There are many approaches to communist organizing. We want to call out two in particular: base building and mass movements. These approaches are geared toward two moments in which we may find ourselves. Base building focuses on building capacity in periods of calm, when mass movements like Occupy or Black Lives Matter aren’t happening. When mass movements arise, it becomes necessary for us to set aside our usual base building work so that we can participate, bolster, and agitate within the movement. In moments where movements arise, we must use the capacity we had built within our base building organizing to support, advance and intensify the movement.

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1. Base Building

We have identified two primary terrains of base building projects: the tenant movement and the labor movement. Additionally, we are open to experimenting with additional forms of base building, which we describe below as “community organizations.”

Tenant Organizing in Autonomous Tenant Unions

Autonomous tenant unions are being rapidly created throughout the US as agitated tenants connect with tenant unionists, like those within the Communist Caucus, to learn how the tenant movement uses ATUs as a vehicle for tenant organizing.

These new organizations spring up because of an increasingly acute capitalist crisis, where landlords ratchet up exploitation of tenants through growing rent, inflation, and disrepair. Many tenants have rightly concluded that they cannot solely rely on housing-rights-based, legal struggle to win the dignity they deserve. Our current strategic focus is to connect with this growing movement of tenants who are willing to fight and to coalesce their efforts into long-lasting and effective working class organization. Building this level of organization requires inspiring and training new organizers to win steadily bolder campaigns, while improving the movement’s support functions, such as logistics and technology, language access, and legal rights navigation. Now is the moment to build a social infrastructure, amid the ongoing tenant’s rights crisis and,before the next inevitable housing crash. We must be ready to rapidly transform disgruntled tenants into confident, militant, socialist organizers.

Our caucus’ internal wing of Tenant Unionists has made significant strides in developing a practicable line and strategic horizon on tenant struggles. We continue to connect with, learn from, and integrate with this growing tenants movement as we develop best practices and further improve our analytical frame.

Key Elements:

• Class Independent: The tenant unions that we build and within which we work must retain their class independence—this is our definition of ‘autonomous’. Many of today’s housing organizations, which are part of the non-profit industrial complex, sometimes operate as unofficial emissaries for the Democratic Party or else promote an ideological view that smothers a socialist or communist horizon, opportunistically trading in revolutionary transformation for a political line that only appears “practical.” Autonomous unions are conditioned by a revolutionary strategic orientation that understands the need for a total break with processes of housing commodification and relations of private property.
  
  
• Tenant-member funded and driven:This is still an area that is in experimentation and the practice on the ground is continually changing. The perennial question hasn’t been resolved yet – how to take a tenant from agitation and education to full fledged cadre​. Our chosen approach is that like labor struggles, it is important that our tenant unions have a member dues structure that allows freedom from courting and sustaining a wealthy donor network. Likewise, our unions must have internal democratic mechanisms that allow tenants to control the organization and use it as a weapon in the class fight.
  
  
• Base Building: Our objective is to build an organized mass base of tenants who are poised to engage in the struggle for a new society without landlords. The “housing crisis” reflects the deeper “tenant crisis,” which is conditioned by the basic facts of capitalism. Private property relations—the animating core of the capitalist mode of production—are responsible for all of the problems of working class tenants. Solutions to this problem must address the fundamental problem of the system of private property. So while Community Land Trusts and moves toward homeownership such as schemes like Tenant Opportunity To Purchase Act (which allows tenants first choice purchase), and “social housing” (which we define as state investment in public housing stock using progressive taxation) can be won as concessions during the protracted struggle towards socialism, these concessions should not be considered fundamental solutions to the system of private property that exploits tenants. ​​Overcoming private property relations will require dispensing with capitalism in general.

Key Principles for Institutionalization: 

Our current work is centered around coalescing tenant efforts into long-lasting organization. Much of our work goes into building processes for, teaching people how, and improving our approaches around the following:

• Building community and culture: When tenants bond with and trust each other, they become willing to take the risk of organizing against the landlord and dare to win. Instead of being alienated and disregarding that their fellow tenants also suffer the same living indignities (such as high rent and disrepair), tenants can begin to acknowledge, respect, and care for each other, most especially by struggling together to win against a common enemy. This looks like: potlucks, picnics, outings, barbeques, events, bar hangouts, movie screenings, brunch, fun icebreakers at meetings, lively building chats, halloween parties, block parties, sharing extra food, borrowing cars, baby showers, valentines day door hangers, community theater, and anything that builds trust and community.

• Coaching, mentorship, and support: Tenants need to feel like they have the social support to learn the new skill of tenant organizing. As budding tenant organizers, they need a go-to person and an organizing network where they can learn by listening and helping others, and request specific strategic, tactical, and logistic support when they need it. This looks like: one-on-ones, meetings with fellow tenant organizers, helping to plan actions, mobilizing people to join those actions, listening carefully, asking thoughtful questions, and maintaining the crucial boundary that the tenant is the organizer, as opposed to the recipient of a tenant advocacy service.

• Regional and national organizing: The movement needs not only to be aware of itself as it responds to different local conditions, but to also have a grasp of regional and national conditions, as well as forming best practices that may originate elsewhere. In particular, the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN) has become a promising hub for this necessary exchange and development of ideas and practice. This looks like: participating in ATUN, performing & systematizing logistical tasks, and supporting the development of tenant unions that affiliate with ATUN. Recently, commie caucus has come into a leading position within the Housing Justice Commission (HJC) within DSA. Commie caucus has used this positioning to create the Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee (ETOC) as a center for organizing new autonomous tenant unions. This looks like: giving presentations at DSA chapters to identify future ATU cadres, seeding new ATUs with an intensive 2 Day Training on tenant organizing, and supporting these new ATU formations with ongoing Mentorship.

• Political education: Tenants need to know why their living situation is inadequate, the root causes of these conditions, and what they can do about it. Through this understanding, they can target the right enemy, choose the correct means of winning, and gather the friends and allies necessary to win. This looks like: conversations with other tenant union members, reading texts, articles and statements together in meetings and gatherings, structured and freeform discussions, shared resources and reading lists, attending talks and panels, conventions and large gatherings with fellow tenant union members, and handling common political questions with explanations that are not only grounded in fact, but can be repeated with ease in a compelling way.

• Organizer training: Tenants need to know how to organize. How do you knock on doors? How do you facilitate meetings? How do you navigate tenant-on-tenant conflict? How do you have an organizing conversation? What is an escalation plan? How do you create an agenda? How do you create a flier and do outreach? How do you establish roles and processes for an effective tenant council? How do you ask for help? While anyone can be a tenant organizer, it takes time and practice to learn how. The goal of organizer training is to demystify this process, to provide a roadmap and expectations on the learning process, and to give the organizing support network the tools it needs to train new organizers. This looks like: distilling best practices, creating new resources, giving presentations, creating templates, “training the trainer” guides and processes, iterating on existing resources, and more. In addition to training tenants as organizers, tenant unions must also train up their cadres who will build up union infrastructure, support tenants to organize, and further develop the tenant movement.

As the budding tenants movement grows in strength, it will take on bigger bosses and require more far-reaching coalitions.

Future areas of exploration:

1. Organizing with houseless tenants as fellow base building organizers
2. How to mobilize bank tenants, people with mortgages on their homes, as fellow base building organizers to the extent that they can be
3. How the tenants movement connects with other workers’ movements, including the movement for socialism
4. How to win against other real estate industry entities, such as developers, property managers, mega landlords, real estate tech, and state institutions that serve them by organizing tenants at greater scale and complexity

Labor Organizing and Workplace Struggle

The labor movement is not weak because of bad leadership, its leadership is bad because changes in today’s economy and labor law have made it weak. We need to move past struggles over who is in charge of a weak movement. Making labor powerful should be our main concern. Rebuilding labor’s power requires exploration of new ways for making militant labor actions, and especially strikes, effective. And we must make organizing common sense and immediate. These actions may require taking substantial risks—risks that many labor leaders are unwilling or unable to embrace. The left wing of the labor movement is not strong enough to make necessary strategic shifts right now, and it is not yet clear what exact strategy is needed. We need to look beyond “strategic sectors” and learn how to organize strategically from our current situation.

Our caucus has an internal wing dedicated to labor organizing and struggle. We have made significant strides in developing a practicable line and strategic horizon on tenant struggles, and the time has come to develop a practical position on labor. We note that this effort must be practical because words are not good enough. We need a practice, or suite of practices, that originate in a perspective on advancing the possibility of working class struggle. 

We are developing a cohesive set of labor union and worksite organizing practices that, together, form a cohesive strategy for building power around the worker-capital contradiction. Our approach, at this time, is open—we think that there is still considerable work and experimentation needed before we solidify our position. 

Key Elements: 

1. To build a communist presence within unionized and non-unionized worksites who agitate around common shop floor issues, build new leadership, push forward new organizing projects, and experiment with different ways of organization;
2. To systematically grasp the various historical episodes of labor insurgency and strategy through ongoing collective learning;
3. To translate our experience organizing and agitating and educational training into a set of practices that are appropriate for current labor conditions. 

Key Principles for Experimentation: 

Since our current position is centered around open experimentation, we have developed principals that will guide our organizing. They are: 

1. We need a labor strategy that slowly builds towards working-class agency and capacity to intervene in local, regional, national, and international situations—a strategy that is capable of moving towards releasing the legal shackles that continue to hold back labor actions to this day;
2. We need a labor strategy that actively facilitates the construction of class independence from the major bourgeois parties—a labor strategy that is not only independent in word but independent in its practical activity;
3. We need a flexible and coordinated labor strategy that speaks to the highly diverse condition of worksites today—a strategy that is practicable in various contexts wherever DSA members live and work, but that also enables action to take place across these various worksite conditions;
4. We need a politicizing labor strategy that takes internal union democracy seriously but does not stop there—a strategy which not only builds shop-floor militancy and leadership but also politicizes rank-and-file workers;
5. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need a labor strategy that enables agitation around the real, material problems that workers are facing on an everyday basis—a strategy that builds from these problems an ever-larger militancy and leadership. 
   

Possible Directions: 

It is too early to say what direct actions and experimentations will be taken. However, some possible avenues for experimentation have already come up: 

1. Building cadre within large unionized worksites (e.g. universities, public school districts, etc) that agitate around necessary demands and use minority action to bring forth (a) new processes of struggle, and (b) widen cadre capacity and leadership;
2. Building regionalized union structures that cover a particular service or shopping district using an inside (worker)/outside (community) strategy to pressure boss compliance and build worker capacity;
3. Building a union-wide cadre structure (for large unions) composed of both rank-and-file and staff members, whose objective is to build towards union-wide transformation and mass action;
4. Organizing new union worksites into already-existing left and democratic unions (e.g. ILWU, UE, NUHW), especially around strategic sectors.

Experimenting with Community Organizations

We must build capacity to fight the contradictions that govern our lives. We do this by building mass, democratic associations that organize working class people in ways that allow them to fight. Building these organizations is difficult and takes time, but this is a strategy that, in the long-term, builds class capacity, and protects against liberal recuperation. Examples include tenant unions, transit rider unions, abolitionist groups, parent-teacher-student solidarity organizations, etc.

Key Elements:

• Contradictions: Powerful liberatory organizations will speak to the everyday problems and contradictions that make life miserable for the working class in your area.
• Organizational infrastructure: We must build militant democratic organizations at a distance from the state that turn working class people into organizers.
• Militancy above mutual aid: Our organizations must be weapons. While mutual aid is important for building trust and finding organizing projects, it cannot be our main objective.

Anti-Racism: An Essential Feature for Base Building Projects

We also want to call attention to an essential feature of all base building organizations: anti-racism.

Anti-Racism

Marxist intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” The stumbling block of race still remains with us. The problem of white supremacy cannot be addressed through mere rhetoric because the demolition of class solidarity by racism is a distinctively material issue. If we are unable to cohere material solidarities because of racism, then we foreclose the communist horizon. Racialized divisions of space, labor and power have not always existed, and they need not always exist. But they do exist now, and they manifest through practices such as red-lining, institutions such as the police, and racially-coded language like “backwards” or “criminal”. It is not only in the class’s interest to struggle against these racialized forms, it is foundationally necessary for the creation of a new world. No matter the content of our organizing, it must always challenge racism. Practically speaking, this means transcending the racial distinctions produced under capitalist society through solidaristic struggle. Failure on this front is catastrophic. The ascendency of today’s far-right did not fall from the sky. It has been nourished by the racism that capitalism perpetuates. History must move in the opposite direction.

Take Aways:

• Building anti-racism into our organizations: All of our base building organizing projects must have mechanisms that organize across the color line. Be they community or labor organizations, they must have an intentional focus on organizing across the segregated class landscape.
• Anti-racism is generative: Recent history has demonstrated that anti-racist struggles have created new political possibilities, forms of organization, and strategic concepts. Moreover, these struggles have produced universal prescriptions that have had the goal of transcending the capitalist racial order.

2. Mass Movements

We live in an age of intense and unpredictable struggle that cannot be taken for granted. Most of today’s struggles are not politically coherent. Take, for example, the Yellow Vests. The Yellow Vest movement was touched off by a distinctively material working class issue—regressive taxation. Yet as soon as the movement began, the political meaning of this complaint was contested. French fascists attempted to bend this issue and the movement towards ethno-nationalism. Leftists of various stripes countered this attempt by battling fascists in the streets. In the end, the fascists were routed and the movement took on a deeply progressive arc. There are two important considerations when we take part in social movements. First, we must intervene against reactionary and racist elements within them, as the leftists engaged in with the Yellow Vests did; second, we must push struggles forward by supporting them and attempting to widen them as much as possible.

Key Elements:

• Bring our base building organizations into the movement: We must always think creatively on how to use the capacity built in autonomous tenant unions, labor unions, and in workplaces to advance movements when they arise. Sometimes it is not obvious how to do this, since contradictions and social issues are so often portrayed as separate and distinct. But today’s capitalism has brought about intense connections between practically all modes of exploitation and domination. We must find these connecting threads and use them if the moment demands it. 
• Become part of the movement: We want movements to be successful. We do not want to take over movements. This means that we must always participate in good faith within them. No movement can succeed without millions of participants, we will always be a small part of the total whole.
• Guard against reactionary infiltration: With a new radical right emergent, we always have to ensure that movements aren’t taken by ideas or concepts that bend towards reaction. This includes, for example, nationalism, collaboration with the repressive arms of the state and racism, to name a few. Similarly, we do not partition participants of movements into the categories that capital and the state use to divide the movement—that is, “outside agitators”, “peaceful” or “violent”, “good” or “bad” protestors.
• Agitate & connect: Mass social movements always have the potential to become even larger and more powerful. Moving into new phases of militancy requires participants who are willing to agitate for next steps, like collaboration with workers to shutdown a local port, factory, etc. Often, agitation for new phases of militancy implies making inroads with parts of the working class that may not be activated within the movement yet.