Re: DSA's Platform Reboot

Marv,

Thanks — but the summary reverses what I said, and the reversal is worth naming, because it is the whole question.

I did not offer a definition of the working class. I offered a distinction between two forms in which the same class is politically constituted. Who belongs to the class is settled exactly where you say it is: by the sale of labor-power, by separation from the means of production. I hold that as firmly as you do, and against the postmodern dissolutions you mention. Precisely because the class is defined objectively, independently of what its members think of themselves, the question of how it is organized is a separate question — and not a lesser one.

So the charge of idealism misses. An idealist criterion would sort workers by consciousness: the advanced and the backward, the awakened and the asleep. I named nothing of the kind. Union locals, workplace committees, tenants' associations, strike committees, chapters with membership lists and minutes — these are not states of mind. They are institutions with dues, officers, meetings, records, and the capacity to sanction. They are as material as a payroll. What distinguishes them from the electorate is not that their members hold better opinions but that they persist, and persistence is what gives a body the capacity to instruct and to withdraw.

On the electorate I would put it more strongly than "snapshot." The ballot does not merely register the class's level of understanding; it processes the class into a determinate shape. One voter, one district, one count, in private, the aggregate dissolving the following morning. That is a real social form with real effects, not a distorted picture of something real elsewhere. Compare the wage. The wage is really paid, and it really presents the sale of labor-power as payment for labor performed. Nobody is deceived in the sense of holding a false belief; the form itself does the work. The electorate is like that. It is the class as the state's own apparatus constitutes it for purposes of legitimation, and one should not expect an apparatus built to that purpose to yield a body capable of giving orders to its own representatives.

On the SWP: I did not call it a mass base and would not. The example was about a relation, not a magnitude — which body is subordinate to which. The organization existed before the campaign, set its terms, and outlived it; the campaign was an instrument of the organization rather than the reverse. Its smallness is, if anything, what makes the illustration clean, since with no prospect of winning nothing obscured the question of where authority sat. You have read a claim about direction as a claim about size, and then found the size wanting. It was wanting. That was never the claim.

The one-in-ten figure describes the problem rather than dissolving it. If nine in ten workers stand in no durable organization, that is the reason the distinction matters, not a reason to abandon it. And a base was never meant to be coextensive with the class. It is the organized portion through which the class acts — no socialist current has ever had otherwise. The Bolsheviks in 1917 were a minority of a minority of a class that was itself a minority of Russia.

Which brings me back to DSA. My complaint is not that too few workers are positioned to discipline their representatives. It is that DSA already possesses the form — members, chapters, dues, conventions, a resolution process — and has declined to attach to it the mechanisms that would make representation answerable: recall, salary at a worker's wage, fractions bound by decisions taken in advance. The gap is not between the organization and the class. It is between the organization and its own officeholders. That gap is a choice, and it gets made again at every convention.

Tony


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