Working within a bourgeois party, in an imperialist state no less, is like trying to stop a ship from sinking while everyone else is shooting holes into the hull. And eventually, you in the head.
There are very good reasons why Lenin exclusively advocated for very limited tactical cooperation with bourgeois and/or reformist parties if and…
Working within a bourgeois party, in an imperialist state no less, is like trying to stop a ship from sinking while everyone else is shooting holes into the hull. And eventually, you in the head.
There are very good reasons why Lenin exclusively advocated for very limited tactical cooperation with bourgeois and/or reformist parties if and only if this happened within a communist party apparatus, and only for the purposes of propaganda.
People like to attribute his focus on the party as the primary organisation to some sort of authoritarian leadership style, but there is a practical reason: The (vanguard) party is able to learn from practical mistakes, and immediately implement binding policy corrections, where movements pull into ten different directions and tend to splinter.
And that's a primary weakness even within the DSA: They are too loosely organized and are too dependent on being a sad appendage of the Democratic Party. Instead, an independent labor party is needed, that is primarily focused on separating a socialist base from both the Republicans and the Democrats while ignoring tactical electoral considerations wherever possible.
The point isn't to win elections, it's to build a radical mass base first, and only once that's done to contest seats where that radical mass base is sufficiently developed. That is a long-term process and necessarily needs to include union + community organizing.
Or to say it with Lenin: "We must take upon ourselves the task of organising an all-round political struggle under the leadership of our Party in such a manner as to make it possible for all oppositional strata to render their fullest support to the struggle and to our Party." - What is to Be Done?, 1903
Partially agree, partially disagree. I agree with you on the need for a party general and an independent labor party today in the US.
That said, I think working through DSA is essential. It's the only mass membership, national political org of the left in the US (the only game in town) and if there is a labor party in the future it will build in part on work being done by DSA now.
Build the base first and then contest elections someday in the future also doesn't seem right to me. I'm not sure Lenin would have agreed with that approach either — check out Lars Lih's history ("Lenin Rediscovered") if you haven't already, from that I took away the view that one does not postpone the political struggle until some date in the future. I think there's a powerful and important connection between base building through particular struggles in workplaces, neighborhoods, and in mass mobilizations on the one hand and representing those struggles and bringing them together in an overall program. That latter work is something that happens through contests for state power. In authoritarian regimes those contests take place in the form of subversive activity and popular insurrections. In capitalist democracies those contests take place largely through elections.
Working within a bourgeois party, in an imperialist state no less, is like trying to stop a ship from sinking while everyone else is shooting holes into the hull. And eventually, you in the head.
There are very good reasons why Lenin exclusively advocated for very limited tactical cooperation with bourgeois and/or reformist parties if and only if this happened within a communist party apparatus, and only for the purposes of propaganda.
People like to attribute his focus on the party as the primary organisation to some sort of authoritarian leadership style, but there is a practical reason: The (vanguard) party is able to learn from practical mistakes, and immediately implement binding policy corrections, where movements pull into ten different directions and tend to splinter.
And that's a primary weakness even within the DSA: They are too loosely organized and are too dependent on being a sad appendage of the Democratic Party. Instead, an independent labor party is needed, that is primarily focused on separating a socialist base from both the Republicans and the Democrats while ignoring tactical electoral considerations wherever possible.
The point isn't to win elections, it's to build a radical mass base first, and only once that's done to contest seats where that radical mass base is sufficiently developed. That is a long-term process and necessarily needs to include union + community organizing.
Or to say it with Lenin: "We must take upon ourselves the task of organising an all-round political struggle under the leadership of our Party in such a manner as to make it possible for all oppositional strata to render their fullest support to the struggle and to our Party." - What is to Be Done?, 1903
Partially agree, partially disagree. I agree with you on the need for a party general and an independent labor party today in the US.
That said, I think working through DSA is essential. It's the only mass membership, national political org of the left in the US (the only game in town) and if there is a labor party in the future it will build in part on work being done by DSA now.
Build the base first and then contest elections someday in the future also doesn't seem right to me. I'm not sure Lenin would have agreed with that approach either — check out Lars Lih's history ("Lenin Rediscovered") if you haven't already, from that I took away the view that one does not postpone the political struggle until some date in the future. I think there's a powerful and important connection between base building through particular struggles in workplaces, neighborhoods, and in mass mobilizations on the one hand and representing those struggles and bringing them together in an overall program. That latter work is something that happens through contests for state power. In authoritarian regimes those contests take place in the form of subversive activity and popular insurrections. In capitalist democracies those contests take place largely through elections.