Austin Socialist Collective Summation

Austin Roc
Aug 31, 2018 · 19 min read

By the Austin Revolutionary Organizing Collective (AROC)

Towards the end of 2017 Austin Socialist Collective (ASC) found itself on the brink of dissolution. Recognizing the need for our continued work, committed members began a process of self-examination, and now self-criticism and rectification. We have written this summation in order to help identify our errors — as well as our successes — so that others may learn from them and help to build a revolution that can end capitalism in our lifetimes.

The document will consist of a narrative history of the organization, followed by elaboration on several key errors made by the organization that led to our near discontinuation, and the steps towards rectification we are taking to reverse these mistakes and start our work anew.

A Brief History of ASC

ASC began when the Austin branch of Socialist Alternative split with the national organization in April 2016. The nature of the split was over the national leadership’s desire to impose ideological uniformity on the branch with regard to abstract, minute matters while also demanding political action in favor of the Bernie Sanders campaign. The Austin and San Marcos branches preferred instead to focus their efforts on the Fight for $15 (FF15) campaign.

FF15 is a mass campaign founded by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), but Austin Socialist Alternative members organized the local efforts on their own, initially without any support or input from SEIU (which has little to no presence in Central Texas). The campaign served as a vehicle for organizing shop-floor activism and leveraging resources — including legal protections for single-day Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strikes. After it gained steam FF15 hired one member as a full-time staff organizer.

Following a series of polemical exchanges, visits by national Socialist Alternative staff, and a brief dues protest Socialist Alternative purged several members and the Austin and San Marcos branches broke away on April 20. The groups reformed as the Austin Socialist Collective and San Marcos Socialist Collective, respectively, shortly thereafter.

Heat Strike, 2016

The groups gained significant attention about six weeks later when we helped lead our first one-day ULP strike at a Wendy’s location in San Marcos. While the location was able to stay open by bringing in workers from other stores, the main demand — repair of the kitchen’s air conditioning — was immediately won, and the action received significant local media coverage. Most importantly, at least one significant shop floor leader became a committed communist and an important proletarian leader in SMSC.

During this time ASC members drew up Points of Unity and a little more than a month after the strike ASC and SMSC members met in a “Regional Conference” to decide upon organizational structures. After considerable discussion and debate a structure based on “departments” — for study, activities, and PR — caucuses, and initiative groups was adopted, with department heads, caucus representatives, and at-large leaders chosen for a Steering Committee. Rank-and-file members were broken up into cell-like “branches.” The design was not based off of any extant, successful organizations of a similar size or level of development, but rather the theoretical assumptions of a few members.

The organization also took a great deal of interest in connecting our work to the historic roots of Texas politics, namely the Reconstruction experience. This position was elaborated in a document called “Fighting for Our Jubilee” and the ideas were presented in a public meeting two months after the Regional Conference called “Building Power for Texas Workers: Socialism for the South.” Note that the study took no account of Texas’ settler colonialist character or the legacy of Native genocide and ethnic cleansing in the state.

The meeting brought out about 40–50 people many of whom expressed interest in ASC membership, and the Steering Committee used information forms from the event to organize several branches. The “Study Department” — essentially two people — developed a program that included information about Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio pecan shellers’ strike of the 1930s, as well as extensive selections from Eric Foner’s Reconstruction. Branches were expected to organize a study of the documents.

In truth, only one branch seems to have completed such a study, and there were immediate complaints about the difficulty of The Communist Manifesto for some members. This did not prompt questions about what the purpose of ASC was, or what sort of organization it intended to be — a cadre formation where comprehending The Communist Manifesto would seem to be a minimal expectation, a mass organization where simpler texts might need to be made available, or something in between. The degree to which these “complaints” were genuine, rather than reflective of a difference in priorities of certain cynical members, remains in question.

These questions as to the nature of ASC were never satisfactorily answered, and as the basic study program broke down each branch took up whatever texts they wished, sometimes coordinating with other branches but more often simply operating in isolation. In a similar vein at this time, the initial Steering Committee and General Body adopted goals regarding recruitment, diversity, campaign development, etc. and a vague, highly abstract strategy of “proletarian hegemony institution building” just after the public meeting. This strategy was never clarified, however, and after this GBM the goals seem to have never been considered again.

In the place of a program and strategy the Collective adopted a succession of projects, typically drawn from two predominant sources — FF15 or local protest culture. Over the course of the Fall workers at an area Popeye’s Chicken went on strike to protest poor pay and conditions, resulting in retaliation by management. ASC helped organize a militant response, mobilizing allies from local labor and leftist communities, ultimately occupying the store and forcing a police response that was captured in an electrifying video that inspired workplace actions in several other shops around the country.

Anti-Fascist Protest, November 2016

Also in the fall came the election of Donald Trump and the rising spectre of fascism. ASC members were involved with demonstrations against neo-Nazis and other fascists in both Houston and Austin, both of which mobilized hundreds against a tiny fascist clique. ASC members were also key elements of the One Resistance demonstration on Inauguration Day — a coalition effort of a number of left and liberal NGOs led by the office of a left liberal city council member. ASC fought consistently to keep Democratic Party forces from taking over the march formally and to refuse collaboration with police, though in the end liberals dominated the effort and plans for civil disobedience were abandoned. Nonetheless, as leaders of the turnout committee ASC activists helped mobilize more than 5,000 people for Austin’s largest demonstration since the 2005 immigrant rights protests.

ASC went on to successfully mobilize direct actions against Whataburger for retaliating against protesting workers and a street protest against US bombing of Syria, among other successfully executed actions, but at no point was a formal strategy on demonstrations/protest culture ever adopted. Even as we took part in the antifascist movement we had no coherent line or program on antifascist organizing, in part because it was given insufficient priority by the steering committee of that time. In general the demonstrations reflected a broader tendency in the organization to simply follow along behind the initiative of individual members when they decided to take a lead on something — demonstrations, self-defense or organizing skills education, study efforts, etc. — proceeding until the effort dropped off.

This persisted as some key members with disproportionate, if not always open, influence over the group resisted calls for a comprehensive Collective strategy. Members were instead pushed to “do the work,” and frustration at the lack of a clear program began to express itself as attacks on the structure of the organization.

This frustration resulted first in a hostile response to a proposed work plan for the “Activities Department.” The organizers of this work plan made good faith efforts to solicit feedback, but errors in communication and procrastination resulted in rancor and disorganization when the plan was presented to the general body. The “departments” had never been clearly defined, and when one of the two Activity Chairs resigned from the Collective altogether after the conflict and the other resigned that position there effectively was no Activities Department at all.

Members decided in January 2017 to redesign the Collective’s structure, a contentious change with opposition from nearly half of membership. Each branch and caucus was now to choose Steering Committee members. This change alienated the remaining Study Chairs, one of whom was the primary author of the previous structure. They, along with a few others, ceased participation with the Collective shortly thereafter.

Neither structure, however, proved capable of facilitating important and very basic decision-making on the part of the Collective. Shortly before the structure change the Collective adopted policies for recruitment, membership requirements, and new member orientation, but none were actually ever kept to in this period. Later, after yet another change in requirements, three members were properly inducted after orientation. Members at this time, however, were added without completing formal requirements, and it was never decided if the organization wanted rapid growth or a more intense member development focus.

Even if we had wanted to add more it was never clear what we would tell them that we were doing other than FF15, itself always a hectic succession of upcoming projects with no longer-term local strategy uniting them. The same patterns existed with regard to basic material tasks for the organization. The Finance Committee met exactly once, and leaders never could decide upon a legal structure for the organization.

At this time SMSC was performing much better than ASC, taking up much more disciplined study and political programs. This followed a period of chaos where the organization was briefly flooded with anarchists and even some liberals. ASC Steering Committee members made special trips to San Marcos to assist in guiding the organization at its request, while remaining formally separate organization.

They were able to do this in San Marcos and not Austin in part because SMSC was organized as only two branches in close contact with one another while ASC, on the contrary, was divided into multiple branches with many members out of touch or completely unfamiliar with others. Coordination and collective action between members became difficult as a result, and the Steering Committee became increasingly powerful as a central conduit of all information and decision-making.

Nonetheless the organization carried on through the Spring of 2017 with a succession of FF15 actions and protests, culminating on May Day with a joint effort alongside a number of labor and left liberal organizations. SMSC actually organized a ULP strike among fast food workers in San Marcos, the only organization in Central Texas to actually bring striking workers out on May Day. They brought these workers and others to Austin where together with ASC and the other groups they led an occupation of the governor’s office in protest of draconian anti-immigrant legislation — SB 4. The demonstration numbered perhaps 200 people, including undocumented immigrants, numerous workers, young people, and community leaders.

May Day 2017

At the same time, however, a separate May Day demonstration led by Red Guards Austin (RGA) was beset by several dozen fascist thugs from around the state, having found our demonstration too large to take on. With the compliance of Austin Police they surrounded RGA and their allies, capturing one of their red flags and assaulting members. ASC members put word out on social media seeking reinforcements, and SMSC comrades sought to intervene at one point to no avail. Ultimately RGA members were able to escape, but quickly lashed out against us as having abandoned them, in effect blaming us for their disastrous deployment.

Prior to this ASC and RGA were able to collaborate effectively at key points despite mutual suspicion. After May Day, however, we exchanged polemics and it became impossible to communicate as RGA accused ASC members of police collaboration, fascist sympathies, and on at least one occasion threatened a former member out of a (false) conviction they had leaked information about RGA. A rare moment of polite comradeship occurred in June when an ASC member re-captured the RGA allies’ stolen flag at a fascist-led “March Against Sharia,” and we were able to return it.

Over the course of the Summer and Fall of 2017 the same patterns held — FF15 actions, including an abortive effort to organize a mass membership “Workers’ Organizing Committee,” ad hoc study programs, branch meetings and internal bureaucratic debates, and occasional attendance at protests. The Collective, astonishingly, began yet another reorganization of its structure, and a number of Steering Committee members dropped out of the organization precipitously, moved out of Austin, or burned out on leadership work. This prompted election of the third Steering Committee in a year. Later a fourth formed before the organization reached its second birthday.

On Labor Day 2017 the group’s focus finally came together on a single campaign — an effort to secure a city ordinance mandating paid sick leave for all employees in Austin. ASC did not found this effort — the office of a left liberal city council member did — and our involvement was mediated through FF15. We undertook an ambitious shop-to-shop “blitz” organizing effort which struck up numerous conversations with fast food and low wage workers, signing on their support for the campaign. The plan for following up with these workers, however, was disorganized, and in the end none of them ever engaged in the formal policy-making process.

Around this same time — in September 2017 — a founding SMSC member was expelled for inappropriate and abusive behavior. Other SMSC leaders — mostly men, but not exclusively — enabled and defended his behavior and adopted reactionary attitudes towards the controversy, deepening divisions, and ultimately leading to the collapse of SMSC. Today only a very small number of San Marcos activists remain engaged, mostly in other outside efforts.

Back in Austin in that same month an area liberal labor activist drafted a letter to a leading ASC activist urging us to liquidate into Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Our Points of Unity should have mandated immediate rejection of any membership in a Democratic Party-affiliated formation, but at least two key ASC members began advocating for this path. They pressured other members into attending a DSA meeting, and joined with the national DSA Refoundation effort.

It soon became clear to other members that much of ASC’s work was shared by and being made redundant by DSA, and that DSA was doing it with more members and greater resources. As ASC’s main FF15 activists thus shifted their efforts to DSA and remaining Collective members questioned the wisdom of expending effort on a liberal reformist effort like the Paid Sick Days campaign the Collective found itself without guidance and neglecting fundamental tasks.

The Austin City Council did ultimately pass the Paid Sick Leave ordinance in February 2018, but by that point ASC was not only not especially engaged in that campaign, it was questioning engagement in reformist, liberal union-backed campaigns of any sort. Following conversations with communist leaders in other parts of the country the Collective decided to take a different course and “reboot,” rectifying its pervasive, liberal errors. This process was formally adopted in February 2018, commencing with this summation you read today.

We do this rectification work — as opposed to a simple disbanding of the organization — because the liberal opportunism of groups to our right and reckless adventurism to our “left” leaves an acute need for genuinely communist politics. It is our hope that by being frank about our failures we can strike forth a path that will lead not only to success, but to the ultimate victory — a victory over capitalism itself. What follows are self-critiques of some of the key mistakes we’ve identified over the course of this brief history.

Lack of Strategy and Decision-Making

ASC abandoned the only measurable goals ever adopted by the organization without ever adopting a strategy for accomplishing them, and we never undertook any thoroughgoing assessment of our present conjuncture. A strategy entails clear objectives and honest assessment of conditions to determine the tactics most likely to lead to success. We took no progress towards any of these in two years.

In place of clear and immediate objectives the Collective had vague, ideal “goals” that were repeatedly invoked by leading members as a stand in for strategy. Namely, the organization spoke often of the need for a “workers party,” but never defined what exactly this meant. Was this an electoral party or a Leninist “party of a new type,” was ASC the party-to-be or are we a pre-party formation of some sort, was this party to be local to Austin or statewide or national or international, or what? And is this to be a “labor” party of undifferentiated masses of non-managerial workers or a proletarian party led by the totally dispossessed elements of the productive class?

It was taken for granted that anything that attracted any workers and organized them in some way contributed to this implicit strategy, but beyond that very broad standard there was no specific vision to work towards concretely.

ASC instead adopted a culture of what we can call “do-work-ism” that discouraged members from confronting our strategic failures. Members questioning these shortcomings were often met with a sort of order to “do the work” — to invest more in the specific projects at hand. The leading elements of the organization would question how much the concerned comrade had spent doing blitzes or calling workers or doing “one-on-one” follow ups, suggesting that a lack of practical work was the real problem. That this work had no clear end in sight was never really addressed.

Ultimately this lack of strategy and the judgmental culture of busy-work led to burnout and persistent confusion about what people should be doing with their time. If members didn’t fit well with “the work” it was rarely clear what they could do instead because we had no objectives for them to help us reach through some other means. They would either do nothing, take up some other unrelated project that might attract a few other members for a little while, or they would busy themselves with bureaucratic tasks like endless debate about the organization’s structure.

With no clear goals we could not assess the value of one decision over another, and our “work” ended up being liberal projects that others were working on too, so it became very easy for opportunists in our midst to simply jump ship for those other organizations. They already had strategies — namely collaboration with imperialist political parties.

Moving forward ASC has already decided definitevely to continue as a cadre organization with a small but growing group of dedicated revolutionaries engaged in organizing, study, and training that will each have clear objectives, each path chosen with regard to our material conditions. We will be adopting clear strategies and empowering leaders to make simple decisions and holding ourselves accountable for completing them all in a timely fashion.

The relationship between ASC and Fight for $15

Our relationship with FF15 structured the practice of ASC in at least three ways: first, it acted as a guiding presence relieving us of the need for strategic thinking beyond the immediate horizons of FF15 (which itself lacked a clear strategy for Texas). Second, ASC imported the tactics and methods of FF15, with limited success. Third, it depended crucially on one organizer being the mediator between ASC and FF15, placing that individual in what amounted to a sole leadership position, with severely negative consequences.

In Texas (or in any state in the South), a minimum wage/labor campaign faces unfriendly legislatures and courts, virtually unchallenged capitalist dominance of the daily life, and vehemently anti-labor legal regimes. This combination of factors reduced the prospects of FF15 to short-term localism: shop-to-shop work, passing of city ordinances, and protests at the state legislature. Any long term prospects — for instance, calls for a national fast food workers’ union that ultimately went nowhere — turned out to be chimeric. This ‘strategy,’ or lack thereof, was replicated by ASC, a nominally revolutionary organization that settled for carrying water for a lethargic and severely underfunded campaign that was doomed from the start in Texas.

Furthermore, FF15’s main tactics of ‘blitzing’ of fast food businesses, ‘follow-up meetings’ to bring the workers around to protest actions, and integration into wider political work were unsuited for ASC. Integrating the workers into political work (and presumably into the organization itself) in particular rarely — if ever — happened. Evaluating these efforts, on which a lot of energy was spent, is nearly impossible: evaluation of particular tactical decisions can only be meaningful in the context of some concrete goal.

Finally to this point, having an organizer employed by FF15 as a leading ASC member on the one hand gave guidance to the organization and put it in touch with a wider labor movement, but it also subverted the Collective’s pretenses to democracy. The organizer in question was vested with too much power and influence, and once they left, we were left without clear direction, our present state.

Holding to Cabral’s dictum of telling no lies and claiming no easy victories, we should entertain no illusions about our work with FF15. ASC could only be in an inferior position with an organization as big as the SEIU; our strategic vision was severely impaired by this position of inferiority, and our tactical/democratic practice suffered accordingly. To avoid these mistakes moving forward we should eschew any collaboration with a larger organization on conditions other than full independence, and seek our own, original organizing projects in the immediate term, approaching these new projects with a clear strategic vision in mind.

Uneven Direct Action Involvement

Aside from FF15, most of the rest of our “work” outside the organization was rooted in direct action organizing. We have demonstrated a real ability to mobilize people to demonstrations on short notice. For example, a well-executed demonstration against American imperialism was planned and promoted within hours of Donald Trump’s missile strikes against Syria in April 2017. At the protest itself, tactics we used tactics developed by local youth protests to snarl traffic, and confronted racist interlopers and forced them to leave.

In demonstrations we did not solely organize, we had a good track record of thoroughly investigating the conditions before committing to participation, taking seriously the maxims: “fight no battle unprepared, fight no battle you are not sure of winning.” Those demonstrations in which ASC members took a leading role in were, on average, better planned and better executed than those from which we were absent.

We have not attached our name to demonstrations that seemed lax in their work, planning and mobilization. More importantly, we did not encourage people to enter into dangerous situations with less than competent leadership. Still, these standards were not formalized in any way and without any internal strategy or concerted dedication of resources we likely missed numerous opportunities to improve demonstrations in ways that would have shored up our leadership in local direct action movements and benefitted the left more broadly.

One additional, persistent limitation is a rather liberal approach to internal mobilization. Members were at times given too much leeway to arrive and leave at their own convenience, without being assigned specific roles and responsibilities. As with many skills and abilities in our organization, confidence in confrontational situations has been unevenly developed — particularly along gender lines. This, again, is symptomatic of an individualistic, casual mindset that perpetuates patriarchy and which must be eradicated from the organization.

Moving forward ASC will have substantial need for internal investigation and debate about what role we will continue to play in efforts such as these. Generally speaking our experience with liberal demonstrations such as One Resistance and the May Day efforts we took up conflicts with the visions we hold for independent communist organizing work. Antifascist efforts, on the other hand, are increasingly urgent, and there is a void in leadership for this struggle in Austin. ASC will need to weigh carefully what sort of role we can play in rectifying this challenge too.

ASC’s Branch and Leadership Structure

Finally, most of the rest of ASC’s work was done at the branch level, where branches varied widely in size and commitment. At these meetings, members worked through the reading material — initially in the handbook, but later from a variety of unplanned sources — and provided input on actions/organizational activities to branch secretaries.

Branch secretaries acted as meeting facilitators and as gatekeepers between the Steering Committee and the rank and file — a structure that was intended to extend democratic engagement but which blunted it instead. Members had little insight into how other branches conducted their meetings or into the decision-making process that occurred during leadership meetings.

Because of these barriers, it was difficult for rank-and-file members to have visibility into which tactics, strategies, and tendencies were favored by the organization as a whole. Instead, we used our Points of Unity as a vague ideological anchor, while receiving a slow trickle of information from the Steering Committee, discussions on social media, and proposal drafts. This along with the “do-work-ism” of FF15 efforts likely obscured the strategic aimlessness of the Collective generally.

With such anti-democratic tendencies festering within the Collective, tensions often boiled over at General Body Meetings and in internal online forums, with long-harbored suspicions between members expressed in unprincipled ways. Adoption of “Community Values” rooted in the need for members to act in good faith represented a positive step, but it also papered over the systemic problems and a lack of communication that contributed to the interpersonal conflicts.

Adopting a cadre model is another step toward improving intra-organizational communication, which will eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy while increasing transparency. In other words, a small but committed group of revolutionaries is much more conducive to democratic decision making than a large, compartmentalized membership. It is also critical that we maintain efficient lines of communication, especially when a new political development or event requires a fast response. These lines should not be limited to social media posts or brief meeting notes, but should include direct phone calls. If we grow as an organization, it may even be worthwhile to discuss the implementation of a formal phone tree.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

If there is one thread connecting all of the errors we have identified, it is an insufficient resistance to liberalism. Liberalism’s hegemony in this conjuncture means that we will reproduce this ideology without realizing it unless we take extraordinary steps to avoid doing so. Casual attitudes to study, organizing, and other political activity will almost always be sucked back down the liberal gravity well — only firm discipline will ensure our fitness for the basic revolutionary tasks of our time.

ASC misapprehended its ability to collaborate in liberal campaigns and maintain independence from their ideology. After this initial error likewise liberal pretensions towards “pragmatism” accelerated our decline. Legitimate militants in our midst were marginalized or abandoned the Collective altogether, while opportunists took advantage. Now that those elements have been removed ASC is in a position to rectify our practice so that Austin may finally have a legitimate, capable, healthy revolutionary formation at work.

The lessons: follow the path blazed by the most successful and visionary communist revolutionaries of our past and adopt a cadre form. By this we mean that ASC will at this point only consist of committed revolutionaries, those willing to dedicate their lives to nearly full-time tasks of study, training, and organizing. These cadre as ASC will take up the work — not just dissociated projects benefiting reformist bureaucracies, but strategic organizing of mass struggles, concerted study, and training — with the total dedication demanded of real revolutionaries. We will seek first independence and unity, and hold ourselves accountable to the commitments we make to ourselves and to the proletariat we seek to empower and ultimately serve.

In short: tell no lies, claim no easy victories.

Until this victory, always!

Austin Roc

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