’69 Was a Nice Year
North Stars, New Foundations, and Never Reading
Part Two of our Sleep Deprived Pseudo-Revisionist “Retrospective” About the Past Repeating Itself, But Worse. See the First One, Here.
Note: Unlike many of our other pieces, this is blatant, unapologetic, pseudo-revisionist speculation on the author’s part, based on cursory research and their feel of DSA over these past two years. Take it as “opinion”, as a sort of non-Newtonian news, as a facet of a larger picture and lens through which to view the DSA’s weirdly mirroring, but darker, structures. This is stream of consciousness, almost gonzo-polemic. It covers things rarely talked about, written by people too exhausted to give you more than links and the hook to get you going. Its rambling and unrewarding so buckle the fuck up.
Consider this equivalent to a rambling twitter thread. A three page long shitpost. Not to be used as anything near a primary source.
Most sources are from the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism, which followed the 1965–1975 left pretty closely and is full of presumably primary documents. Who really knows tho, the transcriber is really bad and in two documents transcribes ‘in’ as ‘la’.
This post brought to you by: DSA North Star: Finally, A Caucus For the Problems of the Global Northwest.
Thanks, North Star, for Reminding Me I Have A Series To Write.
The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, and we are only the thread of the Pattern.
Northstar has been mis-using DSA resources to promote its caucus (Think of the uproar if LSC or Refoundation were to use the labor list, electoral list, etc to promote theirs!), using official mailing lists to disseminate and discuss their caucus positions. An interesting point was made in one of the emails, however, and it relates to our previous piece in this series.
They bring up the idea that the ’69 (nice) SDS convention (And all the other things around that year) is repeating itself. How fitting! The 50th anniversary, to be the same as that momentous occasion. I agree, we, the DSA gestalt and unaffiliated readers, are repeating the mistakes of the left in 1969 (nice), especially the SDS convention. But not in the way the poster is saying. I’m not going into other North Star thoughts in this piece, but I think this is something worth talking about
The poster defines the four core positions, or ‘tendencies’[1], within DSA.
- Momentum, envisioning DSA as a nucleus of a mass socialist party
- Praxis, envisioning DSA as an incubator of enlightened organizers
- Refoundation, envisioning DSA as a feast for parasites playacting hyper-revolutionaries
- North Star, envisioning DSA as one player in the broader movement against trump
I’d like to first point out how wrong each of these are.
- Momentum is largely electoral-reformist, as much as they claim to be non-reformist reformists. Their political nucleus is around essentially the Jacobin editorial team and their friends, and the rest form around that. They have little political ideology other than that of the celebrities which bring them support (Jeremy Gong, Micah Uetricht, Megan Day, Bhaskar Sunkara, etc.) They believe that revolution comes through a mass movement with wide appeal (they cite things like M4A), and through that a party, but their articulation of a party is almost always electoral, like the green party but red.
- Praxis is ‘enlightened organizers’ as the core, but they hardly seem to want to incubate them. They want to teach people how to organize, sure, but as far as I can tell thats only because without more organizers who know what they’re doing, we flounder
- Their view of Refoundation is laughably wrong here, speaking both as a member and as someone only recently joined who’s politics aren’t really the Refoundation external stereotype. Refoundation is a group of several tendencies who all think that communism is rad as hell and also a mass revolutionary party of some sort is important to the progression of the left, especially since history (especially 1969(nice)) shows that without overarching support and organization of the working class, we fizzle.
- North Star is the only correct projection here — they do think that the only hope against Trump is a movement broad enough to focus everyone against him into the same fight. I think this is a pretty bad goal for a socialist organization, because progressive orgs are already doing this
Some of this stems from ignorance.
Most of this stems from ghosts of the 1960s, and from COINTELPRO rumors that somehow stick around like used car ghosts flopping in the wind that people keep jousting with, thinking they’re real threats.
They seem to think refoundation are all “pseudo-revolutionaries” of the sort wanting to forcefully grab and steer an org[2]. This is weird, because what I actually see is people from all sorts of ideologies wanting to steer the org in the same way North Star wants to, which is to say be a magnetic pole for people to move towards as they learn more, except refoundation wants to be more hands-off about it than Northstar does.
Anyway, that out of the way, into the meat: We’re making the mistakes of the past, but the mistake of the past is not the radical nature of SDS/the left in ’69(nice). It is not refusing to affiliate with progressive orgs. I would say, from delving down the rabbit hole into the past, that our core problems are twofold. One, we aren’t radical enough and we lack the political education to effectively apply any of it. Two, we are too close to progressive organizations, who can gain followers far easier than we can. Progressive “volunteers”, fungible labor for whatever their org demands, have their labor allocated to progressive projects without removing from other projects, since thats the progressive MO, whereas ours doing their work keeps us from working on projects elsewhere. Why do what other orgs are already doing? We can instead fight struggles that will help those already struggling in our communities, our neighborhoods, our cities. Those let down these past sixty years by “progressive” orgs, front-groups for the democratic party and their capitalist overlords. In microscale, this experiment was already written when the SNCC lost steam after the civil rights movement where they cut their teeth, and eventually merged with the Black Panther Party not only for legitimacy, but for a way forward to focus their energy.
Realignment, a related topic, is the (failed) idea of Harrington (Who DSA has roots in, unfortunately, via DSOC). He posited that we could use forces within the Democratic Party via democratic socialist candidates running on their ticket, to shift the party further left. This didn’t work, as any good dialectical materialist can see, and the democrats have actually had a sort of right realignment. But I think we, devout readers of The National Razor, already knew that.
“But that is the past, why does it matter?” those who are not dialectical materialists will ask. Why does the past matter? Why does anything matter. We must pay attention to the past if we wish to learn from it! You cannot learn from things you do not know. You cannot learn from things you choose to ignore (You can, I hear, learn from the process of disbelieving in things, no shade, but I digress).
I do think that the “lesson”, if you can call it that, of this particular period of the past is that we are not radical enough.
The two (or three, depending on how you look at it) major factions in the 1969(nice) convention were both arguably “Maoist”. “Maoism” in this era is separate from what we now think of Maoism at this point in the present. In the 1930–1960 era, was when Mao was alive and Maoism and the Chinese Communist Revolution, was in the public consciousness. Related to the anti-imperialism of Maoism at the time (and now), one of the biggest fights in 1969(nice) was against the war in Vietnam by the US, of which almost all of SDS was for supporting the NLF (The communist liberation army of Vietnam). I’m not going into Maoism anymore, because no matter how I describe it it will exclude half of the people who use Maoist as a lable.
One of the splits, and the one I think North Star are talking about fearing repeating the mistakes of, was Revolutionary Youth Movement (I) (Maoist), which became Weather Underground. Their want to be ultra-radical but lacking strong theoretical basis for their radicalness, led them to devolve into bombings and attacks without any real mass base of support to speak of. They spoke for, not with, the people they claimed to fight for. They used the language of black liberation and self-defense, and went on the offense, even though it made it harder to involve those not already radical. But strong theoretical basis, and correct application of Dialectical Materialism [3] can let us learn from the past and not make the mistakes of Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Castro, and Dohrn.
The other two, while being Radical Communists(Maoist) themselves, were unable to settle their differences, and both became their own SDS splinters. Instead of working with other left groups, they stubbornly kept insisting each of them was the successor to the New Left. The problem was not that they were too radical, it was that they were too stubborn to change, and lacked the theory to understand why they needed to. Evolve or die. The past repeats itself, like the countless ‘parties’ before it, leading to the same problems. Leading to the same mistaken idea that the proletariat should be led by the hand, instead of coming to a collective decision themselves, once given the context to understand what they were fighting and what they were fighting for.
Other things we’re repeating of the past include issues of race and white radicals often only becoming involved in struggles that affect them, instead of those of the working class more vulnerable than them. They include white radicals speaking over black radicals and other radicals of color. They include men constantly speaking over women about the place of women in the struggle against capitalism, and generally having the women do most of the ‘invisible’ work. They include men getting away with abuse, with harassment, with sexual assault. They include abled radicals speaking over disabled radicals. They include careerism over the greater good, mass reformist struggles that benefit those who push it over actively helping those currently suffering and struggling under capitalism. If you do not have an organization representative of the entire class, how can you say you are acting in their best interest? If you are actively oppressing people, how can you be sure their input is uncensored? We must include everyone, and we must work extremely hard on tearing down the structures that enable it within our orgs so as not to rebuild them in the future.
Riots are the language of the unheard.
Targeted attacks are the language of those who feel there are no options left. We need to start giving people options if we are afraid of the consequences of 1969(nice), not demand everyone does the same thing.
We need to start fixing the mistakes we’ve seen in the past, the racism, the sexism, the misogyny, the ableism, the minor and major anti-queer sentiments, the anti-trans TERF-esque sentiments. Marginalizing some people because you believe their stuff is less important than class struggle you define so nebulously and forget that EVERYONE who is not of the bourgeoisie, or the petite variation, is part of the proletariat. We all know that misogynists are indistinguishable from informants.
DSA is a “big tent” organization. It is largely unprecedented that an org this big can have opinions this wide, and its largest strength in avoiding fizzling or worse. But most of all, it gives direction and moderation to those who would do utterly bonkers, uncritical shit that puts people at risk for no gain outside of radical cred. Radicalism is not a rank of who is most violent, it is far more complex than that, and there are some cases on especially twitter where I am not sure they understand that.
Our biggest boon is how diverse we are. It is time to stop squandering that, not only for the greater good, not only for the future, but for our mutual survival under capitalism.
The Big Tent is, (perhaps ironically because of caucuses like North Star still existing), our secret weapon. Never in the history of the left has this many diverse opinions or tendencies existed for this long together. In my IMHO, and Refoundation’s Points of Unity, I think DSA should work on building the framework to connect the disparate struggles of the proletariat. That means not just those working, but those who can’t work, those who aren’t, those who don’t want to. Those too disabled to work in unaccommodating spaces. Those working in other ways with regard to society, the caregivers, the parents, the friends, the unlicensed psychologists we all know are able to talk people down better than licensed ones, at expense of their own health, because they’ve been there before. It is about connecting the various struggles and showing the way forward that connects them. Thats my articulation of a “mass party”, as much as I hate the inflexibility of overloaded terminology. Not electoral, but revolutionary, evolutionary. An organizing structure that acts not as a dictator, telling people how to do things, but as a lasing chamber, taking all of these disparate struggles in different directions by separate groups and, through deliberation between them, showing how things are connected and where to best apply collective power. I think that North Star should have a democratic voice within whatever organizations do develop, and within our current one. I just think we also need to build a culture such that people know better than to fall for, relative to DSA’s current center, right-reactionary tendencies.
One last thing. We should not get mired in electoralism.
Bernard Sanders was not even a compromise candidate, but one of the bourgeoisie class; not even a class-traitor. He keeps engaging in politics aimed at saving capitalism, life-support for billionaires. In the same vein, Bread and Roses (nee jacobin) and their followers are wolves in sheep’s clothing, talking vitriol about opponents when the doors are closed but acting as self-styled left-populists in public. Electoralism is three steps forward and two steps back every four years, and then nine steps back the next four. Both parties are part of a self-righting system created to enshrine capital.
Bernardine Dohrn was a terrorist, and we should learn from that so we do not have people going down that path. But the biggest mistake other than their tactics, was that they acted without the proletariat behind them. They had confused their friends and followers and acquaintances with the proletarian whole.
You, my friends, should strive to be neither berniebro.
We must learn from the past in our fight for the future. We must also fight. We must speak loudly, and carry a big tent.
I don’t have a soundcloud, but you can support me by voting Erin Fish for DSA National Director in the 2019 National Convention (Its an unelected position so you’ll have to like, write it on the bottom of the ballot or something its ok we can make it work if we work together). I feel that I am more qualified to be DSA’s collective pretend mom than Maria Svart ever has been.
