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?
Burgis on ‘Anarchism’
I think the best recent example of this DSA critique comes from the Ben Burgis essay collection, Canceling Comedians While The World Burns. I wrote about Burgis’s book earlier. But I mention it here not because I think he’s right or, alternatively, because I think his version is particularly misguided. Rather, I think he largely avoids the mistake of conflating the views called ‘anarchism’ with actual anarchism.
In other words, Burgis avoids a basic mistake most other people succumb to.
That said, Burgis’s essay on this topic – ‘Neo-Anarchy in the UK (and in the United States)’ – is still, by a wide margin, the worst essay in an otherwise solid collection.
In his version of the critique, Burgis sets up a dichotomy of things DSA might do, as an org. DSA could do projects falling roughly into the categories of mutual aid and social events. It could, in other words, start brake light clinics and hold potlucks. It could, as Burgis and many DSA chapters call it, host ‘socializing with socialists.’
Alternatively, DSA could work on electoral politics. It could be, as Burgis puts it, “doing a damn thing to elect the most pro-worker candidate to ever have a serious shot at the American Presidency.”
For Burgis, as for others (e.g., Sunkara, Jacobin, Bread & Roses and related DSA factions), that’s basically the choice. Build around electoral politics or sit around in a circle and chat. They argue for the former.
Readers presumably know where I’m headed. This is just a false dichotomy. DSA could organize tenants and workers to fight landlords and bosses. Among other options that are neither electoral politics nor directionless socializing. But electoralist and centralist factions of DSA set things up to exclude these options.
Bummer.
‘Iowa DSA’
I live in Iowa, and we know this false dichotomy all too well. We’ve had a DSA chapter in Iowa City since 2017. And well, we didn’t set up an active chapter Bernie campaign in 2020. Some people in larger, more conservative (though they’ll deny it), East Coast DSA chapters got very indignant. Some people from Philly DSA seemed especially upset.
To be clear, we’re talking about maybe a half dozen or so whiners from these chapters. Not the whole chapter. Also, to be clear, none of them (as far as I remember) were named Ben Burgis. Everyone else was just various DSA randos re-Tweeting them, in the standard, mindless DSA re-Tweet fashion. Mostly just people who might not be able to find Iowa on a map (though one of them is actually from Iowa, which he never tires of reminding people) and who think we only have one DSA chapter in the state (we’ve ranged from about 3 to 6 since 2017).
Mostly we ignored them. Every now and then one got on my nerves and I told them to fuck off. Good, clean fun.
Twitter fights aside, here’s my point. Though we didn’t start a chapter campaign to elect Bernie, we also didn’t spend our time on brake light clinics or holding nothing but social events.
What ‘Iowa DSA’ Did
What did we do? We founded a tenants’ union. We worked with other chapters in Iowa that addressed housing issues. And we put in various efforts at organizing workers locally. Some more successful than others. Finally, we started a public utilities campaign.
Notice how none of those things fit into either of the boxes above?
Our efforts were far from perfect. I think we should’ve pushed harder on local worker organizing campaigns. I wish we had done a better job canvassing (though we didn’t do badly, either). We could’ve built organic connections with people across lines of race and immigration status. Connections that go beyond already engaged activists.
But, here’s what would’ve happened if we actually did the Bernie thing in 2020. First, we wouldn’t have done any of those other things. And, second, Bernie still would’ve lost.
Does that sound better than what we actually did?
DSA and Locals
I agree it’s bad for a DSA chapter to do nothing but ‘socializing with socialist’ events. And maybe it even happens somewhere. I don’t know. I haven’t seen it.
What I do know is that it’s better to have people on the ground, in a local chapter, deciding democratically what to do than having national leaders (whether elected or not) telling us what to do. The centralizing factions in DSA seem to think taking directions from elected national leadership is the best and most democratic way to do things.
It isn’t.
As for the critique of ‘anarchism,’ even in its more careful formation by Burgis, it’s mostly a strawman. The kind of person the critique aims at certainly existed in the early 2000s. I guess you can find versions of that person around today. Even here in Iowa City, you can find a political current built around sidelining local government in favor of a motley crew of non-profits with varying degrees of grassroots community connections.
But they’re pretty rare these days. And while probably a couple of them pay DSA dues, it’s not many. Most people in the camp I described in the previous paragraph never joined DSA. I just don’t see the ‘anarcho-liberals’ Sunkara (and Cedric Johnson, in another book) describes running DSA chapters.
Do you? Which DSA chapters? Certainly not mine.
We may never totally be rid of the bad habits activists picked up from the New Left. But that’s a much broader problem. The specific kind of ‘anarchist’ under discussion here? It’s not something I worry about. And I certainly don’t let people use the appeal to it to convince me to do things my better judgment tells me not to do.
