Presentation on Hal Draper’s “Two Souls of Socialism”
Ivan DZ, November 6 2025
Introduction
My goal for this presentation is to set the stage for our discussion series on problems of socialist organization.
The fact that we have organized a long discussion series on organization suggests this is a bigger topic than it might appear on the face of it. 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. Can we think about organization as separate from politics? Is there a politics without organization? Is there organization without politics?
In What Is To Be Done, Lenin writes: “The character of any organization is naturally and inevitably determined by the content of its activity.”
I’ve heard comrades refer to this idea over the years, usually meaning that any disagreement within a group has a class character. Sometimes, this notion is used to dismiss conflicts that actually stem from personalities, including even abusive behaviour. But I think what Lenin meant was something different: that there’s a relationship between the class basis of an organization and the form that organization takes.
Maybe another way to say this is that every political problem is, for socialism, an organizational problem.
The centrality of organization to socialism
Socialism is distinguished from other modes of production, by it’s directive participation in economics and politics by the majority of the world population.
Feudalism was characterized by a dual social system: the law and social norms of the aristocracy, and the separate world of the peasant. Aristocrats did not care how peasants lived their lives, so long as they harvested their crops and paid their tithings.
Capitalism has a more unified social system, at least legally, though other worlds exist across borders, and in the untidy lives of the poor.
What these forms 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.
Socialism, however, 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.
You can see right from these basic premises that for socialist principles to be put into action, organization is necessary. Without organization, there can be no socialism.
Daniel Guerin discusses this as a problem: as a contradiction “between spontaneity and consciousness, between the masses and leadership.”
Spontaneity might refer to the mass movement, a social-collective energy and momentum that no one can call into being and which no one can control – especially not in detail. And consciousness might refer to the party – the voluntarily organized group that pre-exists the spontaneous mass movement, and which seeks to influence or direct it, and to fill with its energy in order to sustain and institutionalize that movement.
But where Guerin sees this contradiction as innate to the revolutionary struggle, Hal Draper sees it as a problem of organization –– of how the party, the “conscious leadership,” is organized.
Problems of working class organization
Both Guerin and Draper understand the party as existing apart from the mass movement. The initial problem for them is the break between these bodies. It’s the same for Lenin, who, in What Is To Be Done is trying to work out exactly how to bridge the conscious leadership and the spontaneous mass movement.
This is because of the oppressed and fractured character of the working class under capitalism. The working class exists as an objective social class, that is, that class which is defined by its compulsion to sell its labour power to survive, and its participation in the conversion of that potential labour power into variable capital.
But, at the same time, in the working class persists an inborn emancipatory potential. While the working class produces itself as variable capital, it is also a coordinated human community producing useful things, or use values.
The secret of socialism is that the more the working class is conscious of its useful, human, historic existence and activity, the better it can actively, self-consciously, deploy these collective energies and replace capitalist value production with values produced for the wellbeing of peoples, in harmony with the planet.
Socialists have used a shorthand to explain this process: that the working class must leap from existing of itself to existing for itself.
Because that leap is political, it must move through organizational forms that perform new dances of collectivity and coordination –- smashing capitalist understandings of who we are and who we can be.
What organization?
Now, Draper’s article on the two souls of socialism was not so concerned with the organizational form that working class takes today, which is fine for us because the form it took in the 1960s, when this was written, is not the form that it takes in the 2020s. So, what is working class organization?
Is working class organization a union? Community groups? A tenant union?
When I read Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, I was drawn to his interest in the relationship that the Communist Party had to the working class, which he always –- I think without exception –– referred to as the organized working class.
He did not consider the organized working class to be all workers, or all workers who were members of unions. He considered the organized working class to be those workers who were part of a communist or socialist party, who voluntarily dedicated themselves to the socialist cause.
In Italy of the 1920s, the Communist Party was a mass party, with cadre working and active in factories, having regular, deep connections with the working class that was not so-organized. What distinguished communist workers from other workers was that communist workers had undergone the leap of class consciousness, understanding themselves as part of a class for itself.
What is equally important to these workers being organized is that they are also an organic part of the working class. That means they can also be conduits, for the party, of the moods and attitudes, and, critically, the forms of self organization expressed by the working class more broadly.
This attention to the self consciousness and self activity of the working class does not mean that non-workers are unwelcome in socialist struggle. In the chapter from What Is To Be Done that we read this week, Lenin argues that when “professional revolutionaries” push on the working class to accelerate the socialist movement, it is not from outside, but from within the contradictions of working class existence. But even when he is advocating for students to become such professional revolutionary agitators, his focus is on supporting the leap of consciousness in the working class itself.
Draper’s formula
Draper is sensitive to this dynamic as well, though he expresses it differently.
Draper writes, “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.”
It is through his historical examples of Marx’s own debates about this question where I think Draper is most clear. He says that for Marx, the purpose of struggle, including armed struggle, is “to render [workers] fit for political dominion.” In this read, warfare has a class character and, like other forms of organized struggle, is preparatory. He says Marx derides Lasalle’s state-supported cooperative societies because, “as far as the present cooperative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the government or of the bourgeoisie.” Marx, and Draper, see class struggle, and especially socialist struggle, as a strategy of overcoming capitalism’s structural underdevelopment of working class people.
The thread throughout this text is entirely in the problems of self-activity of the working class: is the activity, planning, or cooperative workplace the product of workers through their organizations? Good, this is building socialism from below. Is it done on their behalf by an alien body? Well, then it might be providing some sort of aid to workers’ wellbeing, but it’s not socialism.
Or, as expressed by Rosa Luxemburg: “Mistakes committed by a genuinely revolutionary labor movement are much more fruitful and worthwhile historically than the infallibility of the very best Central Committee.”
In general I think this should be the guiding question of whether a strategy, analysis, or set of tactics are advancing the struggle for socialism or not: Does this improve the autonomous power and organization of the working class?
This is the framework I will be using throughout this class series to assess the experiences of our revolutionary ancestors and our own moment today.