[The task of political education is to provide a grounding and the
dynamics and strategy of building a larger front.]
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DSA CO-FOUNDERS: ORGANIZERS NEED BETTER POLITICAL EDUCATION  
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Chris Riddiough
May 29, 2022
Democratic Left Blog
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_ The task of political education is to provide a grounding and the
dynamics and strategy of building a larger front. _

, Photo: Tara Winstead via pexels.com

 

_In February of 1982, members of the New American Movement (NAM) and
the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) met in Detroit to
join together as DSA. Democratic Left spoke with two of the key
players in effecting the merger: Richard Healey (RH) of NAM and Jack
Clark (JC) of DSOC. (Further excerpts from this interview that discuss
the origins of DSA appears in the Spring 2022 issue Democratic
Left [link removed]-…
[[link removed]])._

DL: Richard, you mentioned political education. How did things
develop in terms of political education after the merger? And what are
the things that we can do now with 90,000 members? How do we raise
these issues and ideas with them?

RH:  You know, Chris it would be interesting to know more about the
micro level analysis of DSA and the 80s. The thing I thought that I
did best as a leader was promote the socialist schools. A lot of our
chapters had socialist schools and, in many places, played very active
roles in the community and with activist groups, particularly around
women’s organizing and reproductive rights. So, there was a
relationship between theory and practice. We did better than we had
any reason to expect, but that slowly died through the 80s. And I
don’t think any one person was to blame for it. 

It’s just that the continuing assault of neoliberalism/Reaganism
with defeat after  defeat had terrible consequences. You pay not only
the direct price, you pay endless indirect prices for defeat including
increasing marginalization. So even though there were some  hugely
important struggles in that period, as the political agenda in this
country kept moving to the right, the Democratic Party inexorably
continued to go in that direction. So, I think that you had a draining
of energy resources. Slowly, in DSA, the socialist schools and
internal political education dwindled.

If there’s any one thing that DSA could do today to move forward
it’s on this question of political education. But you have to be
very careful what you mean by it. That is to say, if it means a study
of  _Capital_ or _State and Revolution_, then I would vote against
it frankly. If someone wants to go read that stuff, God bless them.
But what we need today is strategy. We need political education on the
strategy, on the political economy and the political dynamics, on the
United States and the history of left organizing. Those are the topics
that seem to be absolutely crucial..

Then there’s the endless temptation to dislike the people just to
your right, this is always the great temptation of the Left. From
every friend of mine that I know, every group I’m involved in,
there’s some chatter about a United Front, except that most of them
don’t act like it. They talk about it, but they don’t actually
want to deal with people toward the center.

The task of political education is to provide a grounding and the
dynamics and strategy of building a larger front. this. How do you do
it state by state? How do you build a left-center coalition that
elects good people to the state legislatures, the cities, and most
important, the Congress.

JC:  I want to tag on that, I’m going to go into some history
that’s a bit after the merger. The Clinton administration ended up
being a disaster for us and contributed to a formalization of
neoliberalism. Take someone who I’ll just refer to as a Clinton
insider, who is now back in DSA. He was ruminating and saying, if you
look back at the beginning of the Clinton administration, the two big
initiatives that they had on the table at the start of the
administration were universal health care and NAFTA [North American
Free Trade Agreement]. If the order in which the Clinton
administration put these two forward had been reversed, U.S. politics
would be very different today. Since they made NAFTA a priority, you
ended up with the top leaders, the top lobbyists and leaders of
capital, in and out of the White House, and  in and out of the top of
Democratic circles [getting what they wanted]. And then, when
healthcare came along, they no longer had any reason to play with the
administration. If NAFTA had been up there as a
carrot AFTER healthcare, you probably would have split some of the
business coalition.

We need to recognize that members of the Congressional Progressive
Caucus are our people right now. We need to figure out how we work
with people like that, how we strengthen their hand. If you’re
talking about a United Front, that United Front is going to need to be
broad enough to include a lot of pretty conservative Democrats,
because the stakes here aren’t just national health insurance at
this point. The stakes here are will a small ‘r’ republican form
of government survive? And that’s a very uncertain question.

And yet, some people say, “We need to purge this or that centrist
Democrat” even in the middle of this discussion about the United
Front. That’s the opposite of the United Front. We need to figure
out the broadest kind of coalition to win whatever we can win and turn
back some very threatening forces that could make things make things a
lot worse than Nixon and Reagan ever dreamed of.

DL:  What kind of education is feasible to do? And how do we make it
happen?

JC:  One point on this. If you want to start with Marx read
the Manifesto
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was really clear that with every gain of the working class, we need to
be deeply involved in every struggle. It’s in many ways a very
practical, strategic document.

RH:  I think the essential thing is that the endpoint of political
education should be how do we understand the nature of power and
social change in the United States. There has been a failure of
Marxist predictions about a coherent working class and the cleavage
being the working class versus the ruling class. That cleavage is not
the predominant thing. In fact, the diversity of groupings in the
working class means there are different interests or different
concerns. The question is, how do you operate in that picture, not at
the level of abstraction of _Capital_, which is at the highest level
of abstraction possible. And a crucial endpoint would be understanding
that every big goal has innumerable steps to get there.

We must understand that the U.S. temptation of saying, ‘Oh, we have
a goal, let’s go for it and forget everything in between’ is a
disaster. How do you take every step forward, every reform as a
possibility of going further, as a stepping stone to something more?
So, the case study would be Medicare for All with the negative example
being the attack on Elizabeth Warren for saying it might take steps to
get there. Elizabeth was correct. The people who denounced her were
exactly what’s wrong with the Left because too many on the Left
don’t understand how politics works, don’t understand how power
works. So, we need a power analysis strategy. There is this classic
notion of the indirect attack, you can’t get there directly, you
don’t have the power to do it. If you try, they will defeat you. You
have to ask how to approach the situation and build your strength?
Those are the crucial things for political education today. The
question is, how does social change in this country work? What does it
take? And what’s a power analysis? The crucial thing is to start
with the question of U.S. dynamics.

JC:  If we look at Marx’s prediction about the grip of capital and
the theme of the internationality of the working class and that
we’re in the final conflict, that’s not where we are. And
there’s some sense about the way people talk about it and DSA that
we’re all working class, in the sense that very few of us  own the
means of production. I guess that’s true. But the diversity of class
formation and the divisions and different interests and the
divergences within the working class are extremely important. And if
you’re going to have a strategy discussion, one of the things you
need is a better understanding of that. And have some humility about
the fact that, yeah, by any measure, the white working class is on the
other side from us right now. And we can’t win without winning at
least some of them back. How do we talk about issues with the white
working class? It doesn’t mean selling out on feminism or race or
anything like that. But it does mean trying to figure out the pain and
the dislocation. Community organizers have done some of this work, but
there needs to be a lot more direct engagement with people who
aren’t on our side right now, but need to be

RH:   As part of the Grassroots Policy Project
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I helped promote the term racial capitalism. The role that DSA could
play, that I would love to see it play in the current period, would be
how to actually make sure the capitalism part of that is understood as
well as the racial part. In this period, everything becomes about race
and de facto class tends to get left out in any serious sense. There
are good and valid reasons for why it has happened. But it is a
one-sided analysis of race and class. DSA is a socialist organization
and could help redress that balance. As Jack just said, the working
class is still majority white, the electorate is a majority white. 

JC:  I’d go back to what Richard said about how it’s imperative
that we connect ourselves to larger forces. And that we’re part of
those fights that are central to the working class. If you want to
cite Marx, you can take the chapter in _Capital_ about the fight for
the 10-hour day, which Marx called the essential political economy of
the working class. But there really is that imperative that when the
working class is in motion, any victory it can get is liberating and
advances us, but every defeat is going to isolate us. And I think the
membership we have is young, inexperienced, and hasn’t had the
political education to understand all of that. And it concerns me. We
need a large group of people who are willing to dig in for the long
haul. And obviously, we’ve all done that. And we don’t want to get
back to having groups that can meet in our living rooms, but we need
people who really understand that this is a long struggle, there are
going to be some serious defeats, and we need to position ourselves to
be there for the victories.

_Chris Riddiough is a member of Metro DC DSA and a founding member of
national DSA. She _served on the National Interim Committee of NAM
and _has been active in the socialist feminist movement for 50
years.  Chris is currently a member of the Democratic Left editorial
team._

* Democratic Socialist of America
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* political education
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