It’s Hard To Find a Soft Cadre
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.
Toward Social Justice
One of the greatest revelations of the year for me was seeing Bill Fletcher Jr. speak at New York’s Left Forum this past March. For years I’ve been familiar with Fletcher, who is, perhaps, the most prominent left intellectual in the U.S. labor movement, who was a special assistant to John Sweeney in the early years of this administration and still a trusted figure in the mainstream labor movement despite his socialist barnstorming. But this was the first time I had heard him speak. I was so captivated by the way he could crystalize and articulate the challenges we face and the practical and realistic steps we could take to address them that I attended every panel at which he spoke, which I hadn’t intended when I got there.
Fletcher has just published his first book, “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice,” co-written with Fernando Gapasin. Centered on the recent split between the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win group, the book features quite a bit of inside baseball reportage on the machinations leading up to the split. Fletcher is highly critical of the “undebate” that took place and focused on marginal and highly technical matters of per capita rebates and core jurisdictions, avoiding a larger reexamination of the role of our labor unions within a wider labor movement. Although Fletcher identifies some key differences in ideology and vision within the union movement, these were not addressed and anyway tend to cut across international union lines. Instead, both the AFL-CIO and what emerged as the Change to Win group, he charges, fundamentally share the same neo-Gompersian framework of “pure and simple” trade union roles and functions that the reason for the split was unnecessary.
One of Fletcher’s most cogent points in this book is that leftists who work in the trade union movement in relatively large numbers have, absent an organized Left, ideologized the mere act of organizing workers into unions, as though this is an inherently radical act. This point hit home for me as I have recently risen to a position of responsibility in my union without any organizational affiliations beyond my union membership and have made organizing workers the most important thing in my life. Indeed, William Z. Foster has become a hero of mine, in his 1919 incarnation, for his sincere belief that organizing mass production workers into the conservative craft unions would necessarily radicalize them and their unions. Of course, Fletcher points out, the real point of organizing workers is to empower them to challenge their employers and improve their jobs and communities, not merely to collect their dues and “represent” them.
The last section of Fletcher and Gapasin’s book is devoted to their modest proposal to transform our trade union movement into a social justice movement that represents all workers, regardless of nation or employment status, and which challenges white supremacy, male patriarchy, U.S. imperialism and the entire global capitalist system. Good luck with that, Bill. In all seriousness, some of Fletcher and Gapasin’s proposals could gain traction among labor movement decision makers, as, for example, their proposal to transform our central labor councils (currently, the umbrella organizations of local unions in a city that gets together for political endorsements and campaigning and occasional strike support) into central workers councils embracing labor organizations beyond “pure and simple unions” and begin functioning like real community coalitions.
However, for the most part, Fletcher and Gasparin’s program is one that needs, as they call for in the proposal itself, an organized Left movement to carry out. At March’s Left Forum, Fletcher made a seemingly oft-hand reference to the need for a real socialist party that inspired very loud and spontaneous applause. During the Q&A, I waited very patiently (and, it turned out, futilely) to be called on and ask: “Bill, I’m with you on the need for a socialist party, and given the applause we heard, I’m not alone. Obviously such a project would not be an easy thing, given our legitimate political differences and the tendency towards factionalism and sectarianism. Still, any process that will move us towards a real organized Left will need leaders such as yourself out front, sponsoring the early calls and meetings. So, in your ample spare time, can you move on this?”
This Is a Shamelessly Factional Button
Shannon Hammock just mailed me a parcel of the past: silly factional buttons from the Socialist Party’s 2001 national convention. It was the first time in many years that an organized caucus was formed to compete for seats on the party’s national committee. Although they called themselves “the Issues Caucus,” their focus seemed to be on personalities. They lumped a bunch of comrades with wildly different politics that didn’t necessarily even like each other into a cabal, the “us vs. them” that they had to “get.” And so I was opposed for re-election as the party’s Vice Chairman, and Shannon and I printed up a bunch of buttons that mocked the whole situation.
“This is a shamelessly factional button” was a properly irreverent sentiment, and I think we got comrades on all sides to wear those little yellow buttons. “No Factions” and the Rodney King button further got the point across. “I’m okay. You have ‘Issues'” was cute, I thought. The cowboy button was inspired by a bizarre, rambling attack e-mail by one young comrade from Chicago that ended with the hysterical exhortation, “Circle the wagons, boys!!!”
In another e-mail, David McReynolds had accused me of being “against Chicago.” My flippant response was that I had nothing against the city of Chicago, except that I hate the way they cut pizzas into squares. I’m really very right-wing on this issue. As my response successfully diverted attention from whatever-the-hell supposed “issue” we were debating to a free-for-all over what constitutes good pizza (I’m not actually making this up), we thought “No Square Pizzas” would make a good button. Bill Stodden later formed a “No Square Pizza” Caucus to keep up the shenanigans, but, being anti-organized factions myself, I did not join.
Much of the personality focus was on lumping myself and Greg Pason together as some kind of gruesome twosome of party bureaucrats. It was so bad that one could be forgiven for thinking that Greg’s last name is “and Shaun.” The picture of the two of us, with the word “Evil?” was a fitting rejoinder. (What’s particularly funny about that button is that there was a third man standing between us in the original photograph, but, like a good apparatchik, I airbrushed the comrade out of the photo!) The idea of floating Greg’s name as a possible Presidential candidate (even on the preposterous ticket of Greg Pason-Angela Davis) was, perversely meant to provoke a little more hostility from the anti-Greg and Shaun crowd. The supreme irony, of course, is that Greg and I, despite being good friends, could never agree on anything politically.
Finally, my sole campaign button read, “Shaun indulges my vices, so I’ll indulge him as Vice Chair.” The only campaign caucusing I did that weekend in Boulder consisted of booze and sex and lots of it (well, mostly booze). I lost, of course.
Debs and Bolshevism
In his famous 1918 anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in which he martyred himself for a prison term that would last beyond the World War and shave years off his life, Eugene V. Debs declared, “From the top of my head to the tip of my toes, I am a Bolshevik, and proud of it.” This quote is often taken out of context by some to argue that in his later years Debs was turning towards Lenin’s doctrine and perhaps would have joined the Communist Party had he lived long enough. Too many socialists attempt to freeze Debs in a particular moment and argue that because the pioneering leader of American socialism took a certain position, say, forming new industrial unions to compete with and replace the American Federation of Labor in 1907, that that is the correct position for socialists in 2007, even if Debs himself contradicted that position at another point in his life.
That’s why it’s fascinating to read in Edward Johanningsmeier’s excellent biography of William Z. Foster, “Forging American Communism,” is Debs’ response to Foster’s entreaties to join the Communist Party. In a meeting shortly after he was released from prison in 1922, Debs declared, “Some groups propose to take orders from men in Moscow who know absolutely nothing about American conditions. I know more about American psychology and conditions than all the leaders in Russia know in five years, and I will not accept my orders from a maniac like Zinoviev. Since when, I want to know, has socialism become synonymous with Communism? I am not a Communist and I don’t want to be one, and I do not believe in minority rule.”
Debs did, however, publicly endorse Foster’s Trade Union Education League and its program of encouraging radicals to bore from within AFL craft unions to promote an agenda of organizing the unskilled masses and challenging the conservative business union leaders. Debs also served as the Socialist Party’s National Chairman in his twilight years, the only time he held office in the party, or indeed even attended a convention. And he came to the conclusion that the SP should direct its electoral efforts on uniting with the AFL and other progressive groups to form a national labor party. If we are going to let WWEVDD guide us, let’s look at where he stood politically at the end of his life, in a political era that is closer to our own.