Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Activism (Page 8 of 30)

These are posts on activism from the blog Base and Superstructure. This takes many forms. The focus here is on political activism, above all on activist organizing and base-building. One concern is how to build effective movements. There’s also a need to create solidarity with fellow members and build coalitions with other groups. The main aim of good movements is to work together to advance material interests. This section also includes critiques of electoral work, and discussion of how and when to use elections to advance activist goals. Navigating the balance between grassroots work and electoral work is difficult for everyone.

A collage of Jacobin magazine covers.

Jacobin Study, Part 2: We’re Not Ready for Electoral Politics

August 7, 2023 /

A couple years ago, Jacobin commissioned a study of working-class voters. I took a close look at the study in an earlier post, and in many ways the study went quite well for Jacobin. While it didn’t necessarily support the mag’s focus on elections and the national political narrative, it did suggest that working-class voters are attracted to a progressive, populist political message.

Jacobin continued the study with a second part, and so I’ll continue with a second post. Readers can check out the mag’s intro to the study here. And they can check out the full study here. While the first study provided social democrats with reason for optimism, the second study paints a much more challenging landscape.

Let’s talk about why.

Continue reading

Writing DSA Convention Resolutions

July 31, 2023 /

It wouldn’t be a DSA Convention without endless rumors and drama! At least one faction has already appealed to made-up shenanigans and conspiracy theory to protest the removal of its (not especially popular) resolution from the conference program.

But enough about that. Here’s what I wanted to say a word about in this post: writing Convention resolutions.

I reviewed the 2023 resolutions in an earlier post. But when I was reading an objection to the ‘expand the NPC’ resolution, I brought a few points together.

Here’s how it goes.

Many resolutions suffer from a similar flaw. A group of very like-minded people get together. They push each other in the same direction until they turn a quite sensible proposal into an unbalanced, extreme, and poorly thought out proposal. In my earlier post, I identified three resolutions that did this. I suspect the one Red Star criticized is a fourth.

So, how do you prevent this from happening?

I’ll leave the reader with some advice. If you’re a DSA member thinking about writing a resolution, include at least one thoughtful and friendly critic on your team of writers. Run it past one of them. They’ll alert you to some of the problems. And you can address those problems before your resolution ends up taking heat for all those problems you ignored at the outset.

Who knows? If you ask nicely enough, I might even be your thoughtful and friendly critic.

An Evening With the Iowa City Police

July 24, 2023 /

Two Iowa City police officers in uniform displaying boxes of donuts.

I haven’t had many encounters with the police over the years. Most of those encounters involve getting fined for petty driving violations. This probably lines up with the experience of most readers.

But my most recent encounter – from a year or two ago – highlights a few things for me. It shows, I think, the dangers inherent in any contact with police officers on duty. Even when nothing outrageously bad results from it.

Continue reading

A wealthy person represented as a Roman emperor watching middle class people surrounded by lions. Intended as a representation of class constructivism.

Class Constructivism: A Dead End

July 17, 2023 /

Sociologists Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Hikaru Desan recently sketched out their response to the class reductionism debate. Their approach lines up rather nicely with the one I took in a post and article. But they also make conceptual space for views I think we can see floating around in various forms. I want to take a look at one such view: class constructivism.

I’ll start by saying a word about how McCarthy and Desan lay out the conceptual space. And then I’ll move on to sketch out class constructivism. While few views completely fit into the class constructivism camp, I think we can find appeals to something like it within common perspectives in both DSA and the broader left.

Continue reading

Banner depicting 'socializing with socialists.' Intended as an illustration of the DSA critique of anarchism.

DSA Criticism of Anarchism

June 26, 2023 /

If nothing else, we know DSA has lots of internal faction fights and rivalries. Many of these are expressed through the caucus system, which I’ve written about a number of times.

But we see another rivalry between more national-focused, centralizing factions and rival views those factions often call ‘anarchism.’ I use quotes for ‘anarchism’ because the view they discuss doesn’t appear, at least to me, to trace all that well to any historical or contemporary anarchist views. It seems to me more of a shorthand for a ‘let’s not do anything’ view.

To get a bit more specific, I think lots of people in DSA see a kind of anti-politics that comes from the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s. And they see a strain of the same kind of politics coming from Occupy Wall Street and related movements. We can trace critique of that to Jacobin and, even earlier, to its founder, Bhaskar Sunkara. See, for example, this article and this response to it.

Let’s briefly address these issues. What’s going on here?

Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 Base and Superstructure

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑