Re: How DSA fixes a political problem

Marv,

I think two aspects of your response need to be distinguished. Demands, such as recall and wages for workers, are made to workers and depend on how much workers can currently be expected to fight over them. In terms of this evaluation, these are both "advanced" or "premature" because there does not yet exist the consciousness necessary for workers to make a struggle for them. However, the question of recalling public officials and the question of whether a workers' organization should recall its own officers is not whether workers will march for the recall of public officials; it is whether DSA will recall its own.

When you separate out these two issues, then your historical context is probably the strongest evidence for the position you have dismissed. As you pointed out, the franchise and collective bargaining have been established, and the militant impulse that drove some of those battles has given way to bread-and-butter unionism (and its mirror image in social democracy). This is not a loss of interest among workers in their democratic rights. Rather, it is the institutionalization of the mass organizations, with the emergence within those organizations of a strata of leaders who do not share the same economic interests as the members. The Commune's provisions are specifically aimed at addressing this formation. Marx did not argue that establishing the workers' wage would cause a wave of people to take action. Instead, he argued that it would remove the material foundation upon which a permanent officialdom could establish itself. The degeneration you see as the natural result of winning democratic rights is precisely the phenomenon that the four mechanisms exist to explain. You have provided the example and refused the conclusion.

You also cut down the conscientious objection. If consciousness develops through practice with self-government rather than prior to it, then delaying the introduction of the mechanisms until after consciousness arises ensures that it will not arise. What the membership will learn instead is how to delegate political decisions to staff and leaderships of caucuses, which is the education process that creates the passivity you cite as justification for waiting.

As for your comment regarding student-intellectuals drawn to the left by abstract ideas rather than actual living experiences, I might agree with you entirely; this seems very similar to Draper's account of the micro-sect. However, it makes my argument, rather than yours. An organization composed largely of intellectuals rather than proletarians needs more internal checks, not fewer, since it lacks a material base outside of itself to constrain its leaders until then.

Finally, "advanced" reverses history. Recall and the workers' wage were normal practice in the commune, in many local unions during the early Second International, and in shop steward committees. What is relatively new is the assumption that a socialist organization is generally organized by paid staff who cannot be recalled by their members. The burden of novelty rests here.
--
Tony


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