A Big Task for the Left: Getting a Grip on the Current Moment
DSA spends a lot of time talking about organizational issues and some time on "evergreen" theory. These are important, but understanding the current moment is the key to finding our way.
I greatly enjoyed meeting and doing an interview with a comrade and activist from Australia, Federico Fuentes, a few weeks ago. The interview is up at Links, a publication Fuentes helps run that covers the global left from a socialist point of view. I talked about how Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza is shaping US politics and how pro-Palestine organizing is going.
We also discussed: the rumblings in the US labor movement and the possibility that worker power might be making a comeback here; how the US is coasting at the moment toward a new age of reaction under a second Donald Trump presidency; and the state of DSA organizing and (a little bit about) the organization’s internal politics. I hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you think.
One of the many reasons I like doing interviews like the one with Links — and just talking with comrades from abroad and from older generations in the US for that matter — is that they have forced me to challenge some of my habits and natural impulses.
When I first became politically active in college I focused a lot on day-to-day activist questions: Who would we organize to come to the next worker-student solidarity picket? How would we organize the agenda for the next meeting? Who would facilitate which part of the next event? Who booked the room?
When I graduated, a few friends and comrades (mostly from campus labor-solidarity activism) and I started thinking more about bigger-picture political questions. Eventually, we decided to join the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA was very small then, so I ended up becoming the national organizer for its student wing a year later. I moved to NYC, and I started going to the quarterly meetings of DSA’s National Political Committee in our cramped little office a couple blocks from Wall Street.
In retrospect these were pretty funny events. DSA’s “old guard” dominated the body, and the organization was very weak at the time. So the meetings brought together a lot of comrades who joined in the 1970s and ’80s. Small talk focused on complaining about the quality of the bagels bought for breakfast, talking about the public access TV station a member ran in their college town, and describing in excruciating detail how a chapter sold wine at a booth at the annual Labor Day picnic to keep themselves solvent (I have no idea what expenses that chapter had that might have posed such a problem).
At one meeting we learned that a comrade had printed out the sign-up sheets provided by national DSA to table at a nearby campus, but they had crossed out the words “Democratic Socialists of America” and replaced them with the title “Progressives of California” because they thought the “s-word” was too controversial. A comrade who was younger like me and who had been elected to represent everyone under fifty, aka “the youth wing” — and who went on to become a very successful podcaster — would show up to meetings in an absolutely massive fur coat that she would rest on one of the precious few chairs. Anyone who wanted to get some coffee would have to crawl around the coat.
The younger members in the room would plead with the older members to acknowledge that DSA’s Geocities-aesthetic website at the time was an embarrassment, and that few people would join the org if we didn’t redo it. It took a lot of work but they were finally convinced.
Toward the end of my time on staff I was feeling a bit frustrated and mischievous, so I decided to print a picture of Lenin out and tape it to the wall behind my desk. This didn’t go over so well at the next NPC meeting. A concerned member of the old guard gave me a book by Sidney Hook that he thought might be of interest and that would also set me straight.
That was the fun and games part. Mostly I thought the meetings were pretty boring, though. What really ground my gears was the regular “lay of the land” political discussion that the NPC would invest a lot of energy into. They’d sit and discuss the political situation in the US for hours: the strategies of various figures in the labor movement, the Obama administration’s latest maneuvers, GOP plans for the midterms, what slogans and demands were most popular among the (mostly student-based) really existing left.
These conversations drove me up the wall because they seemed so disconnected from our political reality as an organization. DSA had at best 150 active activists in the entire country. The idea that we would be able to leverage our lay of the land to make any meaningful “intervention” in what was going on seemed slightly ridiculous. Many of the comrades in the tiny office in NYC’s financial district seemed to want to talk about the game happening in the A leagues, but at best we were actually playing in the C leagues.
I know I wasn’t the only younger activist who felt this way. We wanted to talk about the “road to socialism,” Marx and Engels and Luxemburg, what went wrong with social democracy, how class works in the twenty-first century, and so on. Admittedly, these were questions even more distant from the reality DSA was operating in in the early 2010s. I think our mostly subconscious motivation here was some version of “going back to basics” and getting the big ideas right for a new movement we hoped would come. Plus, we were all nerds.
We also wanted to talk about organizational issues: Should DSA have a tiered-membership structure to give activists more rights and responsibilities than paper members? Should DSA have caucuses to represent different perspectives? Should we disaffiliate from the Socialist International? Could we start some “left unity” discussions with other socialist groups?
All these plus the nitty-gritty questions activists face day to day were the issues we were most interested in. We definitely did not want to spend much time talking about the lay of the land.
I got pretty stuck in this way of thinking until 2016. That year the country was hurtling toward a presidential election that everyone was confident they knew the outcome of. By chance I got introduced to a much more experienced comrade originally from Argentina who was visiting New York. He spoke a little English and my Spanish was very rough. We hacked our way through a conversation. He gave me the lay of the land in Brazil, where he was living, in an inspiring and absorbing way, and then he asked me about the United States and DSA.
I started to talk about all the internal organizational questions that I was fixated on at the time, plus some mile-high ideas about socialist strategy. At some point, this comrade — clearly not very interested in hearing about the new bylaws for NYC-DSA that I had helped write — stopped me and asked me what DSA’s “policy” was for the 2016 election. What did we think? Would we support Clinton? How did we understand Trump’s strategy? What might happen if Trump won?
My spiel about navigating the internal life of DSA ground to a halt, I pivoted to trying to make up an answer on the spot. The truth was our “new guard” in DSA had ignored the lay-of-the-land discussions the NPC was spending time on, and although we increasingly were leading major DSA chapters, we had no “policy” or perspective to speak of on these bigger questions.
That meeting was a bit of a turning point for me. I’ve been working ever since to ground my politics in a better understanding of the world around me. I’ve come to appreciate the conversations that the DSA old guard was so preoccupied by. Not at the expense of bigger questions of strategy, organizational considerations, or day-to-day tactical choices — but as a complement to them and a way of grounding those discussions in bigger questions about politics that everyone not absorbed in the internal life of DSA can relate to. And I’ve tried to ring the alarm bell in DSA that my generation of activists, myself included, are often too focused on questions of internal organization at the expense of finding our way in the here and now. We need to “put politics first.”
Even when we try to “put politics first” however, we often get trapped in writing pieces and doing political education discussions that are “evergreen” — that could have been written or held ten, twenty, or even a hundred years ago or thirty years from now (“the nature of the state,” “why workers need a political party,” “how class works”). Those discussions have their place, but they desperately need to be grounded in a real understanding about what’s going on in the world around us now.
Urgent topics for discussion are the kinds of questions Fuentes asked me in the interview for Links: “How has the US-backed Israeli war on Gaza impacted domestic politics?” “Has public opinion shifted since the war began?” “Can you give us a sense of the state of pro-Palestine organizing?” “What role has DSA played in these protests?” “Prior to the Palestine solidarity protests, many on the US left were excited by what was being referred to as a ‘strike wave.’ What factors explain this uptick in union strikes?” “What will the likely impact of this labor activism and Palestine be on the US presidential elections?” And so on.
Often big questions about socialist strategy are best addressed by grounding them in the current moment too. The claim that “we need our own party” feels a lot more real when we talk about how the absence of an independent left party is holding back Palestinian solidarity organizing right now. The “labor bureaucracy” plays a conservatizing role across time and place, but what is to be done about it becomes a more meaningful question when we learn from the realities and challenges facing reformers in the UAW and the Teamsters in 2024. There’s a theoretical discussion to be had about “lesser-evil” voting, but grounding it in understanding how and why the UAW, the Teamsters, and members of the Squad are dealing with the question in the way they are this year is vital.
Interviews like the one I did with Fuentes help me organize my thoughts about the current moment. They remind me to try to develop compelling answers to the kinds of questions our unorganized friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors are most interested in discussing. And they force me to take stock of where I think we’re at as a movement. If nothing else those kind of discussions are an important grounding exercise. But I think they’re also the key to finding our way in the world we’re living in now.