The Socialist Horizon: Building a New Party
Saturday, August 26, 2017
By Benjamin Balthaser, Truthout | Op-Ed
mix of centralization and decentralization, its democratic ethos within a
larger structure, its flexibility and yet its consistency speak to both the
needs as well as the disaggregated shape and culture of today's millennial
working class.
The Democratic Socialists of America is a mix of centralization and
decentralization, its democratic ethos within a larger structure, its
flexibility and yet its consistency speak to both the needs as well as the
disaggregated shape and culture of today's millennial working class. (Photo:
Northside Chicago DSA)
As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention wound to its close
at the beginning of August, I was struck with the historical strangeness of
what I witnessed. Decades after proclamations of the "end of history" and
critiques of institutional hierarchies and vertical structures of power,
here were nearly 1,000 mostly young activists gathered in a giant lecture
hall doing the work of building a radical political party: taking votes,
making motions, electing a national leadership, making speeches for and
against, observing the strange Anglo-Saxon strictures of Robert's Rules of
Order.
The convention in Chicago has rightly garnered an enormous amount of
attention, both for the unprecedented size of the organization, as well as
for its increasingly red hue. The surge in membership makes DSA the largest
socialist organization in the US since World War II, and its growth in
strength and popularity is equally marked by its radical turn to the left:
delegates voted to endorse the boycott, sanction and divest (BDS) movement
against Israeli violations of human rights; they voted to embrace the
creation of an Afro-Socialism Caucus that includes a platform for abolishing
prisons and police; and they reaffirmed their distance from the Democratic
Party and their role in creating an independent socialist movement. They did
all this while strengthening the centralization and structure of the DSA by
introducing monthly dues payments for members.
As Chilean activist and writer Marta Harnecker notes, the rise of
globalization, neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War has also led to
what she refers to as the "social disorientation" of both the working class
and the left. The organization of workers into giant Fordist factories in
urban centers, the growth of social and cultural institutions, such as
massive schools and state colleges, also did the work of organizing the
people into shared sites of social production and reproduction.
While on the one hand this modernist reorganization of life produced greater
social alienation, it also produced the physical infrastructure for
mass-based, centralized social movements. One can think of the rise of
early-mid 20th century radical parties such as the Socialist and later
Communist Party USA, which exercised wide influence through six-figure
membership bases, affiliated labor and civil rights groups, and high-profile
political campaigns as a kind of structural analogy to the mass
production/mass consumption modernist society Fordism produced. Perhaps the
largest mass-based working-class organization, the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), was a direct outgrowth of the giant factories that
comprised the major sites of its organization.
An increasingly shared mass culture also helped produce new political
movements at mid-century. Small ethnic enclaves and segregated neighborhoods
could join in a dominant, increasingly plebeian mass culture industry that
featured, for the first time, ethnic accents and working-class, urban
heroes, such as James Cagney, Duke Ellington and Barbara Stanwyck. During
CIO drives, one organizer recounted white and Black members listening to a
Joe Louis fight on the radio before going to recruit members for its
integrated locals, and Richard Wright famously wrote of the Louis-Baer match
as leading to a jubilant, spontaneous uprising among working class African
Americans on Chicago's South Side.
Within the mid-century cultural and material matrix of Fordism, the
Communist Party, unlike the Democrats or Republicans, built an entire way of
life, vertically and horizontally integrated, with softball leagues,
newspapers, dances and activity groups like the Friends of the Earth
(camping) and the John Reed Clubs (writing) that provided not only for the
political needs of its members, but also for their social and even romantic
needs. "You could live an entire life within that world," one former
Communist related in Vivian Gornick's oral history of the movement. The
Communist Party, like the centralized and Taylorized mass culture of the
period, was constituted by a sense of totality and organization that marked
both work and leisure. As capitalism's "other," Communism organized much
like Fordist corporations it opposed.
Flash forward a half decade, and the landscape of both capitalism and left
radically changed. Globalization and neoliberalism have not only widened the
gap between the rich and the poor within and between nations, they have
dramatically reorganized the economy away from large-scale urban
manufacturing to decentralized and increasingly mobile just-in-time
production. While this shattered what was left of the large AFL-CIO unions,
it also disrupted the material basis for social, even socialist organizing.
White flight, suburban sprawl, strip malls, the spread of automobile culture
and online micro-communities have not only changed the way social life is
organized, they have also disrupted the forms of organization on which the
"old left" was built. If the culture of modernism was based on the chance
encounter on the city street and collective anonymity of the factory and
rail car, suburban sprawl and the post-modern cubicle entered a new form of
fragmented alienation, one that is isolated as it is as often subcultural.
Theorists of left-wing social organization, such as Michael Hardt and Toni
Negri, as well as journalists, such as Naomi Klein, celebrated these forms
of disaggregation heterogeneity. Hardt and Negri described the "multitude"
as the shape of the new working class. Decentralized and unorganized, this
new class of knowledge and service workers would meet together in loose
networks and horizontal associations, giving up neither their autonomy as
subjects nor their heterotopian forms of difference. Klein described in The
New Left Review the revival of "the commons," both a public and social space
held by all, as well as a vision of radical democracy without ideological or
political center. Narrating the first uprising against neoliberalism after
the end of the Cold War, Klein remarked that the affinity groups and
spokescouncils of the "Battle of Seattle" resembled nothing more than the
internet, as well as the new forms of capitalist organization in Silicon
Valley. Flexible and just-in-time production had met its match with flexible
and just-in-time organizing.
We are a class society, riven by fault lines of race, colonial status and
gender. Capitalism is no longer hidden from view, and neither is its
opposition.
Yet Klein made another comment after the exuberant fin-de-siecle explosion
against the World Trade Organization and an increasingly bleak millennium.
Speaking in 2001 in front of a roomful of activists at UCLA, she asked if
the uprising in Seattle was a "movement" or a "collective hallucination."
This question is perhaps more telling than its answer. In the years
following Seattle, the left witnessed uprising after uprising, the massive
shutdown of the International Monetary Fund in 2001, the half-million
protesters in New York City against the invasion of Iraq, the many millions
that hit the streets in the immigrant rights movement, the protest camps of
the Occupy movement, and most recently, the rebellions against racist state
violence in Ferguson and Baltimore. These movements, much like contingent,
unstable, rapid flows of financial capital around the globe, surge and then
diminish, explode into the streets and then go quiet. Our movements are our
collective hallucinations, in a global system that seems to be spinning from
crisis to crisis.
So, what does it mean that young people, the children of neoliberalism, seem
to be abandoning the horizontalism, disavowal and decentralization of my own
generation X? As Jodi Dean suggests in her manifesto, The Communist Horizon,
radicals have never taken the claims of horizontal democracy as seriously as
they proclaim. All movements, she argues, are vanguard acts; they make
claims of representation: "We are the 99%." "The Movement for Black Lives."
They claim to represent "the people," however they are defined, against an
elite or a class or an institution. Yet the question Dean poses is not so
much whether we will commit acts of representation, but rather whether we
will build organizations that can contain difference and the multiple gaps,
omissions and divisions within capitalism. Shall we have the vanguardism of
the subculture, or the organization of the Party?
Young radicals are voting with their feet. After a generation of uprisings
that have left us hanging in the air, it is safe to say activists are tired
of phantasmagorical movements, of collective hallucinations. The crises of
capitalism, from racialized state violence, to the "gig economy," to
environmental catastrophe, to rape culture, to privatization of our public
schools and our privatized imaginaries cannot be solved within the same
affective structures that produce them. Richard Wright wrote after
witnessing that spontaneous uprising on Chicago's South Side, "say comrade
here's the wild river that's got to be harnessed and directed." When I read
that 20 years ago, I winced at what I thought was Wright's incipient
Stalinism. Two decades later, it now reads like common sense.
Or perhaps rather, we are returning merely to certain 19th-century verities
-- that we are a class society, riven by fault lines of race, colonial
status and gender. Capitalism is no longer hidden from view, and neither is
its opposition. Which is not to say DSA is a Stalinist or even Communist
"cadre" organization. Its mix of centralization and decentralization, its
democratic ethos within a larger structure, its flexibility and yet its
consistency speak to both the needs as well as the disaggregated shape and
culture of today's millennial working class.
A party is more than just a collection of individuals; it is a claim on the
future, a vision of another horizon.
As the convention wound down last week, one of the older comrades, someone I
know from an earlier socialist formation, slowly led the delegates through
the tune and phrases of "The Internationale," before and after the crowd
spontaneously erupted into the
White-Stripes-turned-political-football-chant, "Oh Jeremy Corbyn" and then
"Viva el Day-Ess-Eh" ("DSA, DSA, DSA" it was decided, sounded too much like
"USA, USA, USA"). This mixing of political cultures -- of spontaneity and
tradition, of a polyglot US with a long tradition of democratic organizing
-- marks an epochal shift, away from spokescouncils and affinity groups, and
toward the political party. We should not be shy about what a change this
is. A party is more than just a collection of individuals; it is a claim on
the future, a vision of another horizon. And it is one that we cannot wait
another generation to witness.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Benjamin Balthaser
Benjamin Balthaser is associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at
Indiana University, South Bend, and the author of Anti-Imperialist
Modernism. His writings have also appeared in Jacobin, In These Times,
Boston Review, American Quarterly, Truthout, Criticism, Cultural Logic,
Tablet and elsewhere. Benjamin is a member of the South Side Chicago
Democratic Socialists of America Steering Committee.
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