Big Tent Socialism

Sexy idea right? It seems reasonable to gather everyone who calls themselves a socialist under one political roof and march forward in formidable numbers. By all means, the working class must organize by the millions, and do not let internet discourse stop you. But this posture, which presents itself as strategic flexibility, if left only to itself, is in fact the signature of a deeply seated theoretical confusion, the sign that one has mistaken motion for progress and noise for class power.

We should be celebrating the broadening of socialist ideas among the masses. I do not celebrate organizational forms without investigation.

We are being asked to celebrate the swelling of a political formation whose internal logic guarantees its collapse at the moment of crisis, and to call that collapse a "leftward shift" because the rhetoric inside the tent has grown generally more diverse and militant. Marxism-Leninism cuts through this confusion, not by rejecting united action against fascism, we demand it, but by exposing the class character of the forces assembled in a given formation and the political consequences of this formation. We reject the liquidation of our organizational independence and political line.

The observable phenomenon that this left-opportunist camp calls "expanded influence" is, on examination, something quite different. What we are witnessing is not only the mass political action of the working class, but particularly the mass radicalization of a petty-bourgeois stratum that, finding its material expectations betrayed by neoliberal capitalism, has flooded into the people's movement and its adjacent organizations.

The most insidious dimension of the big-tent tendency is not the presence of social democrats and progressive liberals, whom we should all by now expect to seek the safety of class-collaborationist political forms, it is the presence inside these formations of self-described Marxist, even Leninist(!), caucuses that have convinced themselves, and others, that their participation represents a strategic orientation rather than a tactical deployment and reorientation. They enter the big tent, carrying the language of Lenin, but they wield this language not to sharpen the contradictions and win the advanced workers to an independent communist organization and facilitate the demise of political opportunism, but rather, to argue that the coalition itself, by virtue of their presence within it, is becoming a revolutionary instrument itself. This is fundamentally a revision from Leninism to left reformism, and it is achieved through a vast and fatal substitution:

The party-form is abandoned as the strategic vehicle of revolution, and the party-function, the work of political leadership, mass organization, theoretical education, strategic coordination, is reassigned to a caucus, which is operating inside a multi-class formation that can never, by its structural nature, adopt a consistently revolutionary program. The caucus becomes a lobbying firm for Marxist phrases inside a petty-bourgeois political vanity project, and it calls this "shifting the center of gravity leftward." What it is actually doing, is providing left cover for an operation that, at every moment of actual crisis, will be frozen strategically.

Dare I say, this is Browderite liquidationism and revisionism, simply given a fresh coat of paint. If the proponents of this big-tent theory are correct, perhaps Browder was correct to dissolve the Communist Party into a political association. Alternatively, perhaps our well-meaning friends in the movement have taken up what is actually an anti-communist, class collaborationist position.

The working class is moving.

The explosions of militant strike activity and community defense, the labor and tenant organizing campaigns, the radicalization of Black and brown youth in the streets, the growing anti-imperialist consciousness, the refusal of workers to accept the terms of neoliberal precarity, all of this is genuine class motion, and it creates the objective basis for a truly massive Communist movement. But the subjective factor, the political leadership of that class motion, has been largely occupied by this petty-bourgeois stratum, a stratum that shares the radical mood but not the class position or the strategic interests of the proletariat. This stratum has a material stake in the big-tent form. This stratum does not have experience in creating lasting forms of class organization. Caucuses inside these big tents tend to hold, in their majority, the most politically developed workers of the tent, and their tragedy is that when this petty-bourgois stratum encounters Marxist ideas, it does not absorb them as a guide to action, it collects them as a resource, a set of signifiers that mark its distance from mainstream liberalism without ever committing to the dangerous and self-sacrificial work of building a Leninist vanguard party, to which the worker-militants run along.

The presence of Marxist caucuses inside such a formation does not transform the formation, the formation transforms the Marxists, teaching them to substitute internal factional maneuvering for united class struggle, teaching them to measure victory in resolution adoptions and committee chairmanships rather than in the organized combat readiness of the entire working class.

The theoretical error underlying this entire orientation is a collapse of the distinction between the party and the movement, between the vanguard and the mass, between the strategic and the tactical. Lenin spent his political life fighting precisely this collapse, whether from the right or the left. In each case, the specific organizational form of the revolution, the Communist Party, was defended not out of sectarian rigidity but out of a concrete analysis of what the class struggle requires to actually reach its conclusion.

The working class, left to its spontaneous development, arrives only at trade union consciousness, the need to unite to achieve gains, the acceptance of the wage system with better terms. The leap to revolutionary consciousness requires the organized intervention of a party that stands outside and above the spontaneous movement, armed with the total science of Marxism-Leninism and organized to win the advanced layers of the class to a program of state rupture. The big tent, by its nature as a coalition of heterogeneous class forces and ideologies, cannot perform this function. It can collect discontented masses like trading cards, it cannot transform into revolutionary working-class consciousness. The caucuses inside these tents, however sincere their individual members, are structurally positioned to manage this tension between the spontaneous radicalization and its revolutionary resolution, which is to say, they are structurally positioned to prevent that resolution from occurring at all.

Demanding that comrades exit these broad formations en masse would be an unbelievably sectarian fantasy disconnected from the reality that masses of workers are currently in motion inside and around these formations and need to be engaged, and that the work done in these formations is still good work. The Leninist approach is to maintain an organized presence while openly and systematically contesting the political line which traps class action within politically suicidal boundaries. Commune with the masses, enter the mass organizations, the unions, the broad anti-fascist fronts, but we do so as an organized party, bound by party discipline, executing party strategy, openly advocating the revolutionary program, and building the independent organizational capacity of the working class and oppressed peoples regardless of the fortunes of the big tent. We do not invest our hopes in "shifting" a multi-class coalition leftward, we invest our energy in recruiting the most class-conscious workers and oppressed people out of the entire movement's gravitational field, and into the very specific and necessary orbit of the Leninist party, in order to rip the leadership of the people's movement from the cold clutches of the liberal bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois radical lapdogs.

The mass radicalization of our moment is the raw material of revolution, but it is raw material that must be processed, either by the working class or by the petty-bourgeoisie.

Socialist ideas are spreading because capitalism is failing.

Organizational forms, too, can fail.