I regularly criticize leftist electoralism. Usually that criticism concerns strategic blunders and naive campaigns. I’m going to return to this topic in a couple of ways. First, I’m going to (once again) clear up some misconceptions about class and voting. After that, in a second post, I’ll address the left’s flawed view of the electorate.
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So, occasionally people ask me about the blog’s name (Base and Superstructure). Sometimes they’re just curious. At other times, they know a bit about Marxism and think the name might indicate that I’m some kind of ‘class reductionist‘ (by which they might mean any number of things).
I’ve written about this topic a number of times. Including the very first post back in 2018. In fact, it’s a frequent topic I return to from a variety of angles. But I’d also like to write a short version of a more complicated set of ideas.
Here’s the short version: The term ‘class‘ refers to relationships among different groups of people. These relationships concern which groups own and control economic resources. When trying to best explain society, class relations form the most fundamental explanatory unit. Other things, like religion, culture, identity, and so on, are an important part of our lives and an important social force. They’re also important to our efforts to create and maintain socialist movements. But class is typically where the buck stops.
That’s what the blog name means to me. And while it might make me a ‘class reductionist’ in some narrow explanatory sense, I certainly think there are things other than class that are very important to politics and movements.
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?
And now we’re moving from summer into fall. I can’t say I organize my reading too much around season, but maybe it has an impact.
Let’s find out. Looking down at the list, I see a bit more on politics. As well as one leftover summer novel.
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.
