I
read with great interest Dustin Guastella’s article in Jacobin, We
Need a Medicare for All March on Washington (MoW).
I agree with Dustin, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, on
the main points. Building a national mass mobilization would afford
the left and broader social sectors an opportunity to turn our
current defensivefight
to preserve access to health care into an offensive struggle
for a concrete gain for working people.
This
health-care struggle won’t be won easily. I believe it will take
years of social movement organizing to win the fight. By doing so, we
can decisively shift the balance of forces in favor of the working
class.
Despite
the recent impressive increase in size of the Democratic Socialists
of America, I don’t think the DSA alone has the resources or social
weight to carry this issue forward on its own. That said, the DSA
does have the political authority, right now, to call for the
building of a mass movement.
A
united front coalition that includes the unions, women’s groups,
community organizations, students, and, yes, socialists is necessary
for long-term victory. The united front is a concept that goes back
as far as the early years of the Communist International and allows
for unity in action between organizations around a limited program.
The constituent organizations retain their independence and right to
criticize, publish and organize.
A
necessary debate
Dustin’s
article has sparked a necessary debate, for which he should be
commended. The objections to the MoW raised in Jacobin by
Michael Kinnucan, Don’t
March, Organize for Power, reflect an unnecessary counterposition
of “organizing” and “mobilizing.” Both are activities that I
believe, based on my experience in the antiwar and Central American
solidarity movements, should not be seen as isolated from each other.
Organizing and mobilizing both take place in the context of
on-the-ground work at the local level and of building national
organizations and coalitions.
According
to Kinnucan, rather than “squander” resources on organizing for
health care, which the Democrats are already doing, the DSA should
concentrate on housing issues. Kinnucan’s political horizon is set
on 2020, when the Democrats will magically enact single payer. But
the Democrats’ current desperate plea for “compromise” and a
“bipartisan” solution show which side they are really on.
Labor
organizer Jane McAlevey’s “organizing model,” which Kinnucan
places a lot of confidence in, seems to have real limitations.
McAlevey is critical of the lack of an organized base for movements
like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, since these
mobilization-based movements lack what she calls “actual power.” McAlevey has a pessimistic view of protest movements and instead
proposes a form of long-term base-building organizing that leaves
little room for the self-activity of workers and the oppressed.
Perhaps McAlevey’s top-down organizing model can be used in
trade-union campaigns, but it hinders the building of vibrant social
movements.
Beyond
social media
We
were all inspired by the Women’s March on Jan. 21 and the airport
protests against Trump’s travel ban. The problem I perceive with
these and other social-media-driven mass actions is not in the
mobilizations themselves. Rather, the problem is that these sorts of
demonstrations create no structures for democratic decision-making or
accountability.
In
her book, “Twitter and Tear Gas,” Zeynep Tufekci writes:
This “allows for the organization, for example, of big protests or
major online campaigns with minimal effort and advance-work, but this
empowerment can come along with a seemingly paradoxical weakness. I
find that many such movements lose out on network internalities or
the gains in resilience and collective decision-making and acting
capacity that emerge from the long-term work of negotiation and
interaction required to maintain the networks as functioning and
durable social and political structures.
“In
the past, this was more organic to the process of taking care of
tasks and preparation for acts of protest, from rallies to marches to
producing dissident media—there was no other way to do it quickly
or on-the-fly. Taking care of such tasks through adhocratic methods
leads to many significant consequences, ranging from inverted
movement trajectories (protest first, organize later, unlike the past
where a large protest was the culmination of long-term work.)
to complex frailties including tactical
freeze,
where movements cannot quickly respond to changing conditions and
have an inability to negotiate and delegate when necessary—since
they have no strong means of collectively making decision and
adapting to new circumstances” (Zeynep Tufekci, “Twitter and Tear
Gas,” pp. 269-270).
In
other words, by building protest movements through reliance on
social-media-driven mobilizations, we create “movements” that are
a mile wide and an inch deep. Without the long-term and patient work
of building movements, forging coalitions, etc., we are not creating
movements that let the working class and oppressed learn their own
potential power. What is needed are a mass social movement, coalition
building, democratic movement structures, and political independence
from the bosses’ parties.
From
Vietnam to Fight for $15
A
notable use of the united-front mass-action strategy was during the
U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam. The Vietnam antiwar movement
mobilized millions of people and helped shift public perception of
the imperialist war. Socialist activists worked day and night to
forge broad, democratic and inclusive coalitions. While socialists
were some of the main organizers, the movement included unionists,
religious organizations, and students. This unity in action didn’t
come easily.
In
his book,
Out Now!,
Fred Halstead describes the process of coalition building: “Beyond
their agreement in opposing the war, the initiators of the movement
held discordant views on many matters and advocated different, and
even conflicting, methods. At every point along the road they had to
thrash out their principled strategic and tactical differences in
order to arrive at a unified and concerted action. This was rarely
easy and not always possible. … In the beginning, the movement came
to grips with three internal policy problems that were
interconnected: red baiting, nonexclusion, and democratic decision
making” (Fred Halstead, “Out Now! A Participant’s Account of
the Movement In The U.S. Against The Vietnam War,” pp. 954-955).
A
far different form of organizing can be seen in the campaign for a
$15 per hour minimum wage. Fight for $15, organized by the SEIU, has
been an on-again, off-again, bureaucratic affair. The fast food
worker strikes were an inspiration that pointed to the potential for
a mass action strategy to win victory.
However,
instead of a unified mass movement, organized by the AFL-CIO, the
campaign has been, at times, starved of resources and demobilized.
The Democrats tried to sabotage the movement in favor of an increase
in the minimum wage by embracing the embarrassing $10.10 per hour
wage, with union bureaucrats like Rich Trumka as accomplices. In
places where $15 per hour has been “won,” the Democrats succeeded
in having it phased in over a space of years and have placed certain
exceptions and exemptions in the bills.
The
unions could have made an increased minimum wage into a nationwide
crusade that would lift the living standards of millions of working
people who live on the edge of financial ruin. Instead, they let
their ties to Democratic Party politicians blunt the effectiveness of
the movement.
Unreliable
“allies”
Kinnucan’s
and Guastella’s shared faith in the Democrats’ capacity to carry
this fight forward is, I think, misplaced. The Democrats’ supposed
embrace of single payer doesn’t line up with the reality. When the
issue came up recently in California, it was Democrats who sabotaged
the effort.
The
Democrats have made it clear that they are wedded to the neo-liberal
health-care plan called the ACA, begging the GOP to compromise to
save this bailout for insurance companies. Of course, some
progressive Democrats will “support” single payer in words now
and then cite “reality” as the reason they can’t vote for it
later. It’s a pattern that goes back decades. The Democrats promise
a reform when out of power and fail to push it forward when they have
the votes.
Kinnucan’s
and Guastella’s view comes from a common misapprehension about the
possibility of reforming the Democratic Party. Well-intentioned
people mistake the existence of a “progressive” wing of the
Democrats as proof that the party can be fundamentally reformed. They
draw a false distinction between a supposed Democratic
“establishment” and the rest of the party. Progressive Democrats
have traditionally played the role of keeping workers and the
oppressed inside the party by feeding illusions in the Democrats’
goals and policies.
The
truth is that the Democratic Party as an institution is inextricably
linked to Wall Street and dependent on the capitalist class for its
funding. The structures of the Democratic Party will resist tooth and
nail any progressive effort within the confines of that party. Just
look at the way the DNC sabotaged the moderate liberal Sanders
campaign.
While
we want to work in coalitions with progressive Democrats to win
reforms, we have to understand that the Democratic Party is not a
viable arena of struggle for socialists. Rather, our task as
socialists has to be to break the subordination of our unions and
social movements to the Democrats.
No
electoral solutions
The
fight for health care for all won’t be won at the ballot box. It
can only be won in the streets. The question of working-class
political independence is a fundamental difference between the DSA
and the revolutionary socialist left. While class independence is a
principled issue for us, it’s not a sectarian stance. We oppose
work in the Democratic Party and other bourgeois parties because
these parties will always put the interests of workers and oppressed
people behind those of their paymasters on Wall Street.
If
our friends in the DSA truly want to build an effective socialist
movement, they have to make a clean break with the bosses’ parties.
There can be no halfway measures in this. The notion that we can run
socialists in Democratic primaries or “inside-outside” strategies
are doomed to fail because the Democrats as an institution won’t
let their party be captured by left forces. The best a Democratic
Party left can hope for is the role of a housebroken and token
opposition.
For
a united front, mass action orientation
Movement
building isn’t just about winning this or that reform. It is also
about preparing the working class and oppressed for the struggle for
power, for their self-emancipation. In that sense we must necessarily
see our task as socialists as moving beyond Medicare for All to a
national health-care system entirely under democratic workers’
control and run in the interests of the majority.
There
are no shortcuts in movement building. I want to lend my voice in
support of Dustin Guastella’s proposed March on Washington. I would
propose that the DSA, in conjunction with other forces—unions,
socialist organizations, women’s groups, Black and Latinx
organizations—organize a national conference in the fall to call a
National March on Washington for Medicare for All in April. This
national conference should be democratic, non-exclusionary, and open
to all. The conference should be used as a springboard to launch
local and regional coalitions capable of building the movement at the
grassroots. Such a movement would be open to participation of
rank-and-file Democrats but must maintain its independence from
Democratic Party politicians.
MOW, Dustin G:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/medicare-for-all-single-payer-health-care-march-nurses-unions
Don’t
march organize for power:
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/march-single-payer-medicare-health-care-democratic-socialists-of-america-unions
Long
March, Dustin G:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/medicare-for-all-health-care-nurses-union-march-single-payer
Limits
of organizing model:
https://publicautonomy.org/2017/06/11/the-limits-of-the-organizing-model/
>> The article above was written by John Leslie, and is reprinted from Socialist Action.
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