SHOULD I BECOME A FRIEND?
Consider becoming a Friend of the Communist Caucus if you think that…
1. The Problem is Working Class Disorganization.
Working class disorganization has constrained what is politically possible today, and that DSA’s future, along with the future of the U.S. socialist movement, is bound up with addressing this fundamental problem.
DSA’s early growth was driven by the Trump presidency, Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns, and a series of militant social movements. As our political moment has shifted into one characterized by acute demobilization across the entire left, DSA has hemorrhaged members, seen entire chapters and working groups become inactive, and failed to reach success in many of its organizing goals.
Legislative campaigns have stalled; elections outside our ‘core neighborhoods’ in big cities and against more entrenched machines have lost; the movements that once buoyed the organization has grown quiet. It turns out that the natural ‘constituency’ for socialism is still a limited one. As a result of these setbacks and a narrowing focus of many chapters, many thousands have disengaged; in some lucky cases once engaged members are now organizing their workplaces, getting involved with unions and community groups, but often without any tangible connection to the socialist movement.
But it doesn’t have to be this way—we can find our own impetus for growth by focusing on the problem that has so far curbed our success: proletarian disorganization. By “disorganization” we mean the decline of the institutions and social groupings that enabled working class people to get together and fight back in a class-wide way. Since the 1970s, working class organization and its associated habits of political struggle on the terrain of everyday life have become weakened; we need to rethink and rebuild them for our post-Bernie and post-quarantine world. Absent a new tide of fighting working class organization, the socialist movement will be unable to cast off from our current predicament: an adjunct of the ineffectual progressive establishment.
We plan to support all proposals and efforts that arise that move us towards this goal during the 2023 DSA convention.
2. The Solution is an Organization of Mass Work Organizers.
Communist Caucus sees the primary task of socialists as becoming mass work organizers, meaning the building up and participation in working-class organizations on the terrain of everyday life. We think there are two areas that deserve particular support in the upcoming convention: proposals that develop and support mass work within tenant and labor struggles.
A lot of people talk about “organizing,” and sometimes, it isn’t obvious what it means. That’s why we call it “mass work organizers.” The phrase refers to a focus on building power with other working-class people to address the problems that people face in their everyday lives.
Exploitation at work as a worker, and at home as a tenant, are two terrains where DSA has begun to build important structures that can support working class organization. Friends of the Communist Caucus plans to offer full support for continuing to build out the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee (EWOC) and the Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC). We also hope to support broader efforts to further strengthen and clarify rank-and-file labor and tenant organizing within already existing unions.
We also hope to support the continued investment in abolitionist organizing. Abolition has the promise of contributing to proletarian reorganization in its opposition to the carceral state. We also see this promise in those working class organizations that exist today, where people have taken up new ways to respond to conflict and controversy, relying on each other to redress these issues without the police. Similarly, we see a strong commitment to anti-racist and anti-oppression work, both internal and external facing, as being necessary for DSA to become an organization of mass work organizers: classwide action means anti-racist action, and the fight against white supremacy is a slogan for multiracial working class unity.
We remain open to supporting similar efforts that can build DSA towards becoming a mass work organization as they arise in convention season. Part of what FCC will do is help to navigate the coming debates along these lines.