You Can’t Have a Strategy Without Priorities
By: Ryan Mosgrove
Tags: Dsa, Politics, Labor, Dsa Convention

Photo: Sanitation workers strike supporters marching in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, March 28, 1970

This piece was originally published in The Organizer.

Both Collective Power Network (CPN) and Bread & Roses Caucus (B&R) have presented labor resolutions for the 2019 DSA convention, Resolution 3 and Resolution 32 respectively. Both of these proposals demonstrate divergent approaches to how labor power can be built upon and grown to carry us forward into the next exciting stage of struggle. But how do these proposals relate to our work in the labor movement? How politically do they differ? And what specific goals make these proposals not just ideas or tactics, but a strategy?

It’s important to keep in mind the context of what exactly we will be deciding in Atlanta. Specifically, the convention has authority over the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission (DSLC), the body that connects Locals and national around labor work and pursues a range of national goals set by the convention.

The CPN proposal directs the DSLC to meet a set of very specific objectives. First, we propose that the DSLC “focus its activity on supporting the development of chapter-level labor formations made up of workers, regardless of the unionization status of their workplace.” In the tradition of the best methods of socialists in labor historically, our proposal is geared toward building the power of Locals to carry out and direct this work based on local conditions and by building its organizing capacity among all of its worker-members. Alternatively, B&R proposes that the DSLC should “focus on pursuing the rank and file strategy” as its core objective. But what does B&R mean when they say they want to “focus on the rank and file strategy”?

In a recent article in the Call, Barry Eidlin attempts to flesh out the rank-and-file strategy (RFS) and relate it to the broader desire among socialists for new labor organizing. However it’s apparent early on in his piece that Eidlin finds it difficult to relate B&R’s proposal to this broader goal, and ultimately he finds no direct way to carry out this work while holding fast the tenets of the RFS. Indeed, we are meant to believe that no such direct route for socialist and new organizing even exists.

Eidlin’s case for RFS suffers generally from failing to commit to a clear definition for what exactly the rank-and-file strategy is intended to mean. While he claims the aim is to “build the link between the Left and the working class, with the specific goal of identifying, developing, and expanding the layer of workplace leaders who are primed to fight the boss” — a valid if broad goal to be sure — Eidlin’s piece can’t seem to commit to whether this means just within the “small minority of already-union workers,” as he asserts in some places, or if this means workers in all workplaces everywhere generally.

Bread & Roses seems to be grappling with the apparent tension between the RFS and the obvious need for new organizing. Eidlin attempts to resolve this tension in a few ways. Moving the goalposts, Eidlin tries to re-frame the RFS’s focus on internal union work as itself somehow also organizing the unorganized. When discussing the recent teachers strike wave he states that “these efforts were all instances of organizing the unorganized, since most existing union members in these cities and states were not meaningfully participating in their unions before these reform campaigns and strikes. There’s a difference between being unionized and being organized.”

On this last point we would absolutely agree. There is a difference between the two, and we believe DSA’s focus should be on the latter. Instead of limiting our work to one approach by supporting just a handful of members in a handful of trades, CPN’s proposal instead focuses the DSLC on a set of precise goals that will go the furthest to build the power of Locals everywhere to engage in our critical task of building labor broadly.

This method, while focused in terms of how the DSLC’s work should look, lets Locals set the tone of how they balance their work inside and outside unions. CPN makes no claim that we can predict beforehand what approaches and tactics will be effective in every case. What we do assert however is that our work requires clear goals set for both the national and Locals that can allow us to flesh out these questions, adapting our approach over time, and engaging across regions so that a clearer overall orientation to these complex questions can be built, always on the basis of concrete work and experiences.

By contrast, based on Eidlin’s description of what RFS has looked like historically, the B&R proposal sees these complex questions as only too simple. According to Eidlin RFS means “getting rank and file jobs in unionized workplaces, forming and joining reform caucuses to win leadership in and transform existing unions, and building rank and file cross-union education and organizing networks such as Labor Notes.” The payoff to this approach for Eidlin is the possibility of electing reform leaders who in the past “have created openings for union staff to help develop workplace leaders,” though Eidlin admits attempts at this approach historically “have yielded mixed results.”

If B&R believes Eidlin’s description is somehow an unfair summary of what their proposed “focus on pursuing the rank and file strategy” means, then it’s at best unclear how their approach could mean one thing in practice but would somehow mean something else if it were established as focus of the DSLC as their proposal would do.

Here both Eidlin and B&R begin to show how limited and out of touch their whole approach really is. When the RFS was first codified in 2000, the socialist left was a small, isolated, embattled network of small sects, operating exclusively in large urban centers and topping out at maybe a hundred members in total nationally. The might of the labor movement was still in the throes of a historic decline. Strikes were at a historic ebb, and socialists mostly encompassed small grouplets operating on the fringes of a progressive movement moving further and further away from them towards the center-right.

In this context the RFS makes a bit more sense, indeed it even begins to look more like a strategy. Since majoritarian politics were totally off the table, focusing instead on creating a “militant minority” became the more attractive option. With only 100 members in the entire country, it made sense to try and convince them to stop whatever they were doing to go become a teacher or a nurse. If it meant the life or death of your entire organization to try and secure even just one leadership seat in a single local union, such a laser-focus on the success of one tactic seems reasonable even.

But this is not the situation we are in today, not even close to it. Ignoring the titanic shifts of the last twenty years Bread & Roses points backwards; not to a time when the left was its strongest, its most dynamic, robust and diverse, but instead to when it was it’s most marginal, weakest, handcuffed and at the mercy of political currents it had no weight to affect. To superimpose the left of the 90s onto the DSA of today is like comparing a box fan to a hurricane.

But Eidlin’s piece reaffirms yet another article of faith of the RFS in the quite bold claim that any new organizing “will almost certainly emerge from already-existing [unions]”, to support his view that capturing the leadership of existing unions is a precondition for socialists to initiate any new organizing of any significance. To support this claim he cites a smattering of historical examples such as the Western Federation of Miners and the United Miners Union with no real attempt made to explain how these examples relate to the RFS or even each other.

But if we consider even a small measure of context for these periods we see that the titanic upsurge in union activity — namely in the first four decades of the 20th century — had very little to do with socialists somehow focusing strictly on parachuting into existing unions or by getting staff jobs. Indeed much the opposite. Organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and later the Communist Party, which inherited many of the best organizers of the IWW, developed their approach in the context of a labor landscape dominated by the narrow trade focus of organizations like the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

The Communist Party in particular developed a comprehensive approach to labor that stood in stark contrast to the AFL’s narrow focus, one that would embrace both the masses of workers in new but unorganized industries as well as maintain an orientation toward the existing movement within unions that both connected to the subjective task of building their ranks.

A contemporary perspective gives us a particularly meaningful insight into this approach. Alongside this article the Organizer is republishing “Party Industrial Methods and Structure” written in 1925 by William Z. Foster, then chairman of the Communist Party of America (CPA), which we feel adds important context to the period which Eidlin in his piece makes reference to but fails to develop in any meaningful way.

The period during which Party Industrial Methods and Structure was written marks the opening of one of the most successful times for socialists in labor. It was the era of the Trade Union Education League (TUEL), an organization to which specific reference was made in the resolution which founded the DSLC in 2017.

Here Foster lays out an approach which at its core focuses on the capacity of the organization itself to engage its members in shop organizing and anchor them to the living movement of workers. Though Foster wrote this piece at a time of isolation for the CPA, the methods he lays out ultimately helped propel a period of massive upsurge in both new organizing and strikes, which only now are we seeing the like of again.

Foster points to four distinct layers to the CPA approach to labor, all with both a clear strategic and organizational edge: the shop nuclei (or shop committee), the party labor fraction, the Trade Union Education League, and the progressive bloc. The first two represent internal approaches within the party itself, while the latter represent external formations that the party sought to interact with and operate within.

For the CPA the shop committee was the foundation of this approach. It comprised any group of party members within a workplace that would meet regularly to discuss workplace issues and actively relate those issues to agitation and organizing among their fellow workers. These committees could be based on the workplace, but for larger units would be broken up into departments, shifts, etc. They were not supposed to be big, but instead tightly focused on the issues directly facing workers they interacted with on the floor, and provided crucial space for members to decide how to organize around things their co-workers really cared about, irrespective of whether their workplace had a union or not.

The party labor fraction gave another level of structure and focus to the CPA’s work. This was simply a body of CPA members within a union local, a central labor council, a national union, etc. Similar to the shop committee, it offered a vehicle for socialists to coordinate their activity so that it worked toward common goals to raise issues commonly held among workers in their unions. Without this explicit organizational space it’s hard to see how socialists could have had any coherent approach to their work within unions in this period.

TUEL and the progressive bloc served similar but distinct functions. TUEL was a formal organization of left-wing trade unionists, separate from the party that was open to everyone, but heavily in the CPA’s political orbit. The progressive bloc was more conceptual, representing a broader wing within labor nationally that the CPA could operate within while avoiding the trap of divorcing their labor approach to movements on the left more broadly. As a political project TUEL ended up being very successful in pushing the labor movement toward its goal of breaking from the narrow trade focus of the AFL and toward what they called “amalgamation”, building off the IWW’s earlier vision of “one big union”.

The industrial methods CPA pursued hinged everything on making the CPA a real workers organization. All questions of strategy and approach rested on the precondition that their organization could become a vehicle for workers themselves to organize and to translate the issues they were facing into a real political program of action. From that starting point, larger questions (such as union caucuses, broad left labor formations, and internal blocs contesting leadership) would be considered not as theoretical concepts in search of shortcuts and “militant minorities”, but on the basis of real credibility among their fellow workers built on the back of proven victories.

The CPA approach in this period was not perfect, and was of course grounded to the conditions of its time, and we should table any notion that the CPA should or could be replicated wholesale out of the mists of time. But of course no strategy is ever perfect, nor can any strategy allow us to dictate the context we work in. But that method or strategy is sound which gives an organization the widest range of motion, the greatest command over the field they’re operating on, and brings us always closer to workers themselves, always learning from and supporting their struggles, their hopes, their highest ambitions.

To be sure, Eidlin and B&R could come forward with any number of arguments where the RFS actually means something totally different to what they’ve argued in the Call, their proposal, and elsewhere. As we’ve already mentioned, for Eidlin and B&R the RFS can be generalized to such a degree as to really mean anywhere socialists are working to “build the link between the Left and the working class” when it suits the rhetorical needs of the moment. Organizing the unorganized can even become its opposite, since for B&R, “There’s a difference between being unionized and being organized,” making internal union work and organizing the unorganized, for them at least, one and the same.

But as hard as Eidlin and B&R may attempt, a strategy cannot be both one specific thing and at the same time also everything. A workable strategy, especially for an organization as large as DSA, has to be weighed in terms of its focus and trade-offs, the priorities and sacrifices it advocates as necessary to achieve its goals. In the final analysis this question comes down how we leverage our existing resources to marshal the sharpest point of attack in our war on capital. If a strategy can’t explain directly how it answers these very basic questions, in what respect can it be called a strategy?

While the B&R proposal lacks even these basic features, CPN proposes that DSA take an approach that gives focus to the national level role of the DSLC and accounts for flexibility and dynamism at the grassroots. It doesn’t close off Locals from carrying out an approach such as orienting heavily toward existing unions where they consider that work to be strategic.

Whereas the B&R proposal seeks to wed the DSLC to a strategy they’ve been unable to flesh out, the CPN proposal aims at setting the DSLC to the very specific tasks of member-worker education, building local labor networks, and getting its own house in order in a way that would anchor it to the work of the whole membership. But we are also sober that there would be trade-offs. The DSLC could no longer substitute itself to make up the deficit of local labor branches, and its work would be focused on building those local level networks as an essential precondition for socialist labor work of any real consistency; even when this investment would mean missing opportunities in the short term. But we believe it is exactly this clarity about priorities, focus, and trade-offs that make the CPN proposal the strongest and most comprehensive for strategy for socialist labor being brought to Atlanta.

But ultimately it will be up to the membership themselves to decide which approach will best serve their work in the coming years. Their choice will be between a DSLC that facilitates living connections between the organization and worker-members at large, or one that is simply informing members how they can participate in an already established plan. CPN looks forward to this debate, as it will be essential to the serious work to come.