What If the Real Socialism was the Friends we Made Along the Way (Really)
All of the analysis of the events and motivations in this piece are my own and not necessarily shared by the comrades involved.
The speaker announced that the proposal to adopt a chapter priority to build a rapid response network. I tried to give a sympathetic look to my comrades who were coming back to the table pissed off and dejected. Next up was a vote on another chapter priority focused on a campaign to repeal Costa-Hawkins in November which was in competition with the rapid response network for chapter resources. As people began speaking on the proposal, the criticisms of DSA that I'd been hearing from close comrades replayed in my head. "This organization wants to LARP as revolutionary, but at the end of the day they're electorally minded reformists and careerists". While it's nearly certain that those elements do exist within the organization, I think ultimately my comrades' argument for abstaining from bourgeois politics presented a limited view of the potential benefits regarding organizing in our country's conventional political space that was conditioned by our experiences organizing for immigration justice.
I'd like to take a step back, and present my understanding of how that critique of our structure gained hold of a group of organizers. I've been working with the Immigration Justice Committee (IJC) of DSA-LA since March 2017 when the body was known as the Sanctuary City Working Group. Early on, the primary focus of our work was a campaign around the Los Angeles Justice Fund (to provide legal representation for immigrants), and SB54 the "Sanctuary State Bill". In June 2017, the Justice Fund passed the city council, albeit with significant carve outs that prevented it from truly providing universal representation for immigrants. When SB54 was signed into law in October 2017, I showed up at the next IJC meeting and suggesting that we celebrate our successful campaign but was met with a glum response. Similarly to the justice fund, the bill had been passed with significant carve outs that heavily limited its effectiveness.
After the end of the SB54 campaign, there was a noticeable change in the committee. Participation in establishment politics was mocked as necessarily reformism, marches were largely seen as a waste of time, and direct action took over as the standard approach to contesting state power. We had spent months organizing around those two campaigns and what did we have to show for it? ICE was still terrorizing our communities as it pleased. People were being separated from their families. Organizers were being targeted for deportation. People were dying in ICE's private prisons. Where were we while all of this was happening? All of this was compounded by the continual statements from other members in the chapter relaying how happy they were with how things were going. How could they not see that the massive immigrant population in our city is at huge risk and we were powerless to do anything about it? There must have been something we could alter in our strategy to help people that we simply weren't trying yet. So we decided that we were done with pressuring politicians, we would reach out directly to the people to help build a system of self defense that wasn't reliant on pressuring establishment power.
We wanted to feel power in our hands, not abstracted and warped through the grotesque functions of the American State. It's easy to see any work that involves the political institutions in this country as reliant on the sympathy of those in power. I think it's worth pushing back on this narrative just slightly and seeing that, while forays into establishment politics may not always carry the same readily visible antagonism between classes, they still often rely on the leveraging of collective will in a way that pressures the government to act strategically in response. Along with the somewhat abstracted element of class struggle, it doesn't carry the same satisfaction of control. Direct action is an immediate reclamation of agency through tangible combat with the forces of social control. There's nothing to unpack, there's nobody to sell you a bill of goods. Of course, what we perhaps missed in the analysis of the situation was all of the good organizing we’d done. We’d built our own capacities as individual organizers as well as bringing new people into the group and helping train them. We’d made valuable relationships with outside organizations and showed that we could show up for them when needed. The work of building a political body that is capable of contesting state power might not manifest immediate wins, but it is the work that we must devote ourselves to if our goal is revolution. This isn’t to let anyone off the hook: we should still measure our effectiveness, but we need to be conscious of the weak position we are building from.
So this is how we got to the rapid response network. It wasn't that the proposal was bad, far from it. My comrades had done an excellent job laying out a compelling case for the network including potential use cases as well as fleshing out a clear path for the implementation of the network that provided clear, measurable figures for success. Rather, I think the problem lies in our current power. We lack the member development and density at the current time to provide the network that the authors of the proposal had in mind. While both the Costa-Hawkins and rapid response campaigns provided opportunities for many of the same benefits of developing our current membership, as well as recruiting new members. It's heartbreaking that this comes at the cost of an impact that we can make in real people's lives, including the day to day lives of immigrants. It just ultimately comes down to an honest assessment of the power that we posses at the moment.
As an addendum, it's worth saying that obviously people have the right to be suspicious of an organization that prioritizes reform work over building capabilities to exert people's power through their own actives. When you design an organization to interact with establishment politics, you run the risk of atrophying or never developing its ability to work outside of those systems (which will undoubtedly be a necessary element of revolutionary struggle). That said, I think there’s a damaging kind of dogmatism that swears off of bourgeois politics as necessarily reformism without critically analyzing the way in which campaigns are approached.
