I don't think the article says that the Communist Party does all those
activities now. I think it says they once did it. Apparently, it depended on
where you lived and which faction of the party you were involved with. I'd
love to see an objective comparison of the current Green Party and the SDA.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2017 12:46 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Socialist Horizon: Building a New Party
I can live with the DSA. But can Corporate Capitalism? I am prepared to
change my vote from the Green Party to the DSA. And for the moment, I might
consider joining as a member. If the old American Communist Party in Seattle
had organized family and Party activities, like this article says they do now,
and had they put my mother in charge of organizing concerts, lectures, child
and elder care support groups, I most likely would be a Marxist today. But
these stern, no nonsense Party leaders of the 1940's, ordered mother to put
Party before Family. All they saw was her backside as she herded her three
children out of the Hall.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/27/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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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