Report on the two final classes of Solidarity’s series on Problems of Socialist Organization
BY IVAN DRURY ZARIN
Since the global capitalist crisis of 2007, social movements have had a new becoming. Less so, socialist organization.
This problem was the focus of the last two discussions in our series: the seventh and final proper reading group, was specifically about social movements since 2007. And the eighth and final class, which was a panel discussion rather than a regular reading group, returned to the question that propelled our series overall: what sort of organization socialists need today. Together, these last two classes of Solidarity’s “Problems of Socialist Organization” series asked how socialists can build organizations that can be weapons in struggles against capitalist domination, no matter what form these struggles might take.
We did not record the seventh class, but did record the panel discussion on “Solidarity’s Theory of Organization,” with David Finkel (Solidarity and Against the Current), Liz Hee (Tempest and From the Periphery Media Collective), Bill V Mullen (Socialist Horizon), and Ansar Fayyazuddin (Solidarity and Science for the People). You can watch the video of presentations here and listen to the audio here.
Our readings for our seventh class, “Social movements and organization,” included electoral strategies, Black struggles, new labor organizing, and the Palestine solidarity movement; a broad sweep that still did not manage to include all the major movements since 2007, missing Indigenous land and water defence, Me Too feminism, and the climate justice movement. We had to be even more choosy when it came to organizing the discussion. We decided to focus on the Black struggle in order to look at the total problem of relationships between social movements and socialist organization from the vantage point of the most mass and consequential movement of the last decade.
To facilitate this discussion, informal representatives of two generations of Black freedom struggle started off our discussion. Malik Miah, a veteran of the ’60s, and Rob C, from a younger generation, each gave presentations and then discussed the continuities of struggle.
I am starting this report with Malik and Rob’s presentation and the subsequent discussion. Then I’ll move on to the final panel discussion, “Solidarity’s theory of organization,” the logic of which I think flowed neatly out of Malik and Rob’s concluding thoughts and questions.
Intergenerational developments
Malik said his generation’s understanding of Black struggle came out of the “the militant struggles” and “also out of the reforms won” in the 1960s and 70s. The “reforms won” is not usually how I understand the legacy of the 60s-era Black freedom struggle, but it was interesting to hear Malik frame it this way because attacking these reforms has been key to the right wing racist assault on the full complex of that legacy today. “The attack on DEI is in reality an attack on Black rights.” The legislation being rolled out as part of the roll back of DEI rights and entitlements is “a new, revised form of Jim Crow, which is outdated and not useful for capital today in its old form,” Malik said.
Today’s moment of rollback is also an outcome of the ’68 generation’s struggles. Malik said, “In the early 70s there were two important movements: the movement for independent Black political action, and the Black power movements. These were connected to the international movement against colonialism and the African anti-colonial struggle which was still underway.” These two overlapping but distinct movements were split when “the government decided to integrate elements of the Black middle class into the establishment. And you had moderate leaders go on to become elected officials. The radical leaders moved farther left, becoming socialists.”
A long term result of this development is that the radical Black movement has been demobilized and disorganized, Malik said, while the moderates have been “integrated into the white power structure. We don’t have the independent Black orgs that we had in the 60s.”
In explaining his first steps as a Black radical, Rob C situated his youth within the disorganization described by Malik. “As one of the very few Black people in my high school, I experienced a lot of racism and othering. So when I was able to go to Toronto for university, I felt my life was beginning at the same time that the anti-globalization movement was underway,” Rob said.
Anarchism was the most common anti-capitalist politics when Rob was finding his feet politically, and this meant getting involved in “small decentralized affinity groups” while also realizing that “being Black meant I’d be violently targeted by police during these affinity group actions.” He was recruited into Marxism (and Trotskyism in particular) after moving to California to study in the 2000s and witnessing the movement for Black lives.
Gaps of understanding between (white) socialist groups and Black freedom movements
While anti-capitalism was common in Black Lives Matter spaces, Rob said, its “affirmative vision” was underdeveloped. This was also a critique raised by Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, in the chapter we read from her book From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation, and from the podcast interview with her and Asha Ransby-Sporn. In that interview, Yamahtta Taylor critiques the fetish of individual expression that was prominent in the high BLM days. Such individualism and anti-organization sentiment led to a lot of “freelancing” in the movement, and the ubiquity of “horizontalism”: organizational forms that have limited the development of formal organizations.
It’s necessary to read Yamahtta Taylor’s critique alongside Ransby-Sporn’s experience in order to understand why neither one of them is quitting the abolitionist groups for some socialist group that would, in this context, leave the Black movement behind. Listening to Ransby-Sporn’s reflection on BLM, I take mostly the sense that this is a communist developing her politics through experience of action; she’s adapting and pushing and trying to move with those around her. And rather than take on joining or building a socialist-first organization, she’s working to expand and deepen socialist politics within her abolitionist movement and groups.
In discussion, Rob said that he was a member of the East Bay DSA when it was confronting the challenge of how, as a majority white socialist organization, to relate to BLM. “It didn’t do a good job,” he said. “There was a moment,” he said, “when a Black abolitionist lawyer, Kat Brooks, was running for mayor and sought endorsement from DSA. It became a really farcical situation when DSA refused to endorse her because she was not a socialist. This is someone who was really grounded in Black struggle, but almost on a point of abstraction, DSA refused to align with her.”
A problem was that DSA, along with other majority-white socialist groups, did not understand the police and prison abolition movement the way that Ransby Sporn and Yamahtta Taylor felt it. Young BLM radicals were generating demands based on their political situation, with a focus on police. But their demands actually surpassed policing to address their total structural oppression.
Some socialists read the demands from the new abolition movement as demands cooked up the way that reformers of the old generation develop demands as policy reforms. But the new movement was theorizing on its feet, and its demands were not about particular institutions or policies as much as they attacked those institutions and policies as part of a totality that was bent on their destruction.
Between then and now
The preoccupation of this discussion series has been with the disorganization of socialists, which has us all unequipped to effectively match the challenges of our time. Rob said the same stands for the Black freedom struggle. “Black organization and Black politics do not have the scale required to deal with politics today,” he said.
Despite a “strong ethos of mutual aid and community support,” and an organized combativeness that has shown itself during the ICE raids in Los Angeles, for example, social movement leaderships “can have an anti-organizational, individual focus.”
Malik traces that anti-organization problem to a limited political synthesis, where movements have been more isolated geographically and politically than in the 60s. “As far as Black organizing in the labor movement, the heyday was the 60s and 70s too,” he said. “Black workers were organized because they had greater confidence. You don’t have the same type of Black power initiatives in the labor movement today that you had then. There was a connection between the movements in the streets and the movements in factories –– the street movements inspired action in the factories. It wasn’t the other way around.”
And Black socialists in the 60s “were also influenced by the revolutionary struggles happening around the world,” Malik said. “Today we don’t have those international movements and we don’t have revolutionary groups in the US at the scale we did in the past.”
Malik concluded, “My belief is that young Black activists are going to come to the revelation that I came to: that what we need is a revolutionary party to make a socialist revolution.”
Theories of organization
How this revolutionary party should look and function, and what its role must be within a struggle for socialism was the topic of the final class in the series; a panel discussion titled “Solidarity’s theory of organization.”
There was some discussion about this panel title on the Solidarity email list after the Education Working Group first published it. Some members said it’s false advertising because Solidarity does not have a theory of organization. I said I thought it might be more accurate to characterize it as “theories” (plural) of organization. I don’t think the panel discussion cleared up this particular question, but, in discussion between presenters of three different groups (all of which are part of the United Left Platform) some common themes emerged that could be considered the scaffolding for a common “theory of organization.”
Ansar Fayyazuddin, from Solidarity and Science for the People, was the last speaker, but I think it makes more sense to introduce the discussion with his comments. He framed the problem of organizational theory beyond any one group or the relations between groups. Instead, he said, “organization should be understood in two ways: as organizing for socialism, and organization as a fundamental of socialism.” The ways we organize ourselves in a particular group, and between groups, can represent in inchoate ways the organization of the working class and oppressed peoples, and also prefigure the forms of organization in a socialist world.
He argued against trying “to create the Messianic party to prepare for the apocalypse.” Instead, he called for organizational forms that can “transform the immediate into an emancipated space” where “each moment can be a revolutionary moment.” Critical to Ansar’s view was to understand occasional moments of working class and oppressed peoples’ collective struggle as instances of visibility of a struggle that is everyday and ongoing, not spontaneous or ephemeral.
What Ansar foregrounded in his discussion of organization is a challenge to organized socialists to treat social movements, mutual aid efforts, and community struggles as forms of organization to relate with as part of a total communist movement.
Putting aside non-critical differences
Other speakers were more focused on the internal culture, attitudes, and programmes of formal organizations. They all agreed it is necessary for organized socialists to overcome a sect-mindset that poses their own group in competition against others.
David Finkel, from Solidarity and Against the Current, started by pointing back to his long history in the socialist movement, saying “we can’t hold the ’68 generation responsible for the failure to have a revolution in the US. But… we were partly responsible for the state of the Left as we left it.” He focused his critique on the problem that, through the 1960s, the idea took root that a small group of communists can form a “party in miniature.”
“Small revolutionary groups must be focused on the class movement as it exists,” he said. “Socialists must be organizing locals in workplaces and unions, to participate in the construction of a class movement. We can contribute, though we are not the only force involved. And by “we” I don’t mean just Solidarity or just the United Left Platform.”
Who “we” includes is a historical problem for David. When Solidarity formed, he said, “we put questions aside about ‘the Russian question.’ We also put aside disagreements about the character of the Cuban revolution, with the caveat that we all had to agree that Cuba must be defended against US imperialism. We learned that there are many questions we can put aside without absolute agreement, while other points might still require agreement.” To decide which questions are critical in a particular historical moment, and which are non-critical, not-decisive, unimportant relative to the tasks before us: this is part of the work a small group can do as part of its overcoming of isolation.
Liz Hee argued that old differences between Marxists and Anarchists should be one of those non-critical questions that should be put aside in the forging of new unities. “I see socialism and anarchism as drifting circles in a Venn diagram, depending on what dynamic we’re focused on,” she said. She explained that around practical movement principles like the use of masks to support immunocompromised comrades in political spaces and the provision of child care to allow parents and kids to participate in meetings, Marxists have a lot to learn from Anarchists.
Bill V Mullen said that, after experiencing the collapse of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Horizon founders internalized “the need to be humble.” Their initial discussions focused on problems that were more internal than public-facing political: “the concept of comradeship,” and democratic centralism.
They wanted their comradeship to be deeper than some had experienced in the ISO, where “comradeship was inflected with race, gender, sexuality.” And in thinking through democratic centralism, they read Paolo Friere, who “talked a lot about listening.” And they came away from these discussions with a commitment to regroupment. This meant joining the International Socialist League, as an international move to alliance building, and it also drew Socialist Horizon into the United Left Platform, which was sparked by Tempest and Workers Voice.
In discussion after the presentations, participants and panelists probed the limits of the left unity that everyone agreed we need. David said that while issues that divided the left in the twentieth century should be put aside, “there are issues of our moment that require clarity. Ukraine and Palestine are two global issues that must have clarity. And the character of the Democratic Party also requires clarity.”
Bill agreed, specifying that a necessary contemporary division is against “campism”: those who reduce international politics into a for-or-against US imperialism and whitewash the repressive violence of states that are not US allies. Bill said the best way to fight campism is with the organized unity of revolutionary internationalist forces.
To ask better questions
My takeaways from these final two classes are mostly about what not to think about socialist organization, and what not to do to build the organizations we need.
We should not think about social movements and their organizational forms as absolutely different and apart from formal socialist organizations. Nor should we be hung up on the language used in the social movements of working class and oppressed groups. The meanings of slogans like “abolition,” when they move millions into the streets, need to be thoughtfully plumbed, not rejected out of hand because they don’t use socialist language exactly.
And while there was general agreement that socialists should avoid sect-building and focus instead of developing organizations that can be useful part of class struggle and social movements, I found the exact meanings of this prescription unclear. The worst sectarian micro-sect groups would also say this is their goal.
In his closing comments, Bill Mullen said, “There was a time when people really turned against the micro sect. One problem with that is that it means you can’t start anything. I think we should be open to large and small groups, all as manifestations of the historical conditions that create them.” I think this is pretty true, though also a warning against what not to do rather than a clear, positive formulation.
This, I think, was true of the “Socialist Organization” class series overall. Each week there were compelling stories about problems, and warnings about the calamities that await a small socialist group’s deviations into too much voluntarism, on one side, and the paralysis of too much caution, on the other. I was left feeling that the decisive questions of a socialist organization’s efficacy are answered entirely by the historical movements of classes.
Maybe the best we can hope for from studying history is to learn how to ask better questions. The answers can only come through experimentation and practice by socialists committed to common struggle in our faulty and hopeful organizations.