Clean Break? Dirty Break? Gimme a Break!
Talk about electoral strategy is putting the cart before the horse
I do not fully understand the conversation I am about to wade into, but allow me the privilege of at least dipping my toes in the water.
Everyone’s favorite topics “electoralism” and her sister, “electoral strategy”, have stolen the hearts and minds of many comrades who simply cannot stop thinking and writing about the lovely sisters. Mine included.
On the one hand, there is the party surrogate model popular amongst a certain sect of DSA. Brad C in Breaking Bad offered his definition: “The party surrogate is a membership organization, like DSA, which behaves the way a workers’ party would and should, operating organizationally independent of either of the major parties.” The composition of “the party surrogate would include tenants and workers...in collective struggle” conducting “electoral campaigns every step of the way” and “through intentional growth and development...free our candidates from the Democratic Party”. Further, the party surrogate would treat elections as “a manifestation of that struggle that is seeking to win and utilize elements of state power” by “using the Democratic ballot line where it is strategic”. Dustin Guastello and Jared Abbott provide a nice summary to the idea: “it would be internally democratic, financed by dues, focused on member mobilization, and organized around a worker’s agenda”.
Members of the Bread and Roses caucus agree with this assessment for the need of a party surrogate. However, they do not see a party surrogate as sufficient for their actual objective which is class formation. In ‘Why Workers Need a Political Party’ Nick French and Jeremy Gong note “socialist-democratic parties [have been] crucial to defining working-class attitudes and activity…’to a significant extent it was parties that organized classes, not the other way around.’” The clear separation and independence from a capitalist Democratic Party helps provide a framework for workers to understand the line in the sand, the difference between us as socialists and them as capitalists.
Whereas B&R reveal the ultimate purpose of their political party to be class formation, CPN does not reveal any deeper theoretical purpose to their project. Actually the closest Brad C gets to explaining the end goal is that its to create “a loyal mass base large enough to allow for a dirty break while avoiding electoral marginalization.” Dustin Guastello and Jared Abbott describe the goal of a party surrogate to be “an institution capable of fundraising and mobilizing such that it could sufficiently counteract the incentive structure of the Democratic Party.” (a socialist party in our time). It seems the purpose for a party surrogate is rooted in a sense of, shall we say, vulgar electoralism.
B&R’s conception of electoral politics is no less vulgar. Despite acknowledging the multi-faceted form of the Social Democratic Party (“educational clubs, political and theoretical publications, athletic clubs, grocery stores, and theaters”) Jeremy Strong and Nick French still found the Bernie Sanders campaign as the northern light, highlighting the success of “mobilizing millions around demands like Medicare-for-All and debt forgiveness”. The wonderful victory to be celebrated was a shift in the poll numbers, another indication that public opinion polls and media relations were important considerations in Strong and French’s electoral strategy. For evidence toward this bias, look no further than the almost three hundred words spent outlining the benefits of Bernie Sander’s media apparatus.
The CPN and B&R positions on the matter of electoral strategy are incredibly close. Further, the strategic goal of a worker’s party and the strategic development of a party surrogate aren’t in contradiction with each other. “A membership-run organization with its own name, its own logo, its own identity and therefore its own platform, and its own ideology” describes the benefits of a worker’s party just as well as Seth Ackerman’s description of a party surrogate. Clearly, the supposedly opposing strategies put forward by the two caucuses actually complement each other.
Thus there seems to be an agreement that there is a need to begin building a party, or to engage in party building. However, the problem with the discussion so far is that it has focused solely on strategic objectives at the expense of discussing the means by which we achieve them. It’s easy to talk about the future, but hard to talk about the present, and at present DSA is not on track to achieve anything being discussed. The organizational structure of DSA is not meant to be home to a mass worker movement, nor can it adequately serve as a party surrogate. Rather, DSA’s working group structure tends to benefit the development of activist cadres--which was all that could be done during much of DSA’s history--and this topic is skipped over in favor of will-we-or-won’t-we start a labor party. It’s all besides the point until there are major reforms to DSA’s organizational structure.
Don’t put the cart before the horse by arguing over electoral strategy. It’s time we talk tactics instead of strategy and examine DSA’s electoral tactics with the goal of matching our tactics with our strategy, whatever it ends up being.