3459. How Stalinism Saved the US Democrats

By Emma Norton, Red Flag, December 16, 2020

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945 is now once again fashionable in the U.S. socialist circles. 

The Democratic Party of the US, along with its legions of capitalist donors, supporters in the state bureaucracy, liberal NGOs and union officials, serves to slap an occasionally liberal gloss on unbridled capitalism. Throughout US history, the Democrats have been called upon to coopt and nullify progressive mass movements. Yet swathes of the socialist left find it impossible to break from the Democrats, and the idea that it is permissible to campaign for them is deeply entrenched. But Stalinism is no alternative to Democratic liberalism. Ironically, it was Stalinism that helped the workers’ movement of the US into the abusive arms of the Democrats.

Until the middle of the 1930s, few socialists in the world would have dared support the candidates or program of a capitalist party like the Democrats. Since the 19th century, the socialist movement had been riven with debates about the necessity for revolution. But there was widespread agreement on the need for working-class independence from other classes, a concept that Marx and Engels considered essential to revolutionary theory and practice.

The pair concluded from their experience of the 1848 revolutions that the working class must be organisationally and politically independent of other classes, and that elections were an important avenue for expressing that independence. As Marx put it in his “March Address” of 1850:

“Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled.”

Instead of accepting the rhetoric of political parties and individuals at face value, Marx and Engels analysed their class basis. The interests of the capitalists, even their liberal wing, would always clash with those of the working class. They “diverge at an angle of 180 degrees”, as Trotsky was to put it almost 90 years later. Marx and Engels concluded that, even if the working class needed to cooperate with other classes for some common goal, it would need to organise separately and always put forward its own political program if it wished to avoid being sidelined, compromised or crushed.

The Socialist Party of America understood this basic principle. The party, formed in 1901, recognised that bourgeois parties like the Democrats and the Republicans were the enemies of workers, and that socialists had to argue this. They ran socialist candidates in elections against both major parties, including in the presidential race. They won dozens of mayoral and state governor contests, and gained around 6 percent of the presidential vote. They maintained their critical line in the face of enormous pressure to endorse Democratic President Woodrow Wilson during his 1916 re-election campaign. Wilson was a darling of liberals; after his re-election, he would lead the US into World War I. The socialists went on to oppose virulently America’s entrance into the war, landing many of their members, from both the left and the right, in jail. The popular radical Eugene Debs secured a million votes in the next presidential election from his prison cell.

By the Second World War, this admirable commitment to independent workers’ organisations had become its opposite for socialists around the world. Many would be drawn into campaigning uncritically for liberal bourgeois parties and governments. Why?

Stalin’s government in Russia, and the Stalinist Communist parties around the world, played the leading role in convincing millions of working-class socialists to subordinate their parties, unions and their own class interests to the will of the “progressive” capitalists and middle-class liberals.

The new strategy was called the Popular Front. The Stalinists claimed that the global fascist threat, which had multiplied with the defeat of the German and then Spanish revolutions, had to be met with a broad anti-fascist coalition that included liberals. The goal was to defend liberal and reformist governments rather than intensifying working-class struggle. Instead of fighting fascism through working-class organisation and defence of democratic rights even up to the point of revolution, Stalin’s movement focused its energies on constructing and promoting capitalist governments.

Prior to the adoption of the Popular Front, Stalin’s regime in Russia had pursued a rhetorically militant policy for several years. Claiming that global capitalism was on the verge of collapse, the Communists insisted that all liberals, social democrats and the workers loyal to them were no different from fascists, and they would all soon be overthrown in a victorious revolution. Everywhere Communists built their own unions separate from the rest of the workers’ movement and refused to unite the working class for joint action against the growing far-right.

The policy helped bolster the power of Stalin’s bureaucracy over the Russian state and the foreign Communist parties. Anyone who refused to go along with the sectarian mania was either purged from the Communist movement or, in Russia, imprisoned or executed. By 1934, Stalin’s regime in the USSR had largely eradicated any opposition to his rule. At the same time, Hitler’s government in Germany posed a military threat to the USSR. Instead of strategising to overthrow Hitler with a workers’ revolution, Stalin sought diplomatic and military alliances with imperialist governments like France, Britain and the US. The previous theory had declared the US president a “social fascist”. Now Stalin did a complete about-face. The Popular Front became the new policy of the Communist International: it demanded that Communist workers play nice with their ruling classes. The Popular Front represented the further subjugation of the international workers’ movement to the interests of the Russian state bureaucracy, and it revealed the extreme counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism.

In the US, the Stalinists led the most militant workers’ movement in US history into a disastrous alliance with liberals, union bureaucrats and the Democratic Party. This unsavoury alliance is often referred to as the “New Deal coalition”. As the aristocratic President Franklin Roosevelt tried a series of economic and social measures to jump-start the economy, he also had to try to contain a growing militant strike wave in industry. State and city governments and bosses, many of them Democrats, used police violence and the National Guard to smash strikes, while the federal government also promoted class collaboration, arbitration and compromise. Roosevelt coopted the leadership of an emerging radical union movement and channeled that energy into support for the Democratic Party.

Democrats like Roosevelt could always be expected to play this role. But in a twisted way, the Communists were better placed than anyone to convince worker militants of the virtues of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.

Throughout the 1930s upsurge of workers’ struggle, which led to the creation and growth of the CIO union federation, the Communist Party had built an impressive multiracial organisation of worker militants, numbering in the tens of thousands. They had an important base among industrial workers who led sit-down strikes from 1935 to 1937 in steel, rubber and other industries. They accepted many full-time positions in the growing union bureaucracy, leading about 40 percent of the new industrial unions by 1937. Both the union bureaucracies and the Democrats realised the value of Stalinists in helping to wind up the wave of struggle. Luckily for them, the Communists had by then turned sharply towards the Popular Front and were desperate to be accepted into the liberal alliance. Much of their focus was on supporting the Democratic Party. By 1938, Communist leader Eugene Dennis was arguing that in the US, the Popular Front could “take the form of a political federation, operating insofar as electoral activity is concerned, chiefly through the Democratic Party”. 

The Communists argued that the Democrats and the New Deal coalition were the only thing preventing America’s collapse into fascism. In 1938, Communist leader Earl Browder said that democracy was “fighting for its life” in much of the capitalist world: “It can survive only to the degree to which there are successfully carried out programs such as those of ... the Committee for Industrial Organization and the economic reforms and peace program of President Roosevelt”.

Roosevelt’s “peace program” would soon include an unprecedented military build-up, participation in World War II and an oppressive division of the world into “spheres of influence”.

Around the world, the Stalinist Popular Front did nothing to prevent the rise of fascism. In Spain, the Communists hoped to keep the bourgeois Republican government in power during the fight against Franco’s fascist forces. In the process, they wilfully destroyed the workers’ militias and collectives and wrecked the possibility of social revolution. With much of the population unable to defend themselves, and the rest disillusioned, Franco’s victory was complete. Fascism reigned in Spain for 30 years. In the US, fascists were not on the verge of state power. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration was the immediate threat to the continued strength of the workers’ movement—and his warmongering was the greatest threat to democracy and freedom.

The Communists argued that only the Democrats would defend workers’ rights to collective bargaining and union recognition. In fact, workers made the most gains precisely when they didn’t rely on Roosevelt and fought back against the forces of the state. A Roosevelt presidency was no guarantee of union rights. As the struggle was wound up in the late 1930s, the bosses pushed back against collective bargaining, and company unions grew. The Democratic-controlled courts ruled sit-down strikes illegal. 

Nor did the commitment to the New Deal result in new social reforms after 1935. With the onset of another economic downturn, Roosevelt slashed poor relief and the public works program for the unemployed in 1938 and 1939, unemployment rose and the bosses clawed back wages and union rights. But by this time, the Communists had convinced a generation of working-class militants that the most important political task of the workers’ movement was to promote political loyalty to Roosevelt’s capitalist Democrats.

Because of their sycophantic attitude towards liberals, the Communists began to lose influence among rank-and-file workers, even as their party grew by attracting moderate liberals and middle-class sympathisers. The Communists had consciously abandoned their campaign organisations within the working class by 1938, so as not to seem threatening to the CIO or the Democrats. The Black Communist leader Harry Haywood reflected years later in his autobiography, “[T]he tendency to subordinate the class struggle to Roosevelt’s New Deal policy had manifested itself earlier in the liquidation of the Party’s factory units, shop papers and trade union fractions”.

Stalinist support for the Democrats helped entrench the two-party system in the US and complete the historic “realignment” that shuffled liberals, Blacks, migrants and the bulk of unionised workers into the Democratic camp. This did not usher in a paradise of social reform. Black people, migrants and workers all gained very little from a prolonged period of Democratic presidencies, except that which they won by struggle. The fact that the oppressed felt that their lives were tied to the electoral fortunes of the Democrats served only to dampen struggle.

This cooption was not a foregone conclusion. In the rebellious atmosphere of the 1930s there was a groundswell of support for a working-class alternative to the major parties. Meetings of miners, smelters, sleeping car porters, textile workers and southern farmers all voted to form a workers’ party. A similar motion passed unanimously at a meeting of the United Auto Workers, who even voted down a resolution supporting Roosevelt for president in 1936. A Gallup Poll conducted in 1937 reported that at least 21 percent of the American population supported the formation of a national “farmer-labor party”. The bureaucrats of the new industrial unions worked closely with the Communist Party to put an end to the agitation for a new, independent workers’ party.

Perhaps the most sickening practical application of Popular Front-style politics came during World War Two. The American Communists fell into outright sycophancy after the Soviet Union joined the war in June 1941, adopting an ultra-patriotic stance. Communist leader Earl Browder argued that “the main sacrifice” for the war effort must come from workers, declaring that “class division or political groupings have no significance now”. They supported and rigorously enforced a no-strike pledge and production speed-ups. This fervent patriotism and uncritical support for Roosevelt did not reflect the mood of rank-and-file unionists, who continued to strike in spite of the Stalinists. The Communist Party publicly condemned strikes in war industries, even slandering the 1943 United Mine Workers strike as “pro-Nazi”.  

Stalinist parties  played this treacherous role around the world. The sum of their efforts was to wind up revolutionary workers’ movements, normalise left-wing support for capitalist parties, promote reformism within the working class and marginalise left-wing opposition to Western imperialism in World War II. The British Communist Party sang the praises of Winston Churchill, the Tory and prewar Nazi sympathiser. Even after the war, they supported Churchill, supposedly engaged in a fight against the “reactionary sections of capitalism”, and offered to extend the no-strike pledge. 

The Stalinists facilitated a historic shift in the workers’ movement towards open support for bourgeois parties and liberals. Everywhere, the results were dire. Radical explosions of struggle, and even revolutions, were subjugated to the interests of capitalist parties, who crushed and tamed them in equal measure. The legacy of those years in America is a left that consistently chains itself to the chariot wheels of the Democratic Party, still regurgitating many of the same arguments used by the Stalinists in the late 1930s.

3310. In Defense of the Green Party

By Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, January 27, 2020

American liberals, the bulk of the ecological movement, and much of the left voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Although formulated as recommendations to the Greens in general, the Open Letter is actually a polemic against Howie Hawkins’s CounterPunch article “The Green Party Is Not the Democrats’ Problem.”

As has been the case in most elections since Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate in 1964, the threat of a “unprecedented danger” has become a talking point of the Communist Party, the Nation Magazine and a broad spectrum of liberal thinking epitomized by the articles of Eric Alterman and Todd Gitlin, as well as the spectacle of Michael Moore getting down on his knees to beg Ralph Nader not to run for President on the Bill Maher show in 2004 .

In addition to holding up a second Donald Trump term as a bogeyman, the authors have the gumption to tell Howie Hawkins that even if the Greens run a low-key campaign, they will come out of the elections stronger:

We have no way to assess the claim that Greens would find it dispiriting to remove themselves as a factor that might abet global catastrophe via a Trump re-election. But wouldn’t Trump out of office much less Sanders or Warren in office not only benefit all humanity and a good part of the biosphere to boot, but also the Green Party? For that matter, weren’t more potential Green Party members and voters driven off by the party’s dismissal of the dangers of Trump than were inspired by it? Which grew more in the last four years, DSA or the Greens?

The Open Letter was signed by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Leslie Cagan, Ron Daniels, Kathy Kelly, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters and Michael Albert. Some political background on these high-profile personalities is necessary.

To start with, Chomsky had a conversation that touched on lesser-evilism with Robert Scheer, the editor of Truthdig, where the Open Letter appeared among other places. I ordinarily have zero interest in any of these ubiquitous transcriptions of Chomsky’s profundities, but was curious to see his defense of “lesser evilism”. Scheer, an 83-year old leftist who has made a living since the 1960s publishing magazines like Ramparts and Truthdig, still has enough piss and vinegar inside him to be skeptical of Chomsky’s justifications for voting Democrat. Chomsky, now 91, is an old-fashioned pragmatist despite his anarchist pretensions. Here he is reassuring Scheer that voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020 would be good for us, just like cod liver oil:

There’s another word for lesser evilism. It’s called rationality. Lesser evilism is not an illusion, it’s a rational position. But you don’t stop with lesser evilism. You begin with it, to prevent the worst, and then you go on to deal with the fundamental roots of what’s wrong, even with the lesser evils.

The best you can say about Robert Scheer is that he keeps these meetings of the great minds to a minimum. Over on ZNet, fellow Open Letter signer Michael Albert has inflicted them on his readers dozens of times over the years. Besides putting Chomsky on a pedestal, Albert’s main interest over the years has been to promote PARECON, or participatory economics. Unlike those nasty revolutions in Russia and Cuba, this is a blueprint for a future society that will be like the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where “the sun shines every day on the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees.” So, he has no strategy for getting to the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Nobody’s perfect.

As for Bill Fletcher Jr. and Barbara Ehrenreich, suffice it to say that they constituted half of the committee that initiated Progressives for Obama in 2008. Meanwhile, Ron Daniels was Deputy Campaign Manager for Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign and urged a vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Leslie Cagan was one of the founders of the Committees of Correspondence in 1991, a Eurocommunist split from the CPUSA that retained its orientation to the Democratic Party. Norman Solomon was a Sanders delegate at the 2016 convention. A most mutually reinforcing coterie.

Unlike those mentioned above, Kathy Kelly has no paper trail identifying her as a Democratic Party supporter; nor does Cynthia Peters. I have to assume that they are like most people on the left today, deathly afraid of Trump and harboring immense illusions in the difference that a Sanders presidency can make.

What unites all of them is a belief in gradual change, as if electing Democrats can serve as a brake on the inexorable decline of the capitalist system. There’s a real cognitive dissonance between the almost daily reports on one catastrophe or another, from the Australian fires to thirty percent of birds in North America dying since 1959, and the plodding, self-serving liberalism of the Democratic Party. This includes not only the regular Democrats from Joe Biden to Amy Klobuchar. It also includes the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, whose idea of socialism is to bring back the New Deal on a silver platter. It was WWII, after all, that broke the back of the Great Depression, not building roads for the WPA.

The Open Letter believes that it would help the Green Party grow if it incorporated a “safe state” strategy. Missing from its calculations is any understanding of its relationship to the two-party system. Whatever its flaws, and they are legion, it is the only party in the twentieth and now the twenty-first century that has functioned as a opponent of a rigged game that serves, first and foremost, to preserve the electoral shell-game.

In Chomsky’s chat with Robert Scheer, he refers to the need for staying in the streets even if a Democrat is elected, even Bernie Sanders. That’s the same advice the Progressives for Obama gave in 2008. Even if Obama was elected, we’d have to put pressure on him to promote progressive legislation. They use the analogy with FDR, who supposedly pushed through New Deal legislation because of trade union militancy.

Our problem, however, is the lack of a genuine radical movement in the USA that can coordinate such forceful actions, let alone a militant trade union movement. In the 1930s, there was a powerful Communist Party that despite tail-ending FDR was in the forefront of social struggles everywhere. Over 20 years ago, I wrote an article that gave them their due:

In an essay “Remaking America: Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front”, [Mark] Naison discusses how the CP made the decision to implement the Popular Front in a very aggressive manner. Browder and the American Communists made a big effort to stop speaking in “Marxist-Leninese” and discovered many novel ways to reach the American people.

They concentrated in two important areas: building the CIO and fighting racism. There is an abundance of information about its union activities, but new research is bringing out important facts about its links to the Black community.

A “Saturday Evening Post” writer observed in 1938 that CP headquarters “is a place where every Negro with a grievance can be sure of prompt action. If he has been fired, the Communists can be counted on to picket his employer. If he has been evicted, the Communists will guard his furniture and take his case to court. If his gas has been cut off, the Communists will take his complaint, but not his unpaid bill to the nearest office… There is never a labor parade, nor a mass meeting of any significance in the colored community in which Communists do not get their banner in the front row and their speakers on the platform.”

After WWII, the Cold War kicked in and reduced the CPUSA to a ghost of its once domineering past. However, there was a new upsurge in radical energy as the Maoists and Trotskyists provided the backbone of militant activism in the 1960s and 70s, even making an impact on the trade union movement. Sectarian mistakes and a steep decline of industrial jobs once again led to a decline in radical activism that only began to reappear during the Occupy movement.

Our problem today is we have a renewed interest in using the Democratic Party as an instrument of reform but with a blunt instrument like the DSA leading the charge. Unlike the highly disciplined CPUSA, the DSA seems incapable of using its 60,000 strong membership in a coordinated assault on capitalist power. I try to imagine what things would look like today if the 10,000 or so Maoists and Trotskyists of the mid-70s had not gone off their rocker thinking the revolution was around the corner. If they had dropped their sectarian pretensions and learned to work together, they would have been able to better confront the nativism, racism, and environmentally destructive policies of the Trump administration.

As a DSA member, I get regular communications from Maria Svart, the group’s chairperson. Almost all of it is consumed with electoral projects like going to New Hampshire to go door to door for Bernie Sanders. When Trump authorized the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, there was a genuine fear that this might have led to a new, major war in the region. What was Jacobin’s reaction to this threat? It urged people to work for Sanders’s election to prevent such a war. Talk about electoral cretinism.

There’s some real confusion about leftist parties today, even—I’m afraid to admit—in the Green Party. It runs candidates not exactly in the same way as the Democrats but mostly in the hope of getting elected to local offices that don’t require the kind of money that you need to run for Governor, Congress or the Presidency. The purpose of Howie Hawkins would not be to get elected but to raise awareness of the uncompromising stance of the Green Party on all the important issues of the day.

My idea of the Greens is strongly influenced by the example of the Peace and Freedom Party of the 1960s that was mostly a vehicle for radical activism. It never amounted to much outside of California but for much of the 60s and 70s, it was a key part of the left that drew in many leftists wary of the lunacy of the “Leninist” left, as well they should have been.

When I went to the Madison Square Garden rally for Ralph Nader in 2000, I was stunned to see the sold-out audience of mostly young people filled with energy. It dawned on me that the Greens could draw upon this energy and become the badly needed, nationally coordinated backbone of the left. Unfortunately, the people who believed in a “safe state” strategy, like the Open Letter advocated, maneuvered themselves into a leadership position that was strong enough to deny Ralph Nader the candidacy in 2004. Instead, the Greens ended up with David Cobb as the candidate who was very good at making sure it kept a low profile.

Jill Stein ran a much more energetic campaign in 2012 and 2016 but she doesn’t really have a vision of what the Greens can become. Additionally, she relies on the advice of David Cobb, her campaign manager, who is still bent on preventing the party from exploiting the possibilities that lie ahead of it in a period of deepening crisis.

Howie Hawkins has that vision and that is why I am supporting his candidacy. If he is the Presidential candidate in 2020, I will do everything in my power to back his campaign even if he draws votes away from Bernie Sanders in safe states. The way to build a party is to go full-bore. Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. The Republicans are very good at it even if the goal is to turn back the clock to 1895. In politics, you have to have a killer instinct. Lenin had it. So did Fidel Castro. While the USA is nothing at all like Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1957, the conditions are ripening for immense class battles within a few years.

It will take a revolutionary party to change this country from top to bottom and the time to begin moving toward its formation is now. I do not think that the Green Party can become that party but its growth will create the fertile soil that can determine the outcome, just like the abolitionist parties that gave rise to the Republican Party of Abe Lincoln. The USA had a revolution that put an end to chattel slavery in the 1860s. It is high time to make a new revolution that destroys wage slavery.

3130. Nancy Pelosi and the Horse Trading Progressives

By Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, November 19, 2018

Nancy Pelosi has been making news lately as an obstacle to the transformation of the Democratic Party into the kind of European Social Democratic Party the DSA and Sandernistas yearn for. There is a growing momentum to reject her bid to be reelected as Speaker for the House of Representatives.

Norman Solomon, the director of RootsAction.org, a Sandernista online activist group, wrote an article for Truthdig titled The ‘Pelosi Problem’ Runs Deep that does not quite call for a vote against her: “Nancy Pelosi will probably be the next House speaker, a prospect that fills most alert progressives with disquiet, if not dread. But instead of fixating on her as a villain, progressives should recognize the long-standing House Democratic leader as a symptom of a calcified party hierarchy that has worn out its grassroots welcome and is beginning to lose its grip.” Solomon instead urges his 1.5 million “members” (nothing more than clicking a link online) to continue more or less the same course DSA urges, namely activism around various issues such as a “Green New Deal” and electing people like Ocasio-Cortez.

Justice Democrats, another online activist outfit like RootsAction.org focused on electing “progressives”, has received the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez. Two days ago she got on the phone with some 700 Justice Democrats, most of whom were active in the Sanders campaign, and told them: “Long story short, I need you to run for office. We all need to run at all levels of government, but I really hope that many of you join me here in Congress.”

Last Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez participated in a sit-in at Pelosi’s office calling for a Green New Deal that she views as requiring the same commitment as WWII and the Marshall Plan. If I were her, I’d probably not have alluded to such obvious imperialist projects but then again I live in Another Country, as James Baldwin once put it.

Does this mean that she was ready to vote against Pelosi becoming Speaker? Surprise-surprise. Four hours ago, she pledged support for her as the “Most Progressive Candidate” . She added, “All of the rebellion for the speakership are challenges to her right, and so I think it’s important to communicate that.” Among the 16 House Democrats opposing Pelosi is Max Rose, who just got elected in Staten Island, a NY borough that has much more in common with rural Iowa than the rest of the city. Filled with white cops and firemen, you’d think that Rose would be another Joe Manchin. A visit to Rose’s website, however, will reveal that he favors lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 55, etc. The NY Times analyzed why he beat the incumbent:

His pedigree might have alienated potential constituents, but his rhetoric did not. He offered a simple, unifying message that was progressive in substance but relatively neutral in its delivery: that the system is rigged to benefit special interests, that the little guy is getting stiffed over and over, that we need better infrastructure and stronger unions.

The most outspoken opponent of Pelosi’s reelection is Marcia Fudge, an African-American Representative from Ohio, who has even been considering a run against Pelosi. Fudge has been stigmatized as homophobic for refusing to co-sponsor the Equality act but defends herself by saying that that she supports gay rights, but not the way that particular bill was handled. She said, “They can’t find one vote, not one vote, that’s anti. I just don’t want to insert it into the civil rights bill. It should be a stand-alone bill and I’d support that.”

Fudge is an ally of Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who also signed the letter against Pelosi and who ran against her for the House Speaker post in 2016. There’s nothing much in his record to place him in the DP’s rightwing. Indeed, in an op-ed piece for the NY Times, he stated: “I think that Ocasio-Cortez was expressing the frustration that so many people feel right now that our systems aren’t working for the people who work hard and play by the rules. She talked about the cost of rent, health care, wages and education. Those are bread and butter issues that play all across the country.”

I really don’t have the time, nor the motivation, to look into the background of the other 15 Democrats but for argument’s sake will accept the possibility that they are to the right of Pelosi. What interests me more is how this fits into the broader question of how to understand the role of the Democratic Party in American society.

To start with, Ocasio-Cortez does have a point. Pelosi is, by DP standards, fairly progressive. On Facebook, Stephen Zunes, a San Francisco professor and well-known journalist of the left, wrote:

Given that under Nancy Pelosi’s leadership the Democrats won back the House while under Chuck Schumer’s leadership Democrats actually lost seats in the Senate, why is it Pelosi whose leadership is being challenged?

1) Pelosi, while not nearly as progressive as I would like, is still more liberal than Schumer. For example, she opposed the invasion of Iraq and supported the Iran nuclear agreement while Schumer sided with the Republicans on both of these important foreign policy matters. Pelosi is also more progressive on a number of important domestic issues as well.

2) Pelosi, because she is more willing to challenge Republican priorities, has been attacked a lot more by Republicans than has Schumer and some Democrats get easily spooked by right-wing criticism

3) there is still a lot of sexism among Democrats

In my view, the opposition to Pelosi is overdetermined in the Althusserian sense. Among the various factors, each of which by themselves would serve as sufficient grounds for opposing her, are:

1. As Zunes said above, she has been pilloried for years now by the Republicans. Leaving aside the merit of their attacks, her unpopularity rating is at 29 percent. To some extent, this is the same sort of burden Hillary Clinton carried around. The two are female (obviously), wealthy, urban, and indifferent to the plight of the working people. For example, in 2010 Pelosi opposed a moratorium on home foreclosure, something Clinton ironically did support.
2. As opposed to the Republicans, the Sanders wing of the party views her as inimical to the changes that are necessary to make the DP an agent of “socialism”. Despite the Republican attack on her as a “radical”, Govtrack.us ranks her as the 37^th most conservative Democrat in the House.
3. Probably the most important motivation for replacing her is the perceived need voiced by younger elected officials in the DP to make room at the top for themselves and their cohorts. In a way, it is the same problem that exists in the academy where professors continue to hold down jobs well into their 70s, if not their 80s. An old friend who taught sociology at Columbia described this as “calcification” not much different than the kind that can cause a stroke.

You get a real sense of the ambitions that drive opposition to Pelosi from Beto O’Rourke, the leftwing darling who lost a narrow race to Ted Cruz in November. In today’s NY Times, he comes across as the ultimate careerist:

“You have some of the institutional members say, ‘Who are these upstarts?’ ” one of these younger Democrats, Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who was elected in 2012, told me in 2015. “One member of Congress compared us to spoiled kids, like teenagers who want a car on their 16th birthday. But you look at my class: Tulsi Gabbard, she’s not going to stay in the House for long — she’ll run for governor. Joe Kennedy, the same. Pat Murphy, the same. And they’re all talented, ambitious and good fund-raisers. I’ve just got to think that when you see that 20-year road to be in a position of consequence, other options look a lot more attractive.” O’Rourke, of course, left this year to pursue those other options, following his fellow erstwhile rising House stars Xavier Becerra (who was appointed attorney general of California in 2017) and Kyrsten Sinema (whom Arizona elected to the Senate this month). [emphasis added]

This reminds me quite a bit of what Les Evans told me when I joined the SWP in 1967. “I looked around when I joined and saw that I could become a leader of this party without too much trouble.” (Or something to that effect.) After cutting his ties to the party during the turn, Evans took a position at UCLA exploiting his knowledge of Chinese he developed in the party. Today, he is a Zionist and a liberal. Who knows where O’Rourke will be in 20 years? I can say that when he started out, he was not exactly the sort of politician that would endear himself to the average DSA member.

Probably the most savvy take on the progressive opposition to Pelosi comes from Politico, a website that views this sort of thing the way that touts view the odds at a horse race. Titled Progressives back Pelosi for speaker — in return for more power, it sees the compromise as old-fashion horse-trading, to continue with the equine analogy.

It wasn’t a coincidence that moments after Nancy Pelosi promised progressive House leaders more power in the next Congress, a host of liberal groups announced they were supporting her for speaker.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who is expected to co-chair the House Progressive Caucus next year, left a Thursday night meeting with Pelosi in the Capitol and proclaimed that her members would have more seats on powerful committees and more influence over legislation.

The Washington state Democrat then phoned MoveOn and Indivisible with the news, and they promptly tweeted out support for Pelosi. Then, on Friday morning, Jayapal, previously uncommitted on whom she would back for speaker, gave Pelosi a full-throated endorsement.

“No one can really doubt Pelosi’s progressive chops,” Jayapal told POLITICO in an interview. “And I do think, for the next two years, as we lead into 2020, and are coming off this big wave, we need someone who is smart and strategic and has done this.”

Smart and strategic? I suppose so. To give you an idea of what this means in practice, look how Jayapal and her cohorts finessed the abolish ICE demand as reported by In These Times:

In July, three members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.)—introduced a bill to abolish ICE. They intended it as a statement of principle and, as Vox observed, “weren’t ready to be taken seriously,” given that the majority of Americans oppose abolishing ICE and Democrats themselves are split. House Republicans threatened to bring it up for a vote, with the hope of embarrassing Democrats. The progressives then announced they would vote against their own bill. But as with Warren’s plan for reforming capitalism and the more ambitious climate change plans, such laws that push the moral envelope lay important groundwork for when progressives and Democrats actually have power. [emphasis added]

So if they don’t take themselves seriously, why should we?

Writing for The Nation, the abysmal Joan Walsh interviewed Jayapal as “a bridge between the still-feuding Clinton and Sanders wings of the Democratic Party”. It concluded with these words from Jayapal: “We can’t tear each other down. If we start to divide ourselves now, we’re really lost. It doesn’t mean we can’t disagree about things. But we agree we’re all working toward the same place. That’s when we begin to win.”

For the past year or so, we’ve been hearing about how people like Jayapal and Ocasio-Cortez will eventually take over the Democratic Party. Mark my words. Within a year or two, the Democratic Party will have taken them over. That’s what it has been doing with the left for over a century and it is an art it has perfected. When those being co-opted are getting richly rewarded for their surrender, no wonder there will barely be a whimper. It is up to us who still see a need for revolution to scream at the top of our lungs from every rooftop.

3038. Not Learning From the New Communist Movement

By Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, October 1, 2018

Max Elbaum, author of “Revolution in the Air”

There’s an interview with Max Elbaum on Jacobin today titled “Learning from the New Communist Movement” that is mostly unobjectionable. As I pointed out in a review of Max’s “Revolution in the Air” in 2002, “I strongly recommend this recently published Verso book to anybody trying to make sense of the state of the left today. While focused on the "New Communist Movement" of the 70s and 80s (that I prefer to call Maoist), the lessons Elbaum draws are applicable to all vanguard party-building projects including those of the Trotskyist movement that I participated in.”

Clearly, there is an affinity between Jacobin/DSA and the Maoist movement that Elbaum belonged to and chronicled in this book. With both the DSA and the “New Communist Movement” of yore recycling the politics of the Popular Front, you might even wonder why it took so long for them to have a friendly chat. Max was a leader of the Line of March (LOM) in the 1970s, a Maoist group founded by Irwin Silber, the film critic of the now-defunct American radical newsweekly The Guardian.

The LOM had a most peculiar political agenda. They wanted to either convince the CPUSA to return to its glorious past or carry out that task themselves. Whatever complaints they had about the CPUSA, being embedded in the Democratic Party was not one of them.

In the early 80s, I was active in the New York chapter of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES_ that was mostly made up of political independents like me but had some LOM and Communist Workers Party (CWP) playing an important role as well. The is best known for its ultraleft strategy in North Carolina that played into the hands of the KKK. As two important trends in the New Communist Movement, they both were very active in Democratic Party campaigns involving Black progressives who were the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the day: Harold Washington, who would be elected mayor of Chicago, and Jesse Jackson.

In 1984, CISPES passed a motion that its members would work closely with Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Still allergic to anything connected to the Democratic Party, I began to wind my CISPES activism down. Micah Uetricht, the Jacobin assistant editor who conducted the interview with Elbaum, uses his words to stigmatize people like me: “Planting the banners and waiting in a left-wing stronghold for people to come to us will not cut it.” The full exchange appears below:

Micah Uetricht: In the book, you quote Vladimir Lenin: “Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions.”  Then you write that revolutionaries must not “accept marginal status as a permanent fact of life — much less a mindset that glorifies marginality as a sign of true revolutionary faith. … Planting the banners and waiting in a left-wing stronghold for people to come to us will not cut it.”

When I read that, I think of the critiques of mass campaigns like Medicare for All or for politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which have shown that they can bring the idea of socialism to mass numbers of people who have never heard this term before. Some of those critiques are valid, like the worry that engaging too heavily in electoral politics will water down DSA’s radical politics to the point that the organization ceases to advance a bold socialist vision. But most of them seem more rooted in people clinging to that “pure” marginality — at a moment when socialism has an opportunity to become a truly mass movement. The opportunity to reach the “millions” that Lenin references is here, but orienting a leftist organization in that direction involves ditching some of the habits of glorifying marginality.

Max Elbaum: I think the Bernie campaign, the insurgent campaigns, the way people are learning to speak to large numbers who are envisioning moving the country as a whole — all of that is extremely positive. Politics is a matter of looking at the balance of forces and where the masses are at and intervening in a way that moves the needle. We have to speak to the majority and build a majoritarian movement.

We’re obviously a long way from a majority of the United States not just supporting fundamental change and an alternative to capitalism but taking steps and risks to make that happen. That’s not going to come about by offering only a maximalist program and trying to move in one leap from where we are now to that maximalist program.

It’s certainly legitimate and necessary to realize there’s uneven development in society — you’re going to have an advanced guard, what Lenin called the “conscious element.” That’s the point of having a socialist organization where people are united on the long-range goal. But it works in different layers. It has its immediate base and its periphery, and it works in coalition with outside forces.

So, I think that the purist tendencies, the ones that are critical of anything that is less than their total vision of what a revolutionary socialist program would be, are self-defeating. Because you never break out of the margins.

The idea that you just plant the flag and everyone will come to you if you have the correct line has never worked. That’s not how politics works. Politics is addition — you need to get more people on your team.

The Left has been marginal for a long time in the United States. For some people, that’s their comfort zone. When you mix it up in broad mass politics, there’s always a danger that you compromise some key principle and fall down a slippery slope. Those are real dangers. But every successful movement for radical reform or revolution has to engage in those broad mass politics. There’s no other way to build a majoritarian movement from where we are now to a majoritarian movement for socialism.

With all due respect to Max and Micah, it appears that the words “Politics begin where the masses are” do not appear in the Marxist Internet Archives. It seems to have about the same provenance as “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” None. In fact, the words attributed to Lenin could justify practically anything, including urging a vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, as Max did.

The exchange between the hardened social democrat (or democratic socialist, whatever) and the hardened Eurocommunist is notable for leaving the words “Democratic Party” out. Instead, it frames the differences between “glorifying marginality” by “purist tendencies” and those who are involved with “electoral politics” like the DSA, the Communist Party and the Committees of Correspondence. You might even say that articles written for the People’s World and Jacobin in support of working to elect Democrats are virtually indistinguishable except for the fact that Jacobin articles tend to use the language of the graduate school rather than the AFL-CIO media bureau.

If Jacobin had decided to ask tough questions rather than the kind that Charlie Rose would feed to Henry Kissinger or Bill Gates, they would have brought up Jesse Jackson’s campaigns. For all practical purposes, the Rainbow Coalition was the Sandernista movement of its day with volunteers being drawn from various Maoist sects rather than the social democracy, which was pretty marginal at the time.

Just as Jacobin authors kid themselves into believing that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez et al might eventually break with the Democrats as Lincoln did with the Whigs, you heard the same thing in 1984 and 1988. Most leftists thought there was a realistic possibility that the Rainbow Coalition could turn into a new third party when Jackson had as much of an intention of leading such a break as Sanders does today. You can understand how this would be even more unlikely this would be for Sanders since he enjoys the perks of being an elected Senator.

Thirty years ago, Joanna Misnik wrote a pamphlet for Solidarity titled “The Rainbow and the Democratic Party— New Politics or Old?: A Socialist Perspective” that I highly recommend. It is written from the perspective of Lenin’s electoral strategy that has nothing in common with the exchange between Uetricht and Elbaum above. Instead of quoting non-existent words, they might have tried to grapple with Lenin’s polemics against the Mensheviks who advocating blocs with the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), the Democratic Party of Czarist Russia.

Here is Misnik on the “Inside-Outside” strategy defended by the DSA:

The Rainbow includes a number of socialist and left organizations that hope the Coalition can ultimately precipitate a break from the Democrats in favor of a new anticapitalist political party. Groups such as the National Committee for Independent Political Action (NCIPA) typify the "inside-outside" strategy of the not-really Democrats in the Rainbow. They hold the position that the way to break the Democratic Party apart is to join it. They are urging people to register and vote Democrat!

"Inside-out" Rainbow activists are concerned about the decline of the movements for change during the past decade. They mistakenly identified the shift to the right of establishment politics as a rightward drift in the population at large. Sectors of the movement, buying into the idea that Reagan had a mandate, became fearful and hesitant. This timidity was fed by the collapse of the Black movement into the Democratic Party and the failure of the labor movement to mount a defense against concessions, plant closings, unemployment and the general effects of the recessionary economy.

The difficult political climate led to conclusions of the type offered by Rainbow leader Sheila Collins in her recently published The Rain­bow Challenge: the Jackson Campaign and the Future of U. S. Politics. Collins explains:

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 shocked many left activists into discovering the dialectical relationship between social movements and electoral institutions…. Electoral politics was no longer seen as a substitute for movement-building, but as a necessary complement. Although it was difficult to do both simultaneously, there was a growing realization that the two forms of political activity were dialectically related. (105-108)

This new "dialectic" for the ’80s is a high-toned way of sounding a retreat from what history has already taught. There isn’t a shred of evidence to support the idea that the Democratic Party, in or out of power, offers fundamental concessions to the locked-out when they loyally lock-in their votes in massive numbers. All successes in shifting the social relation of forces—from the rise of the CIO to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war victories—have been the direct results of unruly mass movements playing outside the acceptable channels of U.S. two-party politics.

In the case of both labor in the 1930s and the social movements of the 1960s, it was precisely at the point when major sectors of these movements decided it was time to move "from protest to politics" and act as a pressure group within and around the Democratic Party than reforms began to slack off and eventually disappear. In fact, the brevity of these two periods of major change is due to this very co-optation. Unable to defeat capitalist control of the party from the inside and claim it as their own, the reformers were themselves beaten and became the reformed.

Left Rainbow advocates may argue that all this does not apply. After all, they have an organization separate and apart from the Democratic Party that enables them to resist absorption while they use the "tactic" of Jackson’s candidacy to build a new, integral progressive force. Unfortunately this is not the case.

The Rainbow has only one tactic, one focus that glues all its components together: Jackson’s race for the Democratic Party nomination. No other goals were established at the Raleigh convention. By definition, this subsumes the Rainbow into the Democratic Party and hands it over to those who want it to be nothing more than an army of foot soldiers for the Jackson Campaign Committee.

This problem is not something only those outside the Rainbow can perceive. The powerful New Jersey delegation to the Rainbow Con­vention led a well-received fight to democratize the notoriously top-down Rainbow structure. They were motivated by the fear that the Rainbow will be dictated to by official campaign structures, stunting its growth and threatening its ability to exist beyond `88. Some structural changes were made, such as adding state chairs to the all-powerful Board of Directors and halving the minimum number of members required to receive a local charter.

However, the Rainbow chartering system still requires a minimum membership in a third of a state’s congressional districts. Using the districts as its basic unit shapes the vote-getting operation. It is a foreign and unwieldy organizational structure for activists accustomed to city-wide mobilizing.