Report on week one of Solidarity’s “Problems of Socialist Organization” reading and discussion series
Ivan DZ, November 15 2025
Solidarity’s fall 2025 reading group began on the evening of November 6th by introducing some fundamental differences that have animated and divided socialist camps since the days of Marx and Bakunin. Individual freedom or social equality; mass spontaneity or organizational direction; decentralized autonomy or central planning –– these apparently binary visions of socialist struggle are all, we argued, are better understood as problems of socialist organization.
To approach these problems, which sprawl out far wider and run far deeper than the technical problems implied by the term “organization,” our class started by discussing the frameworks presented in our critical readings for the week. In “Two Souls of Socialism,” Hal Draper claims that all of socialist debates can be best understood as between “socialism from above,” a broad group that spans Stalinists and social democrats, and “socialism from below,” an energetic vision that centres and depends on the self activity of the working class itself. In “Three Problems of the Revolution,” Daniel Guerin breaks these divisions down differently; as three groups consisting of authoritarians, scientific socialists, and anti-authoritarians.
You can listen to the presentations introducing these readings here, and you can watch a video of them here. For this class, Jason Dawsey presented on the Daniel Guerin article, and I presented on Hal Draper. You can read the text of the presentation I gave here.
A note on documenting these classes
Forty six people took part in this first class, which was organized like in our previous classes over the last two years, which were about borders and migration, fascism, and the Palestinian struggle. Discussions in small groups follow introductory presentations, and the 90 minute session wraps-up with a report back and discussion all together for the last half hour.
I wrote reports after each class discussion for those previous sessions, and we recorded the introductory presentations, which we’ve often had delivered by experts in the field, including authors of some of the texts we’re reading. In the coming weeks, we’ll add those reports and recordings to the website. And during this class series, we will add the reports and recordings to the class syllabus as we go, as well as sending them out over the class email list, making these available as resources along with the selection of readings.
My presentation on Hal Draper
I titled my presentation “Organization, the Axis of Socialism” because, reading these texts, I was struck by the unity of organizational problems with political, philosophical, and ethical problems that socialists have confronted. I said, “Organization in the capitalist world is a largely technical and administrative problem: how to divide responsibility, the most efficient ways to make decisions, and maybe how to best represent diverse constituencies in governing structures. For social democrats, and electorally focused democratic socialists, organizational problem tends to follow a similar arc: how to mobilize and recruit volunteer canvassers, or what are the best techniques for organizing a workplace – one-on-ones, etc… We are proposing that socialist organization is a qualitatively different problem.”
Socialism will be a qualitative change in the mode of production that organizes social relations. And one of the principal differences between socialism and the capitalist, and also feudal, mode of production is that socialism is defined by mass leadership in total production, including reproduction. I said that what capitalism and feudalism have in common is that “social organization is determined top down, where the content of peoples lives is heavily influenced by their function in the capitalist mode of production. The tendency of capitalism especially is to remake all social relations into elements of the reproduction of its dominating mode of production. For workers, it is more than unconscious, it is anti-conscious.”
But socialism “depends upon the activation of the broad masses of people; who must apply their productive and reproductive expertise and desires to the total reorganization of society through their own lives.” So, without mass organization, there can be no socialism.
In “Two Souls of Socialism,” Hal Draper addresses this problem, saying, “The heart of Socialism-from-Below is its view that socialism can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses in motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands, mobilized ‘from below’ in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of history.” He then reviews (in sometimes too general a gloss) histories of socialist theory, debate, and experience, to evaluate whether, according to this principle, different forms of organization, as well as the strategies and tactics of those organizations are the product of workers themselves, or not.
My overall argument was that the guiding question of whether a strategy, analysis, or set of tactics are advancing the struggle for socialism or not should be: Does this improve the autonomous power and organization of the working class? That will be the question I ask when studying the experiences of class struggle throughout the rest of this class series.
Jason’s presentation on Daniel Guerin
Jason’s presentation focused on Daniel Guerin’s article, “Three problems of the revolution.” Written in 1958, after the death of Stalin, Kruschev’s revelations about the depths of authoritarian terror in the USSR, and the continuation of that repressive authoritarianism despite pledges to the contrary, Guerin’s article is a defence of revolution, and an argument that libertarian socialism, or, anarchism, is the way to resolve contradictions between mass initiative and bureaucratic organization in revolutionary processes.
Daniel Guerin was a leftist who became active in the 1920s. In the ’30s he became close to the Trotskyist movement, which is when he wrote the book we read in a previous series, Fascism and Big Business, and then turned more towards libertarian communism and anarchism. The problem he’s looking at in this text is the contradiction in revolutionary movements between the masses, who spark revolutionary movement through spontaneous movements, and the leaderships that rise up to take power through those movements.
After riding the energy of spontaneous mass action into power, these revolutionary leaderships have then subverted that power and repressed these popular classes, becoming a new ruling class. Jason explained that Guerin sees that different types of socialists have different approaches about how to deal with these contradictions and clashes. He generalizes these differences as three types: authoritarians, including anti-colonial nationalists and Stalinists; scientific socialists, like Marx and Engels; and anti-authoritarians.
Jason said that in this article Guerin makes a bold claim that, in 1958 this contradiction between spontaneous mass movement and organizational leadership can now be overcome. What’s changed is that the left has acquired a mass of practical experience, that the masses are now much more advanced and educated, and that new technologies, like airplanes, can bring people together, making small group leaderships obsolete.
Despite those advantages, Jason said, we live in a world today that does not have a powerful international left. The sort of things that Guerin assumed about socialist and communist parties no longer apply to the left today. If there’s a rising left politics today, Jason said, it’s a neo social democracy, represented by Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, and now Zohran Mamdani. As Draper points out, this social democracy is just as top-down as Stalinism. So, what can we make of Guerin’s argument that there has been a social evolution away from top-down socialist organization?
Small group discussion
Small group discussion led off with two questions:
How do we relate today to the problems Guerin identifies in the history of revolutionary socialism, especially at a time when most people who consider themselves progressives are more concerned (and understandably so) with the defense of “democracy”? Does Guerin breakdown of socialists into “authoritarian,” “anti-authoritarian,” and “scientific” socialists help us to confront these questions? And;
Draper divides all of socialist history into two camps: socialism from above, and socialism from below. What is useful about this framework, and what are its limitations? What is required to make socialism sustainably “from below”?
In my group, we touched on these points, but we were more interested in how to make sense of the socialist movement today. Frann pointed out that Tom Alter, who was fired by the University of Texas for comments he made at an online conference held by the group Socialist Horizon, was disciplined for making the point that people are more open to socialism today than they were in the past. A growing mass appeal of socialism is being met by a growing repression from above.
Kay pressed us to remember the historical context of both these articles; that they were both written during the height of the Cold War and Stalinist power, and that both writers were in organizations that were decimated by fascists and by Stalinists. That climate informed the analysis they put forward. I added that in the Joel Geier lecture that we included in this week’s readings he makes this point about Draper: that his writings were always in response to struggles he was involved in, so always historically contextual. But the themes remain generally relevant to us today, regardless.
Wendy and Stephen said that the question underlying both readings was democracy. Wendy said she got introduced to Hal Draper in 1969, when she came back from the Paris, where she was for the 1968 movement, and joined the International Socialists, where Draper was in leadership. Stephen said democracy feels like a remote problem today because neither politicians nor the labour movement today have democracy centrally on the agenda, and cannot because they’re both constrained by the demands of capitalism. Lyle said that socialists defend democracy; not only democratic rights but also democratic states from the threat of dictatorship.
Stephen called for more education to foster working class consciousness. And Jodie said we need education to be accessible to “people who are not as nerdy as us.” She said she teaches a class on politics at the local library in Ohio, where people are not open to the word socialism, and uses popular education techniques to introduce ideas. Frann quoted Marx, who said that the class struggle is the university of the working class.
Big group discussion
Back in the big group, Robin said that these readings present polemical and selective interpretations of history, and that can make it difficult to understand the historical context. For example, the Guerin and Draper readings present anarchism differently. What are we to make about that? Joshua said that, as a rare member of Solidarity who came from anarchism, he remembered liking the Draper article except for his utter sophistry about anarchists. He said he has also have been frustrated with how many anarchists have misrepresented Marx. Reading these texts is interesting now as historical documents exactly because they show there isn’t a single truth about class struggle, and we have to work on interpretation as a continuation of that struggle.
Traven asked, what’s the role of socialists? To create sects that define the points they agree on and split over the questions where they can’t agree? Or to be ‘movementist’ and work to develop the power of that movements rather than our groups. I now think movementism is what we need. And Dianne added, yes, but also we need stable leadership structures that can serve movements.
I thought that these disagreements, or difference in emphasis, pointed towards the core problems we were discussing in this class, and also in this series as a whole.
Amy asked if I could explain what I meant in my presentation about the difference between social democracy and revolutionary socialism. I said that social democracy is not revolutionary because it does not transform the mode of production. Social democracy is a strategy of managing capitalism. It maintains capitalist class structures and capitalist value production. Revolutionary socialism smashes the class organization of society and the world, uplifting the production of useful things, through the democratic ownership and management of production by the working class, making a new world. This is also what Draper means by “from above” socialists that promise to redistribute wealth produced through exploitative class relations and “from below” socialists whose power depends on the self activity of workers themselves. But, I concluded, today we can’t simply choose between a “from above” or “from below” option. We have to recognize the appearance of different and contradictory class forces in the real movements around us and adopt tactics that advance the organized power of the working class.
Ranjana, who joined the call from India, said she thinks socialism from below needs to be qualified by what is considered “below.” In India, “below” has become a vexed place with the widespread organizing of right-wing conservative forces. In India there are Hinduvsta forces that claim they represent the ‘below’ and dominate peoples’ movements. This does not mean there’s no hope, but that we must consider the character of from above and from below with more care.
Cyn, who is a member of the DSA caucus Bread and Roses, said that in DSA the ‘natural’ direction to go after finishing school is to get a union staffer position or get close to the Mamdani campaign and help this smart person make change. The consensus seems to be that smart people with influence make change, and the masses help them. Draper’s “from below” socialism is a good way to counter that trend, as well as to make socialist ideas legible to the working class. Adrian also appreciated most of all from the readings was the emphasis on Marx’s formulation on proletarian democracy and the potential for class struggle, rather than winning tactical concessions from Mt. Olympus.
The final comments in the discussion looped around the problems of the present. Ron asked how to work from the definition of socialism popularized by Bernie and Mamdani and pivot to a definition of socialism from below. And Judy said it might help to speak to workers about their role in production, not just the economy. Daisy pointed out the contradictions of our moment when, somehow in the same year a fascist was inaugurated for the second time and a Muslim socialist was elected as mayor of New York City. So while it is frustrating and confusing, we should use the inroads we have to harness the current energy and build something outside of electoral politics.
Conclusion
Our goal with this first class in the series was to introduce the main themes and problems that we will take on throughout the series as a whole. A dynamic I noticed throughout this discussion was that we were more comfortable talking about organizational problems when they were specific, historical, and practical. The rest of the series, up until the final week, is organized and grounded in exactly this way, moving chronologically from the Paris Commune, to the October revolution, the degeneration of that revolution and its international contexts in the 1920s and 30s, the Chinese revolution, the “revolution that didn’t happen” in the 1960s and 70s, and, finally, the problems of our contemporary struggles, since the great recession that started in 2007.
For all these classes, the readings are organized under two major categories: “critical review” articles, which offer an overall perspective, and usually historical context for the problems we’re looking at that week, and “from the archive” readings, which draw from the debates and problems of the historical period of the week. We do not mean these as main and supplementary readings. Some weeks, like for the week two discussion of the Paris Commune, the archival readings are the more “main” readings. But, as always, participants are welcome to read any of the readings for the week, or just to listen to or watch the podcast and film content for the week.
For week two, Carolyn Eichner, the author of the 2002 book The Paris Commune: A Brief History, will be introducing the discussion. And we’ve included the long film La Commune, the collectively made long film directed by Peter Watkins, who passed away recently. If you don’t have time to watch this 6 hour long film before the discussion, you might still want to download the files to watch another time.
Onwards!