Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
Readers know I don’t talk much about the sectarian left. You know, the kinds of smaller leftist groups based on certain ideologies, e.g., Marxist-Leninist groups, Maoist groups, and so on. I spend a lot of time – both as a blogger and a local DSA chapter leader – discussing strategy on the left. I’ve even posted a couple of times on the DSA caucuses. But I mostly ignore the sectarian left during all this.
Why?
So, the DSA released a statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And boy did liberals hate it! Liberals hated it a lot! You can read it at the link in the first sentence.
However, I’m not going to bother linking to any of the liberal critiques. You can read those at your own leisure. Or you can not read them at all. Whatever. Most of those critiques are so awful they don’t merit a response. All I really wanted to do here is provide a short summary of the statement and the context of it, as far as I can tell.
Within the Democratic Socialists of America – especially the very online parts of DSA – there’s been a hot debate lately over whether to expel Jamaal Bowman from the org. Bowman recently won an election to Congress, joined The Squad, and formed a big part of the DSA’s strategy of building membership through electoral engagement.
I won’t recap all the details. Readers can check out coverage from the DSA Observer. But the basic story: Bowman voted for Iron Dome funding for Israel. He took a lobbyist-paid trip to Israel and posed with Israel’s right-wing prime minister, among other things. In response to a rebuff from Bowman and his supporters, the DSA’s Palestine Solidarity Working Group called on him to fix these issues or face expulsion. Some on the online left sided with the WG, while other parts sided against expulsion.
But I think the whole expulsion question arrives far too late. The DSA should look into how it got into this mess in the first place.
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So, we know there’s a huge political space in the U.S. to the left of Joe Biden. Many of the groups in this space talk about how to build a political majority. Progressives talk about building a coalition majority. Leftists talk about building a working-class majority.
The DSA uses the term ‘multiracial working class’ to get at its target political group. But this term raises as many questions as it answers. Each DSA faction adopts it, and then uses it in varying ways.
Where does this leave us? We don’t know what a working-class majority looks like. At least, not in any settled way. Some leftists seem to think it’s already there for the taking. Others think we need to do far more work to form it. In this post, I’ll see what the data can tell us. Is there a working-class majority out there? What does a working-class majority look like?
So, back in 2019, I wrote a post on the different DSA caucuses. In that post, I looked only at caucus ideology as caucuses described it.
I thought about doing a similar task before the 2021 DSA Convention. But I decided against it. Why? For one, someone else already did a good job of it. Two, I thought readers might benefit from a fresh approach.
Let’s look at the DSA caucuses by how they react to problems. One specific problem, in fact. So, that’s what I’ll do in this post.
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