Re: DSA's Platform Reboot

Mark,

Thanks for reading it closely, and for the generous words. But I want to resist the framing of your first point as an omission, because I think we are closer than you allow — and because the two halves of your note pull in different directions.

You write that an analysis of what DSA says misses what DSA does, and that in any case "there is no requirement for chapters to implement it." That is not a gap in the essay; it is the essay's finding. My object was the program-form itself. A platform that binds no one who holds office and obligates no chapter to act is not a plan that failed to be executed — it is a horizon, which is a different kind of object, and one whose non-binding character is a feature of how it gets produced. So when you say the real problem is power, I agree. I would only add that the deliberative question and the power question are one question, not two. More democracy in the writing of a platform, absent anything that makes the platform consequential afterward, yields a better-ratified horizon and nothing else. What converts a program into a plan is the machinery I have been harping on elsewhere: fractions with binding discipline, recall, salary caps at a skilled worker's wage, published votes, the elected accountable to the organization rather than to the electorate that returned them. That machinery is also what would give chapters an obligation rather than an invitation. Your amendment is friendly; I would press it further than you do.

On Bonapartism I think there is a real disagreement, and it turns on which Bonapartism is under discussion.

You say ours is not a Bonapartist crisis because there is no stalemate between a mobilized, militant working class and a capitalist class whose rule it threatens — "it's not Weimar." That is Trotsky's formulation from the thirties: an equilibrium of class forces, the state raising itself as arbiter between two camps both capable of mobilization. It is a real and useful concept, and on its terms you are right that it does not describe 2026.

But it is not Marx's. In the Eighteenth Brumaire the proletariat is not poised; it is beaten. June 1848 is behind the story, not ahead of it. What produces the Second Empire is the mutual paralysis of the bourgeois factions — Legitimists and Orleanists unable to rule in the name of either dynasty, the party of Order unable to rule in its own name at all — combined with a bourgeoisie prepared to surrender political rule in order to preserve social rule, and an atomized mass that, in Marx's phrase about the smallholders, cannot represent itself and must be represented. Defeat and deadlock, not equilibrium.

Which is to say: your own description of the conjuncture is the Brumaire's, not Weimar's. You write that the crisis is largely within the capitalist class and its inability to agree on what follows the failure of neoliberalism, and that workers are not organized independently of the capitalist parties. Those are precisely Marx's two conditions. You have given a Bonapartist account of the crisis while declining the category.

Nor do I think Gramsci is the alternative you want him to be. Caesarism in the Notebooks is Gramsci's own reworking of Bonapartism for exactly this case — the organic crisis in which the old order can no longer rule as before and the new cannot yet be born, and a personalized arbiter emerges from the deadlock, in progressive or regressive form. Hegemony and Bonapartism are not rival explanations. The crisis of hegemony you describe is the condition under which Bonapartist state-forms become available. And the qualifier I have been using — patrimonial — is doing the work you are asking Gramsci to do: naming a rule that personalizes the state and distributes office as private favor rather than mobilizing a mass movement behind it. That is what a Caesarist arbiter looks like when there is no mobilized camp on either side.

One word on the exchange with Marv, since I think you are both right and talking past each other. Marv is right that canvassing is contact with the class and that abstention from elections has never been the Marxist position. You are right that an electorate is not a mass base. Neither of those answers the other, because the question is not participation versus abstention. It is what the campaign leaves behind when it ends, and what the officeholder is accountable to once seated. Marv's SWP comparison makes my point better than mine does: the party could run candidates without becoming an electoral machine because the fraction was the dog and the campaign the tail. That was an organizational relation, not a moral disposition.

Tony
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Tony


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