The “Economic” Is Political
By Zach W
Across DSA, questions of how to organize at points where the working class has the potential to exercise coercive economic power against the capitalist class are taken increasingly seriously.
This is an extraordinarily positive development, after decades of the US Left being unmoored from a clear class basis and analysis. While many comrades acknowledge the centrality of building sufficient working class coercive economic power to defeat the capitalist class, few have sufficiently integrated this knowledge into their practice or theory.
At no point can this question fall by the wayside. As exciting as drafting the perfect program or electing another socialist to office may be, the most well-thought out political program or party platform does not, itself, produce a working class that is more empowered, organized, and capable of acting politically.
However, the election of Zohran Mamdani, followed by further electoral victories in New York City, Washington, DC, and Colorado, has led to DSA becoming the largest socialist organization in US history, showing definitively that DSA’s growth is driven by electoral events that put us in the national spotlight.
So, the fact that nearly every other national caucus in DSA has its eye trained firmly “upwards” on the state and electoral terrain can, to some extent, be forgiven. A huge fraction of the working class in this country understand “politics” and “voting” to be synonymous, and thus tend to think of political organizations like DSA in relation to elections, legislative politics, and the state. If we want DSA to be a mass organization, we have to incorporate these facts into our recruitment and retention strategies.
While elections might be the sort of work that helps us grow fastest, they are not the type of work that most directly increases the power, organization, and self-activity of our class. This is why we in DSA must put a premium on building independent, class-struggle, durable proletarian organizations capable of wielding coercive economic power against the capitalist class. The construction of such collective coercive economic power is not separate from “politics.”
Ultimately, the presence or lack of such power is what will determine whether the politicians we elect, or the programs we draft, stand any chance of accomplishing their stated goals. This argument follows from an analysis of our present moment: After a half-century of relentless neoliberal counter-revolution, the proletariat’s ability to inflict economic pain on the capitalist class has been profoundly weakened in the US.
Building DSA As An Organization of Organizers
By Tiffany B
The injunction to “organize” on the Left has become ubiquitous, even banal. What exactly is meant by “organizing” is extraordinarily nebulous, potentially describing any kind of political work from electoralism to community gardens. The theoretical task of organizers, then, is to turn vague ideas into clear conceptions of action.
Drawing on the Communist Caucus’s thesis of proletarian disorganization, I argue that the primary task of the socialist organizer is to cultivate the agency and collective capacity of our coworkers and neighbors in order to build a militant nucleus of both new and reinvigorated institutions of working-class power. Disorganization is not only understood quantitatively: an Organizer operates under the hypothesis that lived experiences of collectively fighting authority on the terrain of everyday life shifts peoples’ political horizons and engenders a militant class subjectivity that affirms in action that another world is possible.
In this paradigm, the Organizer refuses an overly schematic distinction between the “political” and the “economic,” something transplanted from the early 20th century Russian soil of absolutist monarchism , because, as the sociologist Panagiotis Sotiris says, “there is no purely economic relation of exploitation.” Rather, exploitation itself always requires, and implies, a relationship of domination–even when it is not obviously active within the experience of exploitation, force is always behind the scenes, or waiting patiently off-stage. While the Organizer seeks to leverage worker power–in and out of unions and other formal organizations–for broader social struggles, such as Palestine solidarity, she does so by (to quote Notes from Below’s report on the Autonomous Collective of Dockworkers in Genoa) “tackl[ing] questions of labour and politics in the same manner — as part of the same fight.”
In the two years since this essay’s publication, the two alternate approaches identified — a right opportunism that substitutes even basic forms of class struggle with dedicated cadre politicians advocating on behalf of a disorganized working class, and the left DSA strategy of politics as a programmatic endorsement of revolutionary strategy — have become more sophisticated.
“The Workers Lead, We Support Them”
By Zach Weinstein, Althea Brennan, Joe C
In 2022, members of Communist Caucus in East Bay DSA (EBDSA) asked ourselves a series of questions: How can DSA make a meaningful contribution to building proletarian organization in the East Bay? Why don’t we have much connection to the surge of new union organizing happening locally and nationally? How can our labor work help develop DSA members into organizers?
At that time, the two main ways that an EBDSA member could engage in external-facing labor work were labor solidarity, usually in the form of picket line support for striking local workers, and our chapter jobs program, which helps socialists get jobs in strategic workplaces.
Labor solidarity work was mostly reactive, limiting its ability to develop relationships and organizers. Whether there was meaningful work to do depended on whether a union decided to strike and how long that strike lasted. The jobs program, on the other hand, asked people to change career trajectories, in some cases for low-paying jobs in non-union industries — an important but major “ask” that most DSA members are not going to undertake.
Both of these efforts have yielded impressive successes and will continue to do so. But the East Bay Workplace Organizing Committee, which was founded in the fall of 2022 as part of EBDSA’s Labor Committee, has proven to be a uniquely self-sustaining and successful project among our chapter’s labor efforts.
Theses on Palestine Solidarity
The Al-Aqsa Flood and the subsequent Israeli genocide, which began the fall of 2023, galvanized international and anti-imperialist solidarity across the world, including in the small ranks of the socialist movement in the United States. In those early months especially, members of Communist Caucus came together to discuss how we might leverage our existing organizing – its lessons, our relationships – in a changing context.
Our caucus has long understood the sort of mass work we most prize – rank-and-file action on the job, collective action in the neighborhood, and effective direct action in the streets – to not be a precondition to addressing larger political issues, so much as the means by which we might do so: places where new collectivities are born and a deeper kind of power can be developed. In many respects, our experience of organizing Palestine solidarity actions over the course of the last few years has both confirmed and refined that early hypothesis. In the intervening years, members of the caucus helped organize the only strike for Palestine in the United States; supported and developed the student encampments in spring 2024; helped build out direct action groups and campaigns such as Writers Against the War on Gaza and the boycott of SXSW; developed lasting organizations such as Labor For Palestine; spearheaded massive (and successful!) divestment campaigns in California; supported formations such as Workers in Palestine; contributed to the Pinnacle Tenant Union’s struggle against displacement in Israel and NYC, and much, much more.
Of course, more than two years into the genocide, the limits of what our movements have been able to accomplish are felt acutely, both in Palestine and also around the world, where the impunity of Zionism and American imperialism have emboldened viciously racist and counterrevolutionary forces operating in Minnesota, Venezuela, and elsewhere. We continue to grapple with questions of power and leverage, of fortifying people for fights that can involve severe – and amplifying – legal risks, and of the interplay between large street protests that consolidate common sense and the trench warfare of everyday organization where the needle is moved, albeit in a much more distributed and piecemeal fashion than we often wish.
Still, despite these limits, the sequence of the last few years has encouraged us to continue in the kind of political work we’ve prized and continue to refine and develop. Our early summary of our first conversations after October 7th also provide us with an image of internationalism that does not eschew local struggles, or reduce it to an act of solidarity-statement making or another round of marches and demonstrations. Rather, it is a matter of tangible connections between peoples and struggles, which flow from the kinds of organizing already underway where we live and work. It’s an internationalism that starts at home.
What’s Next For EWOC?
by Paige Gresty and Codi A.
In June 2025, several members of Communist Caucus attended EWOC’s first ever conference in Detroit, MI. Following the conference, we had a caucus debrief of our experiences there. Several attendees reflected on how our experience as EWOC organizers in an EWOC local seemed to be diverging considerably from the expected roles of EWOC organizers as originally conceptualized. This short piece is an attempt to articulate this contradiction, and propose an alternative vision for how EWOC can work.
From its inception, the goal of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) has been simple: Support workers organizing their workplaces, no matter the industry or the prospects for winning a legally recognized union. This simple goal, along with a distributed organizing model that allows for a large degree of freedom for EWOC organizers to flexibly work with shopfloor organizing committees in a variety of different ways, has allowed EWOC to be a vibrant and refreshing presence in the US labor movement, developing organizers and laying the foundation for new worker organizations that continue to go overlooked by most unions in our country. This is also what has made EWOC such an attractive project to our caucus; with the spirit of experimentation and deep, long term development of new working class organizers, EWOC is fertile soil for spadework. This spirit is particularly alive in the EWOC locals, an initiative that was first envisioned and spearheaded by members of Communist Caucus in the years following the pandemic. In the ‘local’ model, groups of five or more EWOC organizers in the same geographic area collaborate to support each other as we support workers, most often with the help of a connected DSA chapter. Having groups of organizers in the same area working with local workers opens up new opportunities for developing organizers and community that are not possible from a national online database.
However, it is from the perspective of our local work that we are starting to identify a limit in EWOC’s organizing model, specifically when campaigns find an established union willing to work with them. The EWOC organizing model, as understood by volunteers and staff, allows international unions to offload responsibility for establishing an organizing committee (OC) or seeding potential organizing leads. EWOC organizers are meant to provide that early mentorship and support, before “handing off” the OC to the union staff organizers once they reach a threshold where the union believes that the shop can win a union recognition campaign. This is representative of the core animating questions of EWOC since our focus expanded beyond supporting workers directly affected by COVID-19, namely “how do we build the capacity to bring in all the people who want to be in a union, into a union?” and relatedly “how do we do that without relying solely on staff?” As detailed in the EWOC Organizer Handbook, EWOC organizers are to help bridge this gap for workers by first helping them develop a strong OC of 10 percent the potential bargaining unit, then help the OC reach out to a union. We help smooth that transition by helping the OC understand the union’s expectations and ask good questions to assess what joining the union would be like.
Once a union has been identified and agrees to organize with the workers, we are expected to only stay involved if the union staff – not the workers on the OC that the organizer has been working with for months or years – agrees to our involvement. Per the handbook (emphasis in the original):
When connecting the OC to a union, the EWOC Organizer will have a conversation with the union about the work that EWOC did to support the organizing up until this point and provide the history of the OC’s organizing. This conversation should make clear that once the connection has been made, EWOC will not try to influence the direction or outcome of the union organizing drive, unless the union asks EWOC to assist in some way. If EWOC has not been asked to assist, then EWOC volunteers will not attempt to continue to guide the campaign. If workers reach out about a challenge navigating the union relationship once the handover has happened please INVOLVE STAFF before attempting to offer advice.
Despite the linear process laid out in the handbook, our work in the local groups has begun to seriously complicate this understanding of the EWOC organizer role, and has naturally led to a schism between the theory of the handbook and the practice of local organizers and EWOC locals.
As EWOC local organizers, we often find it difficult to simply “hand off” a campaign to a staff organizer. Our organizing often comes into conflict with the well-intentioned but ultimately prescriptive sets of steps that the Organizer’s Handbook indicates contain our support. . Our local discussions have recently centered on the frustrations of feeling like we have collaborated with workers in a solidaristic way, building an infrastructure and solidarity that equips workers with tools to see themselves as protagonists, only to find that the unions with which they affiliate can sometimes act as yet another boss, dictating the terms of their strategy, and even at times decimating the size and scope of the bargaining unit. Even worse, when organizing with less union-dense sectors of the working class, particularly in completely unorganized industries, we struggle to find unions even willing to represent workers – paralyzing not only the organizing in the workplace, but also the horizon of dynamism and protagonism inherent to the best parts of the EWOC project. We have described this tendency as “helping workers to get off slippery ice only to get to the shore and be fed into a woodchipper.”
The Southern California and St. Louis EWOC locals have had several cases that provide some insight into these complicated dynamics. We have examples of cases where we essentially “handed off” an OC, examples of staying intimately involved throughout the campaign, and some in between the two poles. We have also begun experimenting with practices and structures that could help EWOC locals stay involved with campaigns without depending solely on the one EWOC organizer assigned to the case carrying all of the relationships and work. And ultimately, we have tried to rethink EWOC as not merely a third party that supports union organization, but instead as a space where workers across shops can provide peer-to-peer mentorship and develop rank-and-file initiatives in our workplaces.
Editorial Statement
Spadework is a new project from Communist Caucus, an organized tendency in the Democratic Socialists of America that seeks to test and refine the hypotheses formed by day-to-day organizing work in the tenant and labor movements.
As we launch this new publication, ICE agents continue to kidnap our neighbors and coworkers, the Zionists bomb Gaza despite a ceasefire, and the far-right is on the offensive around the globe. The injunction to “organize” in the face of such threats is necessary but insufficient. What we really need is not just a generic call to action, but a conceptual and practical framework for how we might conduct political work and test our assumptions in the course of class struggle.
Spadework will be a venue for comrades in Communist Caucus and beyond to reflect on our organizing successes and failures, and to develop those frameworks which emerge in the course of struggle. It takes its name from a concept developed by communist and antiracist organizer Ella Baker (via Alyssa Battistoni’s 2019 essay “Spadework”). As Battistoni takes it up, spadework is “the hard labor that prepares the ground for dramatic action.” The wager of this publication is that some of that hard work is conceptual, and is born in the careful, methodical work of reflecting on our practice in the present conjuncture.
We start from three premises that must occupy the core of communist practice today: combating proletarian disorganization, combating depoliticization, and taking seriously the notion that workers think — that people generate thought as they engage in day-to-day struggles. Spadework is, above all, a place to consolidate and advance the thought that emerges from struggle.
Introduction
Usually, the political problems facing the left are interconnected but heterogeneous. No single problem sits above all others. One can ask “how to articulate a socialist politics around climate change” without thinking that “how to run a successful union negotiation campaign” or “how to manage internal debate within an organization” are related questions. Each of these problems tends to take on a distinctive shape that is not congruent with the others. But in some historical moments, we can identify a prevailing problem that underlies practically all other political issues. All political problems tend to orbit this central problem in these historical situations. We live in just such a moment.
The historical problem of our time is proletarian disorganization. We have lost the class institutions and political habits of organized struggle.
What is proletarian disorganization? Although proletarians are always somewhat disorganized, in our historical situation disorganization has been generalized to systemic levels and has had morbid effects. Before the 1970s, proletarian self-organization in the US1This essay is focused on the US context; it may be that other geographic areas have situations that follow this analysis, though we are not trying to make this claim here.—composed of formations like labor unions, labor auxiliary organizations, left civic organizations, various informal working-class social formations2Even informal networks of social organization have been in decline. Though we disagree with Putnam’s liberal and anti-communist politics, the information presented in his essay (link) is helpful. , etc.—shaped everyday working-class life. These organizations were not reflections of an existing social structure so much as political interventions against them: they were hard-won vehicles for solidaristic collective action of the working class against conditions of competition and segregation. But these institutions, which provide the ability and power to challenge status-quo politics, have been broken up and hollowed out. More conceptually, this proletarian disorganization is characterized by individualization and segmentation. Individualization: the dissolution of vibrant and dynamic self-organized proletarian collectivities across the field of struggle. Segmentation: the naturalization of divisions between groups of proletarians, often collaborating with a neoliberal ideology of classless pluralism.
The very long arc of the workers’ movement gave life to numerous political situations, with organized workers intervening and sometimes determining the outcome of historical events.3See above link to Balibar’s work, which touches on the fact that the workers’ movement was a product of political articulation from intentional proletarian organization, rather than an automatically-generated social fact arising from the capitalist class structure. For more on the workers’ movement, see: Eley’s Forging Democracy (link); and Endnote’s “Betrayal and the Will” (link) The workers’ movement of the past benefited from organizational density that, while never genuinely centralized, produced a dynamic of ever-changing political possibilities conducive to strategic innovations for the left. Even when these situations ended in defeat, the defeat itself implied a real contest with capitalist power, which means that the movement had capacity that the entire left4By ‘left’ we mean socialist and communist tendencies (excluding, for example, non-profit organizations or the progressive wing of the Democratic Party), or other political tendencies that aim to fundamentally transform society towards liberatory and egalitarian ends. currently lacks. The success of the neoliberal counter-revolution demolished a large share of the traditional organized sites of working-class power that delivered might to socialist and communist movements. Disorganization of the proletariat, broadly conceived, has brought about disaster for the left and made it weak.
Proletarian disorganization has also led to innumerable political morbidities in the recent past and the present. It’s no accident that today’s reactionary politics arose amid proletarian disorganization. Psychic distress and nihilistic angst are nourished by generalized political-organizational homelessness. Unmoored from organizations that could proudly and confidently sustain class consciousness through ongoing collective struggles, some within the working class have become susceptible to racist, nationalist and other types of right-wing propaganda, while many more have dropped out of all political activity. While it is important to emphasize this point, exclusive focus on the reactionary right can lead to a politics of liberal tailing and thus reinforce the very conditions that enable today’s reactionary politics. The rise of today’s national conservatism, its political rhetoric around “workers empowerment,” and its intentional conflation of neoliberal centrism with the historic left to sideline both are symptoms of acute disorganization.
No left alternative can be realistically offered without militant and active mass working-class organizations across the entire spectrum of capitalist contradictions. No left tendency—not socialism, not communism, nor serious strands of anarchism—can survive without its integration into an organized working-class movement; for a left formation without an organized proletariat is a fish out of water—a politics defined by its atrophy and destined for a slow death.
Written by members of the DSA Communist Caucus in the Bay Area.
11/10/2020
Biden has won. The “Trumpian” far-right movement remains, however, and will undoubtedly strike back harder down the road. A strategic impasse looms as long as DSA prioritizes electoral politics. The far-right movement will be used as a foil to disempower the Democratic Party’s left. We will be reminded that only the neoliberal center can beat the far-right. Though most socialists recognize the faults of this argument, it makes a convincing case for sidelining “unrealistic” leftists to a Democratic party base committed to an exceptional understanding of “Trumpism.” The problem, though, is not merely about arguments. The Democratic party has moved materially in this direction by centering the concerns of largely white suburban voters—always the most active in the US electoral system—at the expense of younger ‘progressives’ and people of color. But this impasse can be avoided if we alter course and begin to build our own bases of support that aren’t mediated by the Democratic Party. Constructing new working class organizations—like tenant unions, worker centers, or labor unions—will also position us to take advantage of future disenchantment with the Biden-Harris government. Either we change with the times and build power outside of elections, or we’ll end up stuck in an impasse characterized by deference to the centrists who swept the most recent leg of the Democratic Party’s long civil war.
The Communist Caucus—Bay Area offers this collective statement of solidarity with all participants in the uprising against white supremacy and the police state.
6/12/2020
We stand with everyone taking the streets after the police executions of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, David McAtee, and countless other Black and Brown people. History shows us that we cannot simply ask for justice from a white-supremacist police state. Justice must be seized against the will of the racist police and those in power.
This is no easy task. The police have decades of militarization and the will of the state behind them. But we have something they don’t—numbers. From Oakland to Philly, DC to Brooklyn, the last week is a reminder that numbers can make the power of the state irrelevant. In the words of Chairman Fred Hampton, “The people have the power; it belongs to the people.”
A statement accompanying our national launch.
12/28/2019
Our generation of revolutionaries has the great fortune (or misfortune) of living in interesting times. We bear witness not only to the death of the liberal-democratic political consensus, but to the attempted birth of whatever comes next. Some attempts, albeit in very different ways, look backward in order to move forward.
One horrific example comes from the far right. Authoritarian and nationalist politics have found electoral mandates all over the world, deepening the looting of social wealth and the planet wrought by capital. In most cases, these dark marches to the right are made in the name of a return to some past that never existed.
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