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 former strategy, after years of setbacks, has been reinvigorated by the striking victory of Zohran Mamdani. Interestingly, many of our electorally minded comrades claim to agree with the thesis of disorganization. However, when these comrades speak of fighting disorganization, they remain ambivalent about the autonomous action of the working class, and instead focus on building an electoral constituency that can be counted on to vote for progressive politicians (or in the case of the more politically developed, to canvass for them). It is hoped that proletarian self-activity will trickle down, but it must then be subordinated to a top-down legislative strategy, an inside-outside strategy where the “outside” is practically just an alibi. It is undoubtedly true that prominent electoral campaigns, such as Zohran Mamdani’s, can catalyze new organizing, but even the most dedicated and principled elected official cannot substitute themselves for the activity of self-organized people. Electoral campaigns can also be profoundly depoliticizing in their cultivation of demobilizing parasocial loyalties, which replace strategic deliberation with ferocious debates over the moral character of a particular politician. 

For proponents of the left DSA strategy, the primary problem is not concentration of proletarian self-activity, but transmission of a larger political goal (the analysis of whatever 20th century socialist tendency the particular comrade prefers) to local fights. Therefore, the primary goal of the Organizer is to “politicize” economic struggles, understood as recruiting to DSA and pushing a particular line. The issue is that if the “political” is defined by being intrinsically eccentric to the workplace, it will struggle to find its footing on the shop floor itself, reducing political struggle to proselytization. Instead, the Organizer ought to identify how wider social struggles are experienced by their coworkers, and then take concrete collective action with others: for instance, Starbucks baristas organizing for gender-affirming care, or STEM researchers rejecting complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Both of these other paradigms for organizing come as responses to a striking conjunctural development: millions of young people identifying with “democratic socialism,” and the historic (though comparatively modest) growth of the DSA. At the time of writing this piece, DSA was in a membership crisis, which has fortunately reversed as the social movements that had ebbed in the early Biden years became reinvigorated in response to the genocide in Gaza and second election of Trump. Still, this growth so far has engendered a paradigm for militancy that is extraordinarily passive. For most, organizing in the DSA means canvassing, attending political meetings to give or listen to speeches, writing solidarity statements, and, at its worst, being active in an insular social scene that primarily plays out on social media. The wager of what Commie Caucus calls “doing politics at the base” is that it builds the mass protagonism necessary for the political recomposition of the class as a whole, as well as invigorate an associational culture that can sustain struggles on the terrain of the everyday and activate a broader cross section of the class than DSA has thus far. The true potential of the DSA is not a progressive nonprofit or the fantasy of a fetishized revolutionary party (which even in its most cogent articulations relies on an extraordinarily vague sequence of crisis followed by seizing power), but as a scaffolding for members to engage in struggles where they live and work, connect militants across distinct fights, and to use these experiences to reflect on and refine our answers to the difficult questions of our conjuncture.

The paradigm for organizing described below is a wager. In the last two years since this essay’s initial publication, comrades in Communist Caucus and affiliated militants have played a humble role in testing its assumptions, both inside and outside DSA, through building local Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee branches, supporting tenant struggles as part of the Housing Justice Commission, and helping launch what can only be described as a “political strike.” Of course, none of these efforts by themselves are groundshaking. But they are indications of where the beachheads for a fighting socialist movement might be established, and indicate an approach to political work that, if generalized, might make us a real –even potent– force in the world. The hypothesis here — that there is no working class waiting in the wings to be mobilized with the right campaign or slogan, that organizing on the terrain of the everyday engenders new forms of militant subjectivity, and that DSA can play a critical role in building fighting institutions of class power — can, despite some of these early successes, only be proven or disproven through the tests of class struggle. 

August 3, 2023: In Prisoners of the American Dream , the late Mike Davis wrote that each cycle of class struggle sets the “objective conditions of accumulation“ and “subjective capacities of class organization” in the next period. Our moment, using Davis’s analysis, is circumscribed by what the Communist Caucus has collectively defined as the problem of “proletarian disorganization”: the hollowing out of traditional institutions of class power existing in everyday life and associated habits of organized struggle. As the defining problem of our moment, proletarian disorganization has, within our lifetimes, severely limited what is politically possible for the DSA and the Left broadly. 

The Trump years saw the unique eruption of militant social movements and a related phenomenon of self-identified “democratic socialists” being elected to public office. Remarkably, despite the energy behind these ruptures, very little remains organizationally. The remnants of these movements are cohered in a network of nonprofits stuck in the sisyphean tasks of legislative advocacy- taking those demands once made in mass movements and turning them into easily digestible policy soundbites to be presented to politicians. The role of the class struggling for itself has been replaced by a few NGO staffers mobilizing dwindling numbers of activists. 

Just a few years ago the DSA approached 100,000 members but is now hemorrhaging by tens of thousands. In the post-Bernie, post-uprising moment, DSA must make a stronger political case for members to stay involved. 

The post-Bernie DSA’s political practice has crystallized into legislative advocacy, most notably in NYC-DSA’s “Albany strategy” which prioritizes the election of DSA cadre into State assembly and Senate in order to, at least theoretically, advance the project of “non-reformist reforms.” 

Recognizing the limits imposed by proletarian disorganization, proponents of this strategy try to substitute  class struggle with policy advocacy from elected officials and their staff. In New York’s Socialist in Office (SIO) committee, electeds have on several occasions bowed to pressure from Democratic Party leadership, such as elected State Senators not endorsing NYC-DSA’s full electoral slate in 2022 after being threatened with removal from committees if they did so. Albany strategy partisans argued that appeasing establishment politicians was necessary to pass key reforms, specifically “Good Cause” protections for tenants, which in the 2023 legislative session failed to pass for the fourth year in a row. This insider strategy to win reforms eschews publicizing these threats to agitate a base of constituents, does not organize the class, and often even fails to deliver on the reforms it promises. 

Most of NYC-DSA’s legislative priorities have ended in defeat. In the few legislative fights the chapter has won, it only did so as part of a far more politically heterogenous coalition, thus limiting the organization’s advocacy to what liberal nonprofits will support. Far from the original goal of “non-reformist reforms”, DSA socialists in office can only achieve a degree of success by formally cohering itself as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, a strategy that works against the project of working class self-emancipation. This is not to advocate for complete electoral abstentionism, but rather to recognize the real limits of a strategy that views legislation as the primary terrain of struggle for the movement. 

Another political practice in the organization, rising in opposition to the right-wing of DSA, wraps itself in the symbols of defeated 20th century revolutionary movements. This “left of DSA” tends to valorize past organizational forms, namely a bolshevik style party, without serious consideration of distinct political contexts. As such, these comrades hyperfocus on the struggle for the correct line in internal political fights and too often fall into the trap of a “resolutionary socialism” that neither builds the class nor successfully advances communist politics within the organization. The challenges of our moment cannot be adequately addressed by the DSA adopting the right line, even by declaring ourselves communists, but by building “an organization of organizers.”

Such an organization of organizers would work to build institutions of class power in order to produce what Viewpoint editor Bue Rübner Hansen called the “continued production of solidarity in the everyday.” The social atomization and alienation inherent in capitalism reifies everyday exploitation and oppression as a natural reality rather than as something socially constructed and thereby subject to change.In order to fight this demobilizing ideological paradigm, it is not enough to proselytize socialism. We should instead build organizations that develop working class people into organizers themselves. Instead of limiting the terrain of political practice to the bourgeois state apparatus or insisting politics must involve the exhaustive preaching of a “revolutionary” line, we must conceptualize a “new practice of politics” based in autonomous organizations of the working class. Through building such organizations on the terrain of the everyday, we engender a new politicized subjectivity and affirm in action Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis” that the existing world is not necessary. 

Labor and tenant unions, which organize collectively against a shared exploiter, deserve particular focus as institutions of class power. While unions have suffered from decades of disorganizing offensives, they still represent the primary source of organized working class political subjectivity for millions of American workers. Whereas the Left broadly has suffered from a disorganizing malaise after 2020, the labor movement is advancing on new fronts with new union drives happening at Starbucks, the ongoing WGA & SAG strike, and the Teamsters militantly organizing for contract demands. Tenant unionism is on the rise as well with neighborhood and citywide unions cohering in cities such as LA, Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Oakland, and New York. The DSA can support such initiatives by investing members’ ability to organize where they live and work, through projects like the rank-and-file strategy, EWOC (the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee), and ETOC (Emergency Tenants Organizing Committee). 

Labor and tenant unions also provide new strategic options for the movement in moments of social rupture. In Hammer and Hope’s reflections on the 2020 uprisings, philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò argued that unions have unique advantages in popular struggles given their ability to democratically decide on demands and withhold labor if those demands are not met. A key lesson from the defeats of 2020 is that mass marches and theatrical direct actions, while important tactics, cannot enact revolutionary change by themselves without being able to draw on existing institutions and networks of class power. Our task can be understood as an oscillating war of maneuver in moments of rupture and war of position, where our role is to build up working class organization to be ready for those periods, based on the particular political moment. 

There are two reductive approaches on the Left to labor and tenant organizing. The first claims union work should be prioritized as “class first” organizing rather than what is considered frivolous identity politics. The second claims a focus on building working class institutions is “economistic.” The former is a chauvinistic misunderstanding of how united class solidarity forms: the struggle for universal class liberation is necessarily built from particular emergent struggles against exploitation and oppression acting in solidarity with each other. To draw from abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s reflections on anti-carceral organizing, opposition to a prison being built in a particular community often begins with “not in my backyard”, a place-based identity that can be either progressive or reactionary, but through the experience of struggle is transformed into “not in anyone’s backyard”- in other words, true universalism built out of particularity. 

The latter argument draws on a restrictive view of organizing as a series of mostly unrelated issue areas instead of as a means to connect and scale up political struggles. In the labor movement for example, anti-racist and feminist struggle is key, both inside and outside the union, from Amazonians United successfully fighting back a racist anti-union campaign, Newsguild workers at the NY Times advocating against their employer’s transphobic coverage, or the thousands of starbucks workers who went on strike for the ability to openly celebrate Pride in stores. In the tenant movement, it is impossible to do any successful organizing without immediately confronting gentrification and the displacement of black tenants by the landlord class. The category of “tenancy” also creates a precarious relationship to housing and the possibility of criminalization and so, tenants organizing together in our unions directly confront oppressive realities of private property, racist displacement, anti-houseless sweeps, and the carceral state. 

Building an organization of organizers will also involve experimenting with new strategies and organizational forms on the terrain of the everyday. Given the pervasiveness of the carceral state in everyday life, abolitionist organizing provides a key opportunity to experiment with new forms of community base-building. In several places, local abolitionist collectives, such as the Crown Heights Care Collective in Brooklyn, have worked hand-in-hand with the tenant movement as part of a shared struggle for community control over neighborhoods. 

Ultimately, these last six years are a case study in how proletarian disorganization severely limits the Left’s ability to pass and enforce reforms, “build power” both in and outside of electoral politics, hold socialists in office to their commitments, and rely on a mass base of support beyond a homogenous group of mostly white professional activists. Without the institutions of class power that can articulate and engender specific subjectivities in its members, the Left is limited to being a junior partner in a liberal coalition and/or a statement writing collective with a Twitter following. There is no working class waiting in the wings to be mobilized with the right electoral campaign or slogan. The class must instead be built for and by itself. 

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.   

In Southern California,the Sugared and Bronzed campaign shows what campaigns can look like when EWOC organizers stay involved long-term. Sugared and Bronzed is a national salon chain, an industry that had no previous union presence. Southern California EWOC (SCWOC) has been working with the OC for over two years, and the campaign has gone through the gauntlet. The workers had already been trying to organize when they got connected to EWOC, mostly mapping and charting across multiple shops in Los Angeles. Early on, we saw our job as empowering the workers to be prepared for what was increasingly looking like a high-intensity campaign. Besides the fact that this type of organizing was wholly novel, the bargaining unit was also entirely female, and so we struggled to find unions even interested in taking on the campaign due to both the unknown terrain as well as entrenched sexism in the union movement. Initially, our local’s contact at a large national union – a staffer we felt was a fellow traveler – agreed to take on the campaign, much to the excitement of the workers who saw the union as a vanguard of the rank-and-file movement. Unfortunately, as one month of conversations turned into six, the union seemed to drag their heels on any type of strategy, goals, or deadlines that the workers could follow. We later learned that although this union representative had the salon workers’ best interests at heart, the union’s International cast many aspersions on the organizing, claiming that salon workers were less important than other workers, as well as condescending to the all-women bargaining unit. As the LA fires raged in January 2025, and the workers were more motivated to build their union for safety, they called the question with the union– who unceremoniously dropped them. We felt like we were back at square one.

However, during this rough period, the workers didn’t stop organizing and SCWOC didn’t stop supporting them. While Sugared and Bronzed management can claim that their spray tans are “natural” and “safe,” the chemicals used are only safe on the skin, and not when aerosolized for a worker to breathe in all day, every day. Workers demanded PPE, and documented management’s refusal to provide it while organizing. They also met collectively to look at the employee handbook after changes were announced, and built a campaign around not signing the new handbook changes. Then, as the LA fires engulfed the city in toxic smoke, the girls at the Santa Monica salon were forced to come in to work despite being in the evacuation zone. They collectively decided to escalate publicly during this state of climate emergency, blowing up the company’s spot on social media, and taking advantage of the publicity to reach more workers. They reignited their union discussions and were able to bring a lot of new coworkers into the conversation about how the fires, climate change, and the toxic chemicals in the workplace were interrelated. This campaign led down some creative paths, including connecting with the Labor Network for Sustainability, academics, attorneys, and climate scientists. Obviously, this pre-majority organizing went well and beyond the “standard” EWOC organizer model, insofar as we supported protracted organizing long before the recognition campaign had developed such that a local union would pick up the shop. Yet this was not only necessary, but incredibly powerful– for both the workers and the EWOC organizers. 

In St. Louis (STLWOC), we have had similarly elucidating experiences on the limits of the “traditional” EWOC organizer role, and one in particular – a mental health direct service non-profit’s campaign to unionize with SEIU – stands out.

The workplace is a mental health non-profit organization of several hundred workers. STLWOC’s connection with the workers actually predates STLWOC’s existence; STLWOC grew out of an EWOC-style project in the STLDSA Labor Committee. We held our first workplace organizing training series in February 2022, and three workers from this organization who became the core of the OC attended. 

Early on, we were less confident in our role as EWOC organizers, so when SEIU Healthcare expressed interest in taking on the campaign, we went along with the “handoff”. While we did stay in touch with the OC, we were not nearly as involved as we could have been. To put it bluntly, the “SEIU era” was a two-year constant struggle between the OC and the union staff. The OC had already spent a few months organizing when the union got involved, and were having increasingly vibrant and well-attended OC meetings, identifying issues and charting and mapping, feeling like they were building momentum while also staying under the bosses’ radar. However, tensions arose when the SEIU playbook clashed with what the workers thought were strategic moves, particularly the union staff’s aggressive focus on collecting cards as opposed to following through on addressing issues that had been identified. Those differences in approach were compounded by SEIU’s general reluctance to receive feedback from the workers. Tensions also escalated in the workplace, with the bosses able to mobilize some particularly well-entrenched “5s” (or workers who were firmly anti-union, in our assessments) to exploit class and race divides in the workplace, which was not only toxic for the prospects of the campaign but incredibly demoralizing to the OC. SEIU was unable to offer much support to the organizers about how to navigate this, even when SEIU’s history – “history” meaning the misleading and bad-faith information readily available online to any anti-union coworker or boss – was being weaponized against the OC. Management even filed for an election themselves, clearly in an attempt to force the union’s hand for a loss; when SEIU got the election canceled through legal means without involving the OC, it further hurt the organizing effort in the shop as it gave even more ammunition to the antis, and gave the bosses a huge win that they took full advantage of.

After two years of struggle, SEIU’s involvement ended abruptly with a short email after the company merged with a larger corporation. Because STLWOC had essentially sidelined ourselves at a very early point, we found out about all of this after the fact, in bits and pieces and through the grapevine. Once we realized what was going on, we were not in a position to make much of a difference. Three years later, we were at square -3 with an OC of three, reeling from the two-year campaign, the firing of two longtime core OC members, and facing both a workplace still recovering from a highly contentious campaign and an even bolder boss in the new corporate management that has no hesitation in crushing dissent. The OC has gone dormant, and while we still have a relationship with workers, we can’t help but feel like we dropped the ball. 

Through our locals’ work, we are developing a new vision for the role of the EWOC organizer, one that takes the EWOC ethos to its logical conclusion: supporting workers and developing organizers regardless of what organizing phase an OC is in. This alternative method for the EWOC organizer, however, is incredibly labor intensive, and requires a tremendous amount of time and energy from one to two volunteer organizers.A well-organized local can help remedy this problem, with each case becoming more of a team effort than an individual project. 

Additionally, a promising experiment that some locals have started is workers’ circles. Workers’ circles as a concept has meant different things to different groups and locals. Past circles have been focused on a specific industry, bringing workers in similar working conditions together to strategize. St. Louis and others have started experimenting with more general circles, where workers across all industries and at all phases of organizing who are connected with the local come together to discuss their organizing, commiserate losses, and celebrate wins. Our first circle last month involved Starbucks baristas from unionized stores; nonprofit workers, some bargaining their first contract and some beginning to organize; recently unionized graduate workers bargaining their first contract; and union machinists preparing for a strike. We used the same popular-education style of facilitation we use in EWOC workshops for this conversation. This initial attempt showed glimmers of the organizing community we think could help sustain EWOC’s support for individual OCs for the long haul. We plan to continue to experiment with this practice in the coming year. 

In short, this new model, centering less on case management and recognition campaigns, is predicated on building out the spaces whereby workers can coach other workers and provide ongoing peer-to-peer support in our organizing. This is a model that fortifies the resolve, initiative, and confidence of the rank and file, builds cross-sectoral connections, and allows us to put a real stamp on the labor movement. 

Despite the limitations we’ve encountered, we believe that EWOC’s vision and practice can be fruitfully expanded and adapted to the changing needs of the labor movement. In fact, the ongoing experimentation with workers’ circles, the ambition of EWOC to support the general strike in Minneapolis, and the daily experiences of volunteers and staff alike to think creatively about how to best scaffold working class self-organization points towards an exciting direction for the organization to develop in the coming years. We think that special attention can be paid to developing local EWOCs and to get involved in EWOC’s national Local Support Team, and to continue to reflect on the practice of peer to peer support and mentorship that the workers’ circles provide.

At the EWOC conference, Allie Rooney, a worker from Sugared and Bronzed, said, “After we win our election, I will be organizing for the rest of my life. This is what I was meant to do.” This, perhaps better than anything else, sums up the potential we see for EWOC.

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.

Proletarian Disorganization and Class Composition

As we argue in Our Moment, any analysis of the present needs to start with the profound disorganization of the working class, the signs of which are everywhere.

The thesis that proletarian disorganization is the central problem confronting socialists and communists can be understood in two distinct ways. First, it can be taken as a statement about the historic degradation of working class organizations wrought by a half-century of neoliberalism. This manifests in phenomena like low union density and the breakup of working-class institutions. But to pose the problem of disorganization at this level is still to conceive of “organization” abstractly. The implication is that organizing is a mechanical process, and the task of organizers is to discover, then apply, the right organizing methods. Density can increase or decrease; organizations can be built or dismantled. From this narrow understanding, we ultimately land in nostalgia: The task is always to recapture the lost organization of an imagined class unity that can either be broken up or put (back) together.  

But there is another way to view proletarian disorganization. This starts not from an abstract and quantitative sense of organizing, but instead from the framework of class composition. In this view, disorganization is itself a specific form of the organization of workers by capital and for capital. Disorganization is just shorthand for the fact that capital always and everywhere composes the working classes in particular configurations that are already divided by job, skill, sector, race, gender, nationality, citizenship, and a myriad of other fault lines. Put simply, capital produces the working classes as disorganized, atomized and divided.  When we say that the problem we confront as communists is the problem of proletarian disorganization, this is what we mean. The task is not just mechanically increasing the density of organizations, but rather of comprehending and combating the ways in which the working class itself is produced in disorganization. 

This means that we cannot content ourselves with a mechanical notion of organization as simply applying correct “methods” to increase density. Organizing is itself a political project. It starts with what our comrades at Notes From Below call a political leap — with people who are divided seeing their struggles as part of a single, unified, political fight, thinking together, strategizing together, and acting together. We do not conceive of our task as “organizing the unorganized” as one would organize their sock drawer. Nor do we see our work as “base-building,” which always carries with it a whiff of instrumentalization (a base is built so that you can then erect something else, a second-order politics, on top of it). Rather, we see our project as “doing politics at the base,” a subtle but crucial distinction that highlights the bringing into existence of a working class capable of thinking and acting politically, of comprehending its position and acting to change it. 

This is not primarily a project aimed at raising the level of class consciousness. It’s a project of organizing people across the divisions that block their politicization, for proletarian recomposition.

Against Depoliticization

This leads us to the second premise that animates our task as socialists: combating depoliticization.Even with the explosive growth of the socialist movement in the last decade, and the steady reemergence of organized labor as a real political force, the conjuncture is characterized by profound depoliticization. Politics is reduced to a periodic electoral choice between a greater and lesser evil to administer what already exists. There’s a very real danger that socialist organizing gets tethered to this thinned-out notion of politics, and in our organizing work we must carefully avoid the trap of fighting to be the most competent and humane administrators of what already exists. 

For us, depoliticization must be conceived of as an organizational problem, rather than one of consciousness-raising. We don’t call for endlessly perfecting the right line or program in our heads and our writing, as though workers just need to “hear the good news” (or the right program) from socialists to beat apathy. Instead, we work to compose collectivities that can think together, reflect on their activity together, and overcome the pervasive sense that there is no alternative to the world as it exists. Fighting depoliticization in a world characterized by proletarian disorganization means that communists must bring together groups of workers in struggle and open up spaces where workers can reflect, strategize, learn, and experiment collectively. 

We also recognize that there are forms of depoliticization specific to the left, even those that use the words “communist” or “revolutionary” but nevertheless take the form of what Asad Haider described as “total affective investment in the necessity of the existing world.” One form of this leftist depoliticization is a revolutionary nostalgia that avoids engagement with current conditions and instead sees the present as just another instance of the past. Some comrades don’t see a living and contingent set of conjunctures, but an archive of arguments and organizing models from which to pick and choose. Whether the aim is a Green New Deal, a recreation of the German Social Democratic Party’s form, or the Popular Front, this approach affirms what already exists by denying the contingency of the present. It refuses the need to experiment, to develop new political forms, to collectively and ambitiously think about the current terrain.

Another mode of depoliticization is “adjustment,” defined by Haider as “condescending rejection of any organizational process which does not have the state as its object.” On the left today, there is much grandstanding about “needing to win,” which is assumed to only be possible on the terrain of the legislative state. Instead of politics being, as Alan Badiou articulates it, the mass struggle of working people operating under the hypothesis that the existing world is not necessary, it is reduced to a few talented individuals legislating on our behalf. If those outside the state have any political agency, it is at most to canvass for progressive candidates, while any autonomous initiatives — such as union struggles or social movements — must be subordinated to a legislative agenda determined by a core group of socialist politicians. 

Ironically, many left critiques of electoralism criticize its content rather than its form, implicitly accepting this framing by focusing on a particular elected official’s rhetoric, thus affirming that politicians are the only meaningful protagonists in class struggle. We are not allergic to struggle at the highest level of the state; we have seen repeatedly that this can play an important role in the working-class political composition and can catalyze new initiatives for and by the class. But, as Haider argues in his citation of the Congolese theorist Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba: “To reduce every political capacity to a state capacity is to abscond from politics.”

What both these modes of depoliticization share is disregard for experimentation, disengagement with the present, and the belief that working people themselves are not in fact capable of successfully struggling against their everyday exploitation.  In DSA, even as nearly all factions profess that “every cook can govern” in some form, the implicit assumption in our political work is that astute socialist organizers should impose from above a prefab model for doing politics, whether that model comes from Lenin, Kautsky, Bernie Sanders, or Jane McAlevey. The belief is that politics is not something working people can originate. In other words, it’s a politics for the working class, but not politics by and of the working class.

People Think

Depoliticization then points us to the third premise from which the Communist Caucus and Spadework embark: a politics that centers the fact that people think. 

This sounds almost trivially true, butmuch organizing on the left is oriented towards denying this principle. To take seriously the fact that people think is to stop approaching political expertise as a commodity that we just need to transmit to a workers’ movement. It is to start from the notion that working people are engaged in day-to-day struggles that lead to the political insights needed to make interventions themselves. Whether through conversations on the shop floor, at the dive bar with coworkers, with neighbors passing by in the stairwell, or sitting across from their families at the dinner table, workers are constantly thinking about and theorizing those struggles. 

It’s not the job of politicians or the DSA to bring the “correct” political insight to workers’ struggles from the outside. Rather, we should be creating spaces for  workers to articulate their own answers to the most pressing questions of our moment throughout the course of collective struggle. It’s true that the thinking coming out of workers’ struggles is unevenly developed, and objective barriers exist that must be overcome. For one, it’s not a habit of most workers to engage in written forms of thinking — and it hasn’t been the practice of editors to encourage workers to write about their struggles. This means many political insights of working people have remained limited in their reach.

We are absolutely committed to building spaces where people can overcome barriers and think together about how to transform their world. Spadework is one venue to do this. Here, we turn to workers’ insights in order to construct a political framework that emerges  from them  narrating and analyzing their own collective experiences. 

Ultimately, this calls for a far more experimental politics than is on offer in most of the contemporary left – a politics that takes workplace and tenant struggles as laboratories for new organizational forms, for understanding and seizing power. It is workers themselves who must do this experimentation. We aim to operate in a mode akin to the experimental and experiential pedagogies of figures like Paolo Freire, Miles Horton, Ella Baker, and generations of organizer-pedagogues who approach workers in struggle as comrades to learn and think with. 

Spadework is intended to foster these projects. To confront the openness of this moment not with the correct theory based on our expert study of the past, but with a humble conviction that working people themselves are constantly thinking and are truly capable of doing politics. As communists, we understand our task to put actual, thinking workers in communication with one another, to grow and learn together through the course of struggle, and to facilitate the political leap from the base, moving from geographically or sectorally specific issue campaigns to a unified struggle against class society as a whole. Only then can real transformative politics emerge.