The aim of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is unique among major American political organizations: to democratically bring about socialism in the United States. For most DSA members, engagement with that goal is limited. They help fund the organization through membership dues and donations and vote for our endorsed candidates. Some may even engage through additional small acts like sharing our social media content, attending one of our events, or refusing to cross a picket line that we are supporting. While we should always find ways to lead these members to additional engagement, it is fine (and healthy for one’s psyche) to accept that most of them will not consistently increase their engagement.
This piece is not written for these casual members, but instead for the footsoldiers and captains that are our vocal minority and the organization’s shepherds: socialist organizers. This cadre is not content to merely count themselves as members of a socialist organization and as supporters of socialism – they want to pour the concrete of its foundation. They are compelled to take action because, after all, if we don’t take action, who will? We understand that the question is not only what economic system should we have, but what is to be done to bring it about.
Unfortunately for us, there is little to guide our way in terms of modern applicable instruction. The socialist organizers I have known have picked up their skills and tactics from a variety of sources that are rarely directly socialist organizing. Some learn politicking from working for the Democratic Party. Some learn list building and planning an escalation strategy from the world of organized labor. From ACORN to Occupy Wall Street, our organizational pasts may be socialist-adjacent, but rarely are they outright socialist. Instead, we were the ones at LGBTQ rights rallies trying to convince our community that corporate recognition would not liberate us. We may have even gotten on the megaphone at the Black Lives Matter rally and tried to name the link between racist policing and class war. We were the ones bemoaning the fall from influence of socialism in the Palestinian liberation movement, criticizing Hamas for reasons that had nothing to do with them lobbing rockets at the fascists occupying their homeland.
Paolo Freire once said “we make the road by walking,” and indeed many of us become socialist organizers not by taking a socialist organizing class or even being trained by a mentor within an organization. We begin by trying and failing, and trying a little differently and failing again, and trying a little differently again and maybe pulling off a win. And while experience is the best teacher, any self-taught musician can tell you that experience without pedagogical foundation can lead to bad habits. These may seem small on their own, but they can stop us from reaching our full potential and set artificial ceilings to what we can achieve.
A pitfall we must constantly be vigilant against as socialist organizers is the conflation of being a socialist with organizing for socialism. Being a socialist, no matter how loudly and proudly, is not organizing for socialism. While this tendency has always been an issue (Marx and Engels derisively called it “the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine”), it is particularly reinforced today by social media. Social media mines the entire world, humans and bots alike, for interactions, and so one’s “hot take” feels demonstrably powerful because some invisible hand has determined it merits thousands or even millions of “internet points.” This charade should fall away with even a minute of critical interrogation – it requires no effort to “like” a post, barely any effort to comment on one, and engaging with socialist thought in this way reinforces the thoroughly disorganizing behavior of spending our time “doom scrolling” rather than talking to one another and actually organizing. But while supercharged by social media, the problem is not caused by social media itself.
To return to the previously cited Communist Manifesto, the core deficiency with what I will call the “aesthetic socialists” was the same then as it is now – a lack of class consciousness. They are happy to endlessly discuss the ideas of socialist thinkers, and they may even invoke terms including “communism” and even “revolution.” But as Marx wrote in his Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
The aesthetic socialists will post memes and share videos, but rather than to drive organizing they are always focused on the promotion of aesthetic supremacy by lashing out venomously at any actual organizing project. Socialist elected officials? Traitors for any action they take that does not align with some mythic pure socialist set of values. Labor unions? First-world labor aristocrats. And for general use, they can always throw out general denunciations unaccompanied by evidence, including “liberal,” “racist,” “Zionist,” etc. If you are involved with socialist organizing, you’ve been exposed to someone like this at some point, or even worse, had them dragging down your organizing project. If they engage in any organizing, it will inevitably face inward, obsess over constructing a faberge egg of socialist organization for its aesthetics rather than its utility in building socialism among the working masses.
Too often though I see well-meaning comrades propose inept and misinformed solutions to the problem of aesthetic socialists. Some suggest it is the problem of not having the right kind of socialism. But from social democrats to hardline Maoists, from DNC Underground to the Austin Red Guard, the aesthetic socialist spans the spectrum of socialist thought. Some see how social media has reinforced the delusions of the aesthetic socialists and think prohibiting or restricting social media is the answer. And while social media restrictions are warranted for other reasons (especially to prevent delusions or depression), aesthetic socialism long predates social media, and the reinforcement from likes and retweets can also be obtained from reading groups, niche conferences, or the triumph of one’s caucus or faction. Having been to Left Forum and seen a dozen Noam Chomsky lookalikes pontificate on Lacan, I can assure you that social media merely magnifies rather than causes the problem.
There is only one solution: prioritizing class consciousness in socialist organizing. Regardless of any other variable, when a socialist has their eye on their class position and how it relates to the working class, it becomes practically impossible to justify aesthetic socialism. When the socialist has the people’s need for bread and rent and childcare on their mind and in their heart, the unimportance of their own socialist aesthetic becomes clear. Internal organizing becomes a means to ensure the prioritization of external organizing rather than an end to itself. To put it simply, your internecine fight with another DSA member seems stupid when you’re reminded most people are just worried about putting food on the table and not getting evicted.
Some comrades understand this centrality of class consciousness but mistake it as being baptismal. That, once one has attained class consciousness, they are born again and saved, their actions forever anointed in holy enlightenment. Not so – class consciousness must be maintained, adjusted, sharpened, and constantly re-examined. The working class and its movement through history is not static. While fundamental relationships may persist as long as we are in a capitalist economy (between workers and the means of production, between capitalists and the state, etc.), the precise dynamics and most importantly the lived experiences of working people constantly shift. Teaching ‘M-C-M’ is not organizing – it’s economics. Even teaching the writings of Lenin is not organizing – it’s political science. Understanding someone’s lived experience and connecting that to class struggle is fundamental socialist organizing. Marxist theory can give us a foundation to build on, but having class consciousness requires more than being well-read.
For purposes of maintaining class consciousness of our membership, I have always insisted that our members should be engaged in at least one of two DSA organizing fundamentals – electoral or labor. Good electoral organizing means exposure to dozens or even hundreds of persuasive conversations every month with working class people on why they should vote for a socialist. Good labor organizing means exposure to such conversations with working class people on why they should form a union or otherwise demand more from their employer.
There is no other advocacy or organizing that will foster class consciousness in the way that DSA’s electoral or labor organizing does for our membership. And this is not to discount the importance of other advocacy. But the nature of that advocacy under capitalism divorces it from class consciousness, even for those groups (Black people, immigrants, trans people) that are majority working class. At worst this leads to the liberal nonprofit world, and even at best it leads to disorganizing separatism and standpoint supremacy. It isolates on a pedestal the people (Black people, immigrants, trans people) most in need of working class solidarity and connection to the collective, ennobling their marginalization and suffering rather than seeking its end. Only a select few organizations have been able to navigate these treacherous waters, and they are notably akin to DSA in being membership organizations rooted in some form of class analysis (e.g., New York Communities for Change, Southerners on New Ground, GoodKidsMadCity Englewood, etc.).
Sometimes when I have given this argument I’ll receive pushback that the organizing targets of electoral and labor are also subsets of the working class rather than perfectly representative. And there is no perfect representative of the working class, of course. But it is the nature of the subjects that creates the class consciousness, the people as “voters” and as “workers.” Organizing people as voters confronts them and ourselves with the contradictions of bourgeois democracy – how capitalists use democracy to grant their domination of the working class legitimacy, even though this democracy creates risk for them of losing control of the government. Organizing people as workers confronts them and ourselves with alienation and division of the working class and shows the power of withholding labor by proximity to the means of production. Or, put more simply, electoral organizing shows people the government is captured by capitalists but that we can end that capture through democratic organizing, and worker organizing shows people capitalism exploits workers but that we can end that exploitation through strikes and other collective worker actions.
We all have different roles to play in the struggle for socialism, and even among organizers are roles that may look very different but be equally valuable. We need the introvert pouring over spreadsheets and the homebody making beautiful graphics for our literature. I’m not asking these comrades to overhaul their personalities and become the weekly canvasser or shopfloor socialite. Nor am I asking our elected officials or new parents or caretakers or any number of comrades who literally do not have the time to do that frontline work to somehow do it anyway. But what I am asking of them is to stay connected to the frontline work. Do it when you can, and when you cannot, openly ask your comrades who are on the frontlines of electoral and labor, knocking the doors and talking on the shop floors, what their experiences are like and to internalize it and trust it. Class consciousness after all is about the humility of the individual as much as the power of the collective, the feeble strength of one compared to the awesome power of a united working class.
