Canvassing Captain Training for Medicare for All
Sunday, March 18,  2-4pm @ 256 West 38th Street, 12th floor, New York, New York 10018

Act Up, Fight Back: A History of Direct Action & Health Justice

Eric Blanc had outstanding coverage of the West Virginia teachers' strike in Jacobin, but we especially recommend his interview with strike leaders Emily Comer and James O'Neal.  Joe Burns points out "there is no such thing as an illegal strike, just an unsuccessful one" and Meagan Day connects increased labor militancy with the fight for universal healthcare. Meredith Talusan asks if we're listening to the transwomen shouting #MeToo, and Amazon is pushing postal workers, who have a militant organizing history of their own, to the breaking point.

In New Politics, Kim Moody argues against socialist entanglement with the Democrats. Dornbush, Elliott-Negri, and Lewis reply, and Moody expands on his initial point.

For this week's historical read, check out the pamphlet Strike Strategy by William Z. Foster. The  Trade Union Educational League was founded by the Communist Party USA in an attempt to turn the country's unions into more militant, active working class organizations. Many of the lessons from the pamphlet are still applicable today.  For a shorter read, check out Lenin "On Strikes."

The elections of November 2017 resulted in a surprising number of victories for DSA-related candidates nationwide. Those successes showed that DSA organizers seemed to be doing something right while offering a much-needed psychological boost to a segment of the Left that has regularly been disappointed at the ballot box. Then, in late January, DSA’s NPC unanimously passed a national electoral strategy that was developed by electoral organizers from chapters around the country.

But these achievements obscure the reality that there remains a significant portion of DSA members who are, for lack of a better term, electoral pessimists. I know they exist because I am one of them. This pessimism shouldn’t be confused with a total disavowal of electoralism. Even within the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC), to which I belong, the prevailing sentiment is that electoral campaigns have their tactical uses. Rather, electoral pessimism is a wariness towards placing too great an emphasis on winning elections, particularly in a political context where even success has historically resulted in limited benefits for the communities to which DSA must be responsible and accountable.

To their credit, the authors of the national electoral strategy recognize this position and have attempted to assuage the concerns that many of us have expressed. Their document also recognizes that “electoral work, as only one aspect of building power, will to the greatest extent possible be the natural extension of other local campaigns around issues like housing, racial justice, mutual aid, etc.”

“The kind of power we want to build is inextricably rooted in local communities,” the statement reads, and “building left political power requires trusting locals to make choices about their own electoral work.” It’s a strategy based on a new model of building electoral capacity—one “responsible directly to the organization and democratically controlled by its members.” The goal is “to build long-term local power, not to get a slightly better breed of progressive politician into office.” This trust in the locals is now being put to the test here in Queens and the Bronx, where we are well into the process to decide whether to endorse Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a Democratic Party primary challenger to Rep. Joseph Crowley (NY-14).

In general, I’m not keen on supporting candidates who offer boilerplate “progressive” platforms and call it socialism. I believe I speak alongside a large contingent of DSA comrades who seek something more structurally transformative and overtly anti-capitalist; something more along the lines of a “dual-power” strategy that seeks to counter existing power structures while developing the alternative structures with which we want to replace them. Can electoralism be employed tactically as a means to counter existing power when it is still playing the game of established power? I genuinely don’t know, and honestly, I have my doubts. But I’d like to be proven wrong in a specific real world scenario rather than write off the idea before even trying it out.

To address these concerns, the strategy statement lays out several positive reasons to engage in elections, including that they can “advance popular demands and force their recognition by the establishment,” and, on a more basic level, possess the ability to “politicize and organize people.” If an electoral campaign can work towards strengthening a community and energize its members to engage in producing structures that are accountable to them, then why not give it a shot? We’re not reinventing the wheel here, and what works in one location won’t necessarily work elsewhere; chapters are going to have to experiment. If DSA chapters are simultaneously working on building the kinds of alternative structures that will replace existing capitalist ones, then working on an electoral campaign shouldn’t be an issue as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the non-electoral work.

DSA has asserted a long term national strategy rooted in building power. But it is up to local chapters to midwife this power into the world, rather than focus on an electoralism that likely will only lead to more electoralism in a more “amenable” form. Right now maybe an engagement with electoralism is what’s needed, while down the line it will no longer be relevant and our resources better applied elsewhere. As communities try to assemble the types of alternative structures that can meet their needs, we should see if winning elections can be part of a larger strategy or if it is indeed a dead-end.