on? How might a commitment to anti-racism express itself in an organization that is majority white? How can relationships be formed and deepened with trade and tenant unions around this cause in addition to advancing their struggle for better working and living conditions? What resources can the DSA make available to assist local anti-racist organizations in an effort to build and potentially lead anti-racist coalitions? I believe we must pursue these questions together.

Before I close, I must admit that the Juneteenth event was not without tension. The morning ILWU rally began with a blessing from a Black preacher who stated that “Black lives matter” and that “all lives matter.” Following him, a member of the ILWU forcefully declared we would be having a “peaceful” protest; either the preacher or this ILWU member affirmed the importance of voting. Later, a member of ILWU leadership said that “good cops need to start checking bad cops.”

Now there were a few grumbles around me when these things were said. It is clear there are more contradictions present in our emancipatory beginnings than I have been able to attend to. But perhaps these statements were allowed to pass because the day was only beginning. Perhaps we all understood that this movement itself is only a beginning, and that as such, the patience to struggle is necessary.