In Michael Harrington’s remarkable deathbed autobiography, “The Long-Distance Runner,” he describes attempting to pick up the pieces of the shattered Socialist Party and a movement split between “Old” and “New” Lefts. The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that he formed from his old wing of the party and the diaspora of unaffiliated socialists in the labor and feminist movements was structurally a “mass” organization (albeit, one with few illusions of attracting the masses to it) with a soft cadre at its center.

This terminology, Harrington notes, would be foreign to all but the .0001% of Americans who have spent any time in the organized sects of the left. A cadre are the people who give some internal coherence to an organization. The people who write and photocopy fliers, raise funds, sweep floors, attend meetings and caucus for votes, and so on and so forth. In a Leninist model, this cadre operates with a fairly tight discipline and a democratic centralist decision-making process. Translated to what my 14-year-old cousin would call “normal talk,” that means that the group has an internal debate, following which all members “toe the party line” and carry out the decision of the majority. It also means that no one can join the organization who is not vouched for by a member of the cadre. (Although we don’t use these terms in the context, political campaigns and union organizing campaigns follow similar principles.)

Harrington graduated from an arcane milieu of “anti-Communist, Leninist democratic sects.” Although DSOC (later, Democratic Socialists of America) took all comers, there was a soft cadre at its center – prominent intellectuals and labor leaders, as well as more anonymous volunteers – who nudged the broader organization towards its ecumenical bridge-building envisioned at its founding. One primary challenge, Harrington noted, is that each successive generation has less of a tradition of the movement and less ability to form a coherent cadre. The problem has obviously worsened in the two decades since Harrington published “The Long-Distance Runner.”

Harrington has the decency to note that the old Socialist Party died in a three-way split. Most scholars only deal with the two most prominent factions: Harrington’s and the majority Social Democrats who drifted towards the neoconservatism of Reagan and Bush. The third faction, which kept the name of the old party, provides little of scholarly interest. It is there that I cut my teeth politically. There is probably a paper to be written about the failed experiment of the new Socialist Party in attempting to recreate the mass-based party of yore without the benefit of an intellectual cadre, and, lately, without the benefit of a culture or tradition of the movement. Instead, each successive generation (a generation here being two or three years) joins the party cold after reading some inspiring speech of the long-dead Eugene Debs, and proceeds to engage in pointless faction fights over bureaucratic details (what is to be the name of the magazine, whom shall appoint the members of the International Commission) that are divorced from the actual politics of society.

We do need a socialist party, but first we need to rebuild the cadre for democratic socialism. The first step must be some kind of think tank, which can limit its membership to only the most serious and comradely of comrades, and pt out useful material (studies, statements, blogs, etc) that could find an audience in the greater number of Americans who consider themselves socialists but do not belong to any explicitly socialist organization. With a cohesive cadre and a modest audience, then, and only then, can we consider forming a new socialist formation that is open to any who would join it.