This is written for the thousands of queer radicals in this country, who are rightfully angry, horrified, traumatized by the turn towards a genocide of queer people by a growing fascist tendency. Who are frustrated at the way our ‘community’ continues to mire itself in petty disagreements and petty issues, as church and state organize to destroy our rights and public existence. We are seeing fascists working to violently shove queerness back into the closet, using state force to bring our civil rights to a pre-Stonewall level. They do this because we are a threat to them, but they can do this because we are disorganized, fragmented, and alienated. To fight this we need to change ourselves and change our community. We need to build a fighting queerness and organize our social circles. Ultimately we need to accept what we, as queer people, are: the vanguard of the working class.
In this pamphlet I seek to explain the situation our community is in, why we are so fragmented, and propose that the way to resolve this is through developing new political collectives as the start of building a fighting queer community.
Our Situation
It is plainly obvious that queer people are, alongside people of oppressed nations, the objective vanguard of the US working class. They are disproportionately politicized and have played a vastly disproportionate role in the movements which have arisen in the last decade.
It is for this reason that the right has attacked us in the last two years. From personal attacks on anyone willing to be Out in public to the transphobic and hateful laws being passed in every Republican-controlled state, queer people are under attack by a right that is increasingly eager to entrench the USA’s minoritarian rule. This has challenged rights we previously considered to have been permanently won–and you, among others, are likely desperately looking around for some way to stop this.
This desperate searching manifests in a million different ways and through the channels we have available to us. We all know an Instagram warrior, we all know the cycle of adoration and rejection of idols, the bitter intra-community fights, people picking on a target they can do anything about. All of these are symptoms of oppressed people flailing, desperately looking for some outside force to save them, looking to defend themselves, unaware of how to embark on that path themselves.
We are under the gun of encroaching genocide, a well-funded and zealous campaign to destroy our ability to exist in public, to seek and achieve self actualization, to survive as queer people. To stop this we need to unite the queer community towards political ends.
PARTICIPATING IN THE STRUGGLE IS GAY
Queers are often highly politicized because being publicly queer is a choice to question the narratives you were given at birth, culminating in joining an oppressed group. Going through this process produces people whose very existence is a form of agitation against our hetero-patriarchal society. It also produces singularly curious people, which also explains the proclivity among queer people for seeking high-level theoretical knowledge.
Often queer discourses are about the nature of our coalition, of which part of the L + G + B + T coalition has it the worst. Think of the instinctive disdain for cis gay men, or the infinite hairsplitting on forms of sapphic attraction, or the forever war around asexuality. But queerness has always been a political coalition of different groups of people. The spark which brought a variety of different queer groups–lesbians, upper class gay men, street kids, queens–into an alliance was the AIDS crisis, a material manifestation of homophobic violence.
In our current moment, defined as it is by micro-targeted advertising, queerness appears as an individualized identity which exists for us and only us. That is absurd. We can call ourselves whatever we want, but fascists will still attack us using the state to its fullest effect. What we need is a queerness grounded in a militant solidarity, a solidarity that is clear in our friends–other queers, other workers, the imperialized working class, who we may disagree with or dislike but who we need to work with and develop–and our enemies–the Christo-fascists, the patriarchy, and ultimately the capitalist state.
This needs to be connected with another reformulation of queerness. As the AIDS crisis worsened, the narrative that queer people appear not by choice but that we are ‘born this way’ was used as a rhetorical shield. Queer people went from a societal failure, a threat, to an someone who could be comfortably assimilated into our society. This is not to say that there were not monumental struggles in the 2000s and 2010s–it was not even 20 years ago that any homosexual act could lead to one being arrested in much of this country–but the experience of countless people who have been agitated into queerness, and the attacks of conservatives both speak to another narrative. You have heard that queer people are a social contagion, that by being a lesbian school teacher, a flaming gay barista, or a drag queen who reads stories to children, we are ‘tricking’ people into queerness.
Queer people are a social contagion, our existence is an attack on our society’s narratives about sex and gender, because those narratives are bullshit and have only ever been forced through violence. Violence used to keep a gay kid in a quietly sad and unexamined life, violence used to keep trans people at a hyper-exploited edge of society, violence used to keep women in domestic servitude and men in a dumb state of dominance. There is nothing ‘natural’ about our current gender regime, and our existence is proof of that, which is why we are a threat.
We know this when we have helped our friends realize their gender, realize their sexuality. We know this when we call people eggs, we know this when we work to convince our friends who we already know are gay to embrace themselves. Just by existing in the open we erode the patriarchy’s bad deal, but so many queers are already amazing agitators because queerness is agitational. Imagine if we were simply to use that, what a movement of queers could achieve. That is why fascists fear us.
PARIS HAS BURNT: THE FRAGMENTED QUEER COMMUNITY
The “Queer Community” is often talked about as if it is a real, existing thing, but that is not fully true. What exists in every city is less of a unified community and more of a series of interconnected networks of social circles. Friend groups, housemates, artistic collaborators, polycules, or small activist micro-groups show up to community-wide events at venues or Pride marches, but those groups do not coordinate with these venues or marches in any significant way, and ultimately they are the ones who decide to show up or not show up, not the organizers of these events.
This situation is the product of lack of buy-in to official Gay Rights organizations. In a process similar to the degeneration of the Civil Rights movement, as the struggles for broad-based political rights were won (gay marriage, but also the abolition of sodomy laws), the cross-class gay rights movement fractured. Most official organizations you would come across–who host Pride parades, do lobby days, etc, are class organizations of queer business owners or queer employees of big capital, from tech to finance. But because so many of those fights were conducted through legal channels, these NGOs do not have the pull that liberal ‘community organizing’ groups (who are largely funded by big capital) have in America’s internal colonies.
While we have avoided a parasitic relationship with NGOs, the queer community has its own share of weaknesses, particularly escapism and individualism. This doesn’t just refer to our proclivity towards splitting over children’s shows. It also refers to a ‘literal’ escape, to some perfect community free of oppression which can exist within a world defined by oppression. That is absurd. Even at its best, perfect sanctuary communities do not exist because the ‘outside’ is always also ‘within’. Contradictions of class & race also exist within our communities, and harmful ideologies need to be ideologically defeated instead of escaped. A racist society will create racist communes.
Furthermore, because we are so individualized, we are deeply bad at resolving conflict. Our society has ruined a tool which is absolutely crucial for radicals—criticism—by making it a weapon of the powerful against the weak. If you are criticized, it is often by your boss, or the prelude to a breakup, and thus it is easy to see criticism as an attack. But when we perceive criticism as an attack, and when we solely use it as an attack, we foreclose on our ability to make our friends, loved ones, comrades, better. Our community is fantastic at creating tempests in teapots, or in other words, treating disagreement as abuse, because of we experience criticism as an expression of power. But all that happens and continues to happen because we see queerness as an individual identity rather than an identity inherently opposed to oppression and exploitation, and have given up the task of reshaping ourselves.
While these tempests in a teapot rage we continue to ignore the deep segregation within queerness. Because our queer ‘community’ is effectively a network of friend groups that formed inside our segregated and racist society, we end up socializing in segregated ways, struggling in segregated ways, and replicating our society’s racism with a pink veneer. This problem, like escapism and individualism, cannot be fixed through changing our friend groups. It can only be resolved through the transformation of our social circles into political ones. By creating queer political collectives and engaging in political work, we not only build our capacity to defend ourselves against the Christian right, we also equip ourselves to actually resolve the fundamentally political issues within our community.
THE HOMO’S PLACE IS AT THE HEAD OF A MOVEMENT
It is no surprise that so many queer people have become socialist due to their awareness of the way that their gender based oppression emerges from capitalist exploitation. But the theories of most socialist and progressive organizations in the US tells us that in order to be Serious we must leave our “subculture”, must organize “normal people” and not queer people, must shear our connections to our community.
This has always been an effectively homophobic argument, but it is also incorrect. While we must remold ourselves and work to combat our own patriarchal and racist beliefs, our interaction with the queer community is not some grand mistake that needs correcting. Our interconnection is our strength, and shearing that connection does not make for better work, or a better person. Indeed, it just continues the alienation of politics from our day to day lives.
If we are to build a militant queer movement we must move past that alienation and transform our personal circles into political collectives. In our studies we have found that there are two crucial elements to successfully forming a political group
A social basis for the group: people need to have some kind of community that exists outside of the explicit work of the group, if we want to have an organization that does not feel like a new job.
A shared strategy, so that we understand why we do the things we do.
Because the queer community is in actuality a network of interconnected social circles, we effectively already have the first item resolved. If we want to transform those circles into political bodies, what is required is the development of a shared strategy. The way to do this is through the development of a study group that aims towards developing a shared strategic perspective, which you can sum up in points of unity. The content of what you read can be anything your group wants; Circles Mag intends to republish pieces that would serve this purpose, such as Organization Means Commitment, Constructive Criticism: A Handbook, or The Tyranny of Structurelessness. What is important here is that the discussion around these pieces be relevant to your lives, and aimed towards making points of agreement and disagreement clear, that these conversations be summed up in points of unity which describe your view of the world, what you hope to achieve, and how you seek to achieve it.
I know, “another reading group?” But these reading groups are really about reflecting on our own experience, mediated by the text, to foster our thinking about the problems in our lives, where they come from, and what we would want to change about it. If we want to intervene in struggles, to go to moments of crisis and talk to oppressed people, to our fellows queers, to other workers, we should have something worth saying. Importantly, the struggles you should intervene in do not necessarily have to be ‘queer’ struggles, because the struggle for queer liberation is not disconnected or separate from other struggles. The struggle for a real queer liberation requires the transformation of the cornerstone of the capitalist-imperialist state, the family. Thus the fight for queer liberation is intimately tied to the universal struggle against oppression and exploitation everywhere. This may seem like an impossible escalation of your task: “was I not just starting a reading group?”. But because we are fantastic agitators at the junction of imperial capitalism, because we are embedded in so many spaces, we can use those strengths to strike at society’s weak points.
Capitalism exists under a state of constant crisis and contradiction, indeed the things that are crises for us are the profits that capitalists and the imperialist state pulls from us. Normally those crises exist for one person, family, or neighborhood. Your boss fires you. Your landlord evicts you. Homophobes beat your partner. But we have also seen moments when those crises spill out, when people see theplight of the oppressedas their own, and when that happens things suddenly move very quickly. The George Floyd Uprising in 2020 was precisely that kind of societal crisis, caused by the death of a handful of people at the hands of the police. What you need is to be at the site of this crisis before it explodes, with an idea of what should be done, which is delivered at the right time.
Being able to synthesize all of your experiences into a political line is one reason to start with a reading club. But we do not arrive at a perfect position without some push and pull, and the other main reason to start with a low stakes reading group is the need to test and grow your collective’s ability to disagree productively. I have seen so many friendships and political organizations that have been absolutely destroyed by our inability to productively criticize each other. By developing our differences in the low stakes space of a reading group, we can model good conflict without the risk of destroying an ongoing project.
While I hesitate to give further strategic advice given that your situation will depend on your context, I have some suggestions on broad potential campaigns:
If you want to focus your work entirely on the organization of your local queer community, I would suggest picking a material enemy–a local homophobic church, anti-choice organizations, or crisis pregnancy centers (fake clinics used to undermine reproductive choice in blue states). A good issue would be to focus on abortion as a way of connecting the struggles for queer and women’s liberation. I would suggest that you use the age-tested strategy of ‘educate the agitator’, developing talking points and analysis which you teach to people who are interested in this work, and asking them to spread this to their own social circles.
If you instead want to build a union in a workplace or apartment complex, I would strongly suggest Kurt Marlin’s Nontraditional Unionism.
If you look at your local scene and see an organization which is doing exactly the kind of work you want to do, you should interact with them and get a sense of if they could accept your collective, and if the way they do the work is the way you would do it. If that is the case, join en masse after talking with their leadership and membership about it.
There are days when I take a walk along the river by my home. During that walk I am suddenly taken by this thought, this insane thought, that through my own deeds and thoughts I have become a small part of the socialist movement. I feel the wind at my back as the hundreds of comrades I have made, the ground on my feet as the millions of past comrades on whose shoulders I stand. It is an exhilarating feeling, and it often lasts but a second, but those moments steel me, and I want that feeling for everyone. What I have described sounds like a tremendous amount of work, and it is. But this work, of building a real community, of fighting against your shared oppression, of being a homo at the head of the movement, is one of the most meaningful things you can do.
Some cursory suggestions for organizing:
Always reflect and encourage reflection after every meeting you have with people outside your collective.
Make sure that decision-making happens during meetings, and that all decisions are upheld after meetings in order to prevent the individualist tendency of letting disagreements slide in a meeting and complaining afterwards.
A meeting is only ever as good as the notes you take on that meeting. Without notes on a meeting, people will forget what they said and agreed to, which will rapidly degrade your work. There is no point when you should not take minutes on meetings.
If you don’t bring up your politics during your work, your ideas will never spread, and you won’t be able to sharpen your talking points. At all times work to make your politics as explicit as you can in the spaces you are in.
Continue nurturing social links with and clarifying your politics with every new person who wants to join.
What happened to Marxist Center and what does it tell us about base building?
Introduction
There have now been three post-mortems on Marxist Center by its members: Tim Horras’ The Dead End And How We Got There, Marisa Miale’s “Dissolving the People and Electing Another” and Renato Flores’ Marx Did Not Invent Socialism, He Observed It. In the case of Horras, he did a capable job presenting the perspective of one side of the ‘split’ in Marxist Center (MC) but spent most of the article defending base-building’s relevance after it’s collapse. In the case of Flores, but also of Miale’s “Dissolving the People,” the authors avoided speaking to the specifics of the conflict that caused MC’s demise.
It is understandable that these three authors did not speak to every aspect of MC’s breakup, but we should not be satisfied with that. Without an all-sided understanding of the conflict, what we are left with is an organization of some thousand odd members who floundered and disappeared for reasons that are not entirely clear. In such a situation, and in the context of multiple authors avoiding giving their side on the issue, many have come to think that MC fell apart due to some petty drama or disagreement beneath our thinking.
I want to be clear about this, and about all cases where we dismiss a conflict as being mere drama. If we say that an organization with a thousand people just collapsed for interpersonal reasons, and we don’t need to think about it any further than that, then we have no business organizing, theorizing, or calling ourselves socialists. We are effectively saying that anything we do can collapse at any moment for reasons we are not willing to investigate.
Without that investigation, we have seen the events of MC’s four year existence devolve to the level of hearsay and rumor. The central tenet of MC, base-building, has been taken on by a new generation of theorists and practitioners who are unaware of the way that the theory was practiced in MC and whether its collapse had anything to do with the strategy it held so closely. Without investigation, base-building threatens to become a beautiful idea, which only fails from a betrayal by practitioners and organizations we do not care to know about, to be picked up and applied in the same ways that destroyed a thousand person organization.
It is understandable that Horras gave an account of MC which largely takes his side. It is understandable that Flores and Miale gave accounts which did not include the specifics of a debate they were not directly involved in. But as organizers, as socialists, as Marxists, we should ask for more than that. In the collapse of MC I was on neither “side,” my participation was limited to interacting with its theoretical forefounders, a handful of at-large meetings, and my work during the 2021 convention and afterwards trying to keep it together. I feel the need to relay this story because the collapse of an organization is not just a matter of the egos of its primary participants, is not something we should brush off in order to defend our great ideas, and is not the personal property of its inheritors. It is owned by us all, and is something we should all consider. We cannot learn from the past if the past is not recounted, and we cannot develop our work if we refuse to learn from the past.
The Founding
MC emerged from a handful of independent socialist organizations over the course of 2016-2018, its core was a group of theorists who became increasingly unified around one strategy: base-building. Sophia Burns, Tim Horras, Teresa Kalisz, Avery Minelli, the coyly named DB Cooper and many others all came together on shared theses:
The existing left is a poor engine for class struggle due to their focus on student politics and a subculture of ‘activists’ disconnected from a working class base, which is tied to the class composition of the left and the work they do, and which are linked phenomena.
The activist left’s focus on political lines obscures a broad unity on the work they do, which is mainly showing up to ‘activist networking’ protests and campaigning for Democrats.
Practice and structure creates its own ideology which is inextricable and not worth countering.
What is needed is a new strategy, based around organizing the unorganized, and using mutual aid and tenants unions alongside other counter-power institutions to build up the class, which would lead to a revolutionary politics after that work had been done.
That this strategy implies an abstention from both electoral and ‘movement’ politics, and that neither form of work can build a movement of the working class.
While there was already a divergence between members about the specifics, this core set of theses unified the people and organizations who came together to form MC in 2018. At the time this was a massive breath of fresh air between tailing barely extant social movements, praying that Bernie 2020 would redeem us, and holding onto the rapidly decaying remnants of the sectarian left. Over this period base-building has become common sense within the broader US left, with both explicit adherents and a group of people who performed it without knowing the broader canon. In 2020, the rapid collapse of the economic situation led to a massive boom in mutual aid organization, and from 2018 to now we have seen tenant organizations growing out of a handful of cities into a presence across the country. This occurred while the International Socialist Organization collapsed, the Workers World Party fell into obscurity, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation faced constant conflicts around abuse. All of this indicated that base building as a tendency, and MC as an organization was on the rise.
The Problems
From the beginning, MC faced problems. Several of the founding organizations fell apart in the first year, but beyond that, the national (and then international) organization and the basics of their strategy were flawed in a way which led it to fall apart over 2021.
Structural Issues
We cannot understand the collapse of MC, or the stakes of the 2021 convention, without understanding the level of decentralization the organization had. In the immediate collapse of the organization, a common theme among outsiders speaking on the breakup was that the groups involved in MC were too different to ever work together. While that was one aspect of the problem, DSA is also a massively big tent organization which has had more than its share of interpersonal conflicts, but DSA chapters are resilient in a way that other organizations are not. The best example of this was the story of South Jersey DSA, which dissolved its relationship to the national organization in protest over disagreements they had with the Sanders endorsement to join MC. Two years later, the chapter which joined MC had narrowed down to one person, while the DSA chapters comprising the area have reformed.
I happen to agree that the 2019 Sanders endorsement was done in a haphazard manner and that the DSA’s weddedness to the Sanders campaign is the cause of its current strategic underdevelopment. But while an interpersonal blowup between members in MC could destroy the affiliate forever, this was not the case in DSA, where eventually a group of at-large members would be able to reconstitute the chapter. This occurred due to a series of things that DSA had which MC did not:
A national membership list
Any member who joins DSA joins the national first, and may move to a different chapter or create a chapter in a space without one if need be. MC did not have a unified membership list, instead going off of information voluntarily given by affiliates with a national list only for at-large members.
Lack of paper members
Paper members are often criticized within and without DSA, but they act as a stabilizing force in any conflict. An organization with 20 members needs to keep relationships between those 20 people to a certain level of comradelness, because a disagreement may lead to some group of people leaving and starting their own organization. On the other hand, an organization with 20 active members out of 200 means that any conflict occurs within the context of a broader membership who does not understand the stakes of the conflict. This may lead to a ‘lowest common denominator’ effect but does prevent conflicts from being resolved in splits.
Lack of dues share
The MC Continental organization had very few resources, meaning that the links affiliates had to the central organization were wholly voluntary. Since 2019, DSA chapters may have conflicts with the national organization, but that has been buoyed by hundreds of dollars received per quarter meaning that it is relatively rare for a chapter to just up and leave. That was not present in MC, and they had a seemingly low level of participation in their organization-wide Discord and in organization-wide meetings.
These concerns left MC in a very fragile place: unable to reconstitute affiliates if it lost them, under far more threat of affiliates ending their participation in the organization than competing organizations, and without the name recognition or meteoric growth that DSA had, the organization was still reducible to the same fifty people at the national level three years into its existence, and furthermore, to the rivalries between many of those people.
These concerns that MC as an international organization was fragile and easily fractured led to the “centralizer” position in the 2021 convention, which Horras was a part of. I will now explain the concerns which led to the “network” position.
Lack of Theorization
MC did not just lose several of its organizations within the first year, it also lost many of its leading theorists. Within just 2019, Avery Minnelli, Alyson Escalante, DB Cooper, and Sophia Burns had ended their ties with the organization or stopped writing entirely. This would be fine on its own, except there was not a new group of theorists leading the way. Regeneration, the central journal, published 42 articles in 2019, 27 in 2020, and none in 2021. In contrast, Cosmonaut magazine published 84 articles in 2019, 70 in 2020, and far more since, not counting podcast episodes or letters to the editor. Discussions in Regeneration were limited to debates over the use of reform campaigns, and in 2020 a large portion of the articles were not so much analysis but public statements by affiliates.
This was important because so much of base-building theory consisted of a relatively simple command: to abstain from any organizing outside of base building work. Horras’ Activist Networking or Organizing the Unorganizedand Sophia Burns’ The US Left Has Only Four Tendencieswere both largely criticisms of other forms of political work leading to the need for base building as the sole remaining option, rather than the buttressing some already theorized strategy. This meant that while base-building and the creation of tenant organizations specifically were accepted as central to MC, there was not much direct discussion of this work because base-building theory was not an analysis of tenant organization so much as it was a criticism of anything else an organization could do.
Instead of sharpening political goals and analysis, what did take up the minds of MC members was an administrative fetish which manifested in obsessions with cybernetics and other organizational theories. The promise given by these proselytizers of administration was that with the correct organizational form you would create an organization which could ‘run on its own,’ thus transferring questions of strategy and politics into questions of structure and management, which is an inherently depoliticizing frame. As this shift occurred, questions about the nature and purpose of base-building went underground and became more and more connected to the common sense of the Left that we should focus attention away from our own activist subculture and toward “normal people.” Thus, as the theoretical discussion of MC shifted towards more and more granular questions of administration, the work of local affiliates became disconnected from the still deeply held belief in base-building by the at-large membership.
This disconnect became worse in 2020 because many affiliates did engage in work which had previously been considered out of bounds. Philly Socialists became a part of a coalition and was involved in street actions despite this being advocated against in “Activist Networking or Organizing the Unorganized” and in “The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies”. This also occurred with Red Bloom in New York City and Counterpower in Virginia. I am not saying this to criticize or to levy a charge of hypocrisy, but this work was being done outside of the bounds of base-building as it had been construed in 2015-17, and there was no theorization explaining why this change was happening. In Flores’ article, he says that “meetings seem a bit superfluous when you spend most of your time doing base-building work.” This was an attitude which was also applied to theorization and developing after action reports: why spend your time analyzing work you are already doing when the strategy is so clear?
The problem is that theory is the way we articulate and expand our understanding of our work to others. Within MC, several local affiliates went against the established doctrine in their work, this was never understood or explained outside of it being the “right thing to do” to a mass membership, and the events and conversations which occurred as a product of Philly Socialists or Red Bloom engaging in street coalitions were never turned into a broader understanding of base-building. That multiple affiliates broke with the theoretical tradition during a key point should have said something about that tradition. 2020 should have been an event which changed the way base-builders thought about socialism, just as 1968 was for communists. Instead, the largest protest wave in US history may have changed some minds, but that change was never expressed to a broader audience.
I recall the only at-large meeting I participated in during my time at MC. This was in July of 2020, about the way that at-large members were interacting with local protest movements. Within the at-large membership, I saw what I can only describe as a base-builder dogmatism, which I saw throughout the Left during this period. The sentiment I saw was, effectively, that the protests are just activists blowing off steam, a distraction from organizing, and we should, now more than ever, stay the course.
This exposed a fault within base-building which was at its worst within the at-large membership: that its abstentionism could very easily turn into dogmatism, and that the turn away from organizing ‘activist networks’ could turn into a distrust of social movements more broadly. The 2020 protests had a contradictory nature, unquestionably, but the view of all protests as always-already coopted meant that a group of people who considered themselves the most left-wing people in their cities refused to engage in a space where they could agitate for their politics, in the name of building a base of people who were (it was assumed) ready to move on from the protests. Throughout 2020 we saw avowed communists even agitate against participation in these protests because the protests were led by activists who turned off the “normal people” they were organizing. This fear of engaging with already politicized people not only contributed to the failures of conflict resolution at the 2021 Convention, it has hamstrung not only MC or ‘base-builders’ but the socialist Left broadly over the course of the last six years.
Theoretical incoherence is not a death sentence. DSA has plenty of its own, and underneath the seeming agreement democratic centralist organizations have there is a great deal of discord. But in an organization with only voluntary links between its affiliates and at-large membership, this was a problem. Every affiliate came into MC expecting it to be something slightly different, and every affiliate and every at-large member experienced the years afterwards in deeply different ways which they never communicated with each other. This was exacerbated by the turn, within the at-large membership and Philly Socialists, to immediate centralization as the solution of MC’s woes. Which brings us to the at-large problem.
The At-Large Question
In 2019, MC created a space for ‘at-large’(that is, individual) members. Immediately, a large number of sympathizers with the base-building canon joined up, and MC soon found itself with roughly 20% of its total membership as at-large members. I was included among those numbers, as were many of MC’s most active members at the international level.
Generally, at-large membership can serve two potential roles: either these at-large members help form new locals, or they can help serve administrative functions of the broader organization. Due to a variety of reasons including the perceived superfluousness of political organization separate from mass work, and the existence of an international MC organization to plug into, the 200 or so at-large members never created local organizations over the course of MC’s existence. Instead, they started working together to help create international-level institutions. It was this process which made the affiliates consider the at-large membership a threat, which sets the stage for the conflict at the 2021 convention.
The existence of a category of members involved almost solely with continental-level work was not necessarily a problem, but combined with their alignment with the ‘original’ base-building canon and their lack of change over 2020, it posed both a cultural and a structural conflict with many of the affiliates. As they began interacting with the affiliates a series of problems regarding competing conceptions of the organization coalesced. Working on any committee immediately created the problem that affiliates did not even have a unified member list or any reason to accept help from what were considered disconnected bureaucrats. To the at-large members, this felt like affiliate autonomy was being used as a shield to prevent accountability or transparency. To the affiliates, this felt like a class of bureaucrats forcing them into an organization they had never agreed to be a part of. This was worsened by the loudest at-large members being seen as typical white male shitposters.
This laid out the scope of the conflict which both sides brought into 2021. Even before the convention the affiliates were looking for an escape route, as they felt the organization was steadily becoming something different than what they joined, and the at-large members and Philly Socialists were insistent on centralizing the organization. The conflict between these two groups would then spell the death of the organization and almost every sub-organization involved.
The 2021 Convention
Day 1
I only participated in the actual events of the 2021 convention and cannot speak to the leadup to it, but the twin problems I presented: that MC was structurally unable to integrate its at-large members without changing its relationship with affiliates, and that there was not sufficient strategic unity (because of a lack of theoretical unity) for any agreement to be fostered on what shape the convention would take. Combine that with interpersonal grievances and poor conflict resolution, and you have the events which destroyed an organization brought together over the course of 5 years in nearly one hour.
The first issue was that the lack of organizational and theoretical unity were articulated in a way where they were opposed to each other. The main item of the Convention: whether the MC would become a centralized ‘party’ with a focus on membership committees or remain a decentralized ‘network’ with a focus on establishing theoretical unity to determine whether centralization was even feasible, combined the two issues of MC together in such a way that it could never be resolved. While no speaker at the convention accepted this framing, there was no synthesis or alternative framing presented, and the events of the next few weeks solidified this stilted framing.
The second issue was that interpersonal disagreements and animus were escalating rapidly in the lead up to the convention. Over the past few months groups like Red Braid, Counterpower, and Red Bloom increasingly felt that they had been hoodhinked, brought into an organization which was transforming in a way they had not agreed to. This turned into fears that Philly Socialists and the at-large membership outnumbered them and would turn them into subsidiaries of a model they didn’t agree with. On the other hand, the at-large membership and Philly Socialists went from seeing the affiliates as organizations which perhaps disagreed with the vision they were trying to built to an internal fifth column of exactly the kind of sectarian and cultic organizations they were trying to get away from, whose desire for autonomy was just a justification for undemocratic and unaccountable rule. This made the resolution of this disagreement increasingly unfeasible, and attempts to even articulate what the disagreement was about felt beyond the point. Beyond this, the affiliates felt that the most outspoken at-large members were chauvinistic, ‘online’ white men which clashed with their desire to merge with the movements of women, queers, and oppressed people. For their part, at-large members (I cannot speak to Philly Socialists) felt that this was an unfair accusation of a group which included several women, queer people, and people of oppressed nationalities.
For all of these bubbling conflicts, the first day of convention seemed relatively calm. The debate on whether MC should remain a network or become a party was scheduled for the second day, but much of the voting on organizational change was scheduled for the first. So without a clear setting of the stakes of the debate, things proceeded rapidly into a rather tense argument over organizational reforms which perhaps did not make sense to the participants who were not intimately involved in continental organization. This reinforced a sense among the affiliates that the continental organization was full of toxic opinionated keyboard warriors which lended a sense of worry to any steps towards centralization. This was worsened by one RD who ran on the position that the affiliates needed to be brought into line, who did his best to escalate conflicts where it benefitted him So even though many of the strongest pushes towards centralization were stopped, the moderate pushes towards a unified membership list were enough to trigger the affiliates ‘nuclear option’.
Midnight
On midnight of the first day of the convention, the affiliates dropped a proposal they had been drafting in secret as a way out of an organization they felt was becoming alien towards them. The proposal was that the category of at-large would be dissolved, and at-large members of MC would be required to either create their own organizations within two years time or leave the organization.
This was not a purge, although it was immediately perceived as one. Rather it was the outgrowth of the kind of structuralist thinking that the affiliates, and indeed all MC members, shared. The issue for them was not that there was little to no interest in developing a unified line outside of vague ‘organize!’ platitudes, but that the at-large members had not gone through the process of developing themselves intrinsic to organizing, and thus were unable to effectively communicate with the organizations in MC. The assumption was that the process of organizing would help the organization get on the same page, but the perception that the affiliates were dropping a proposal to purge a fifth of MC’s membership led to a rapid escalation of hostilities, with old friends suddenly revealing and litigating long standing grievances, while others began cop and fedjacketing the other side of the organization.
I was never an active member of MC. Many of my closest friends were, but for the entirety of my at-large membership I was more focused on my duties as a steering committee member of Rochester DSA, a position which I realize put me on the outside of an organization which was to a degree opposed to DSA. I had even argued against at-large membership for other groups in the past, on the same grounds that the affiliates had opposing at-large membership in MC. Alongside my friendship with members of Red Bloom, I was broadly aligned with the affiliates, but due to my conflict averse tendencies I saw the massive blow up of interpersonal and political disagreements as something to keep away from.
Thirty minutes later, I was contacted by three friends, Marisa M, Jess L, and Jenny N, who convinced me of the need to de-escalate the conflict within MC. We worked to lower the temperature, first during that night, and then over the coming weeks. The second day of the convention featured more excessive grandstanding by people afraid of being purged and more reactions to that grandstanding. The ‘at-large’ question was tabled, with some of the affiliates admitting it was an overreaction. Over the week after that we scheduled calls with at-large members, affiliates, and members of Philly Socialists. We isolated the worst offenders who were escalating things and tried to iron out differences while preparing for the ‘mini-convention’ which was scheduled for that summer with the goal of finally adjudicating the at-large question.
But the damage had already been done. Over the first week, an affiliate quietly left after confiding in me that to them, the ‘at-large proposal’ was more a justification for leaving than a serious suggestion. Over the coming months we held the first Constructive Criticism study group for the at-large membership generally, and Jess L held one for Philly Socialists. But running a book club on conflict resolution after the fact is a difficult thing, as these skills work best preemptively. Years of petty disagreements and distrust coming out over the course of a few hours, dozens of comrades grandstanding and copjacketing each other, is always going to be hard to come back from. Without drastic structural and political changes which no one was willing to act on, the simple fact is that no one wanted to work together anymore. Disagreements had become stronger than any community MC had.
By the time the mini-convention came later that summer, MC was already barely more than Philly Socialists and at-large members. The Constructive Criticism Collective’s proposal (which would have strengthened the theoretical journal and given it the goal of helping MC comrades scientifically analyze their work) was treated by the mini-convention an interesting oddity, but was barely discussed. I had already checked out, but Marisa and Jenny remained involved in their committees until they too disconnected from it. Over 2021, many of the affiliates who left MC broke apart for their own reasons. At the end, 15 remaining active members decided to sunset the project. There was no second blowup, no resolution of disagreements; Marxist Center died with a bang and then a whimper.
Why did this happen? How can we stop it?
I did not write this article just to detail the collapse of an organization I was a part of. I think the lessons of MC’s collapse are transferable. I think that the faults it revealed in both base-building and our broader movement’s failings in analyzing conflict are universal. The base-building canon depicted all its enemies as either unreasonable sectarians, thoughtless activists, or creatures of the Democratic Party, and all those terms were thrown about throughout the convention when MC fell apart. The way we deal with conflict within our movement is the same as the way we deal with conflict within our organizations, because the barrier between inside and outside is ever-changing. MC was a cross ideological organization which did not work to synthesize its tendencies in any capacity. This lack of synthesis left them strategically listless, prevented them from realizing the flaws in the mass organizations they were building, and now, a year after its collapse, hardly any of its locals even exist.
I do not think that MC collapsed because it was too multi-tendency, because of wreckers, or because it was betrayed. MC collapsed because it had deep structural issues which were compounded with a fundamental disagreement on what their work looked like, which made any resolution of those structural issues impossible. What theoretical unity did exist made conditions worse, as it was broadly a unity of disunity: that hammering out strategic and theoretical agreement was the kind of things sects did, that the point was to “build the base” and that to do more than that made one suspect. That is not a unique position for a leftist organization to be in post-2022. What strategic unity existed (we should build the base) became irrelevant post 2020 as nearly every city had a new organization with a similar mission set with politics wildly different than MC but with no way for MCites to articulate this difference (except by casting those groups out of the pale as ultra-left, sect-like, reactionary, Democrat-aligned, etc). Thus, the affiliates who wanted a ‘network’ arrayed around a strengthened internal publication were written off as sectarians in waiting, who wanted to turn MC into nothing but a talk shop. But without those affiliates any centralization efforts by MC were a dead letter, as there is no need for a centralized national body with only one extant local.
There is an easy narrative you could spin here: MC collapsed because some people did not believe in its project enough, it collapsed because of potential infiltration, it collapsed because it was betrayed by groups who believed they were base-building but who were actually sectarian organizations. This is all far too simple and far too clean. MC was not betrayed, it was destroyed by its own contradictions which were, at every step of the way, avoided. To the degree that the federal intervention of Colorado Springs Communists damaged the organization, it did so because there were already contradictions which the FBI preyed on. Constructive criticism and careful management of conflict are not important skills to avoid conflict. Good conflict is necessary, and by struggling over the unity of our political principles we can sharpen those ideas.
Rereading the founding texts of ‘base-building’ one might be shocked at the lack of definition of base-building in those texts. They are largely criticisms of other tendencies with little to no positive argument besides the need to organize the unorganized. Those who choose not to build the base/organize the unorganized are described as performative, as activists inherently disconnected from the movement, and as not worth arguing with and not worth convincing. Perhaps that was true at the time. In the early 2010s the socialist Left was filled with organizations which were later derided as sects by MC, who sought to use any movement, any seeming display of spontaneity, to recruit people into their organizations, which often had longstanding issues with sexual assault (which destroyed the International Socialist Organization, hurt the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Workers World Party, and which are currently collapsing the Canadian branch of the International Marxist Tendency as well as the Canadian Communist Party). In such a context it made sense to theorize and then create an organization which would do precisely the opposite of these sects, who organized among the masses while they held book clubs, who did things while they focused on internal matters. It also made sense, in the early 2010s, to write off the possibility of useful interaction with these sectarian organizations. Better, perhaps, to focus on building the base of socialism and the ocean socialists swim in, while leaving those abstract questions online leftists love to parse out to later.
That we live in a drastically different country from the early Obama years is obvious. That another strategy is required when the previous one has not worked in a decade should be obvious. But base-building’s faults were not just responsible for MC’s lack of growth. It was also responsible for their failure to properly manage conflict leading to its collapse, and this was a fault that Philly Socialists and at-large members shared with the affiliates.
Building the base. Organizing the unorganized. Organizing apolitical people. Organizing normal people. In all of these formulations I heard hundreds of times while I was a part of MC, the task was articulated as a purely administrative one, where the organizer puts organization onto an unorganized normal person who, it is assumed, has had no thoughts about the world and no inklings of socialism in their brain before they were organized. Those people who already had thoughts about the world were written off as activists. I heard this too over my time in MC; engaging in the George Floyd protests was seen by both at-large members and interested base builders as inherently opposed to organizing ‘normal people.’ I heard stories where white 20-something socialists would talk about the Paris Commune or some other topic that interested them, and then clam up when a person of color asked them what they were talking about. No wonder MC’s leadership remained effectively unchanged in its 3 years of existence! No wonder so many in the MC viewed themselves as Watchmaker Gods, if the only task is to create an organization and let the workers come to it.
This fetish for structure existed on both sides of the 2021 Convention divide. Both sides viewed the problem as a problem of structure, where they would change the structure of MC in order to bring their rivals into line, while dismissing the idea of speaking through their disagreements given that the disagreements were themselves created by structure. Their belief system left no room for their own agency as human beings, no room to see interlocutors as also human beings coming to different theses, and thus no room for disagreement. And so in their first major disagreement, the organization collapsed.
But even had it not collapsed, the single minded focus on mass work failed to take account of what the actual cadre of the organizations they had built were. There were, as far as I am aware, almost no leaders present at the MC convention had been brought up from the base. Each of the active members were pre-existing socialists who had been convinced by the base-building canon to engage in MC. This was not seen as an achievement but as an embarrassment, which encouraged these socialists to pull the ladder of agitation up with them. Base-building claimed none of the victories or growth it promised, and because of the commonsensical way it presented itself, many of the hundreds of people who burnt out before or after the 2021 convention largely left it thinking that all that could have been done had been done, that politics in the United States are impossible.
As I have noted before, base building ‘won’. Nearly every city in the United States developed a mutual aid organization in 2020, tenant organizing is widespread. But we do not get to claim this disconnected movement for our own while ignoring it’s failures. If the United States has seen thousands of new mutual aid organizations, it has also seen thousands of them peter out into small cells of well meaning progressives who do forms of red charity. If the United States in the last decade has seen hundreds of tenant struggles, it has also seen hundreds of ephemeral tenant organizations united only over the slightest of economic concerns, constantly threatening to phase out.
I want to address head on one other failing of base-building’s blurring between the need to build a working class base and ‘normal people’. MC had a disproportionate number of trans people involved in it, and for many of them this was an eye-opening experience. Transgender people formed a key part of MC’s theoretical and political leadership, with almost the entirety of the core of classical base-building theorists being trans or nonbinary. This made sense, given that transitioning is to many a political journey, given the tight online circles that trans people organized themselves into. Ironically, if it were not for the tight connections that existed in the Tumblr communist milieu (a space that hardly anyone would say is normal), base-building would not have had the reach it had.
That base-building pointed people out of their circles and towards ‘the people’ may have been good, and from one comrade’s mouth “we gained more respect and support for trans people as tenant organizers than we ever did as organizers of LGBT issues.” But it posed a new problem—by definition, ‘normal people’ were exactly the opposite kinds of people who would ever associate with a trans communist. Pieces came out decrying the very idea of ‘leftist organizers’ (defined as an organizer who cares about pronouns or other basic elements of trans life). The authors of those pieces and several more have gone into a transphobic direction as a fascist offensive against queer people and women advances, which is a failing in and of itself, but there was a further problem.
If we acknowledge that almost all of MC’s theorists, that most of its leaders, came from very tight circles of trans people, why did they not continue this growth? Why was the main task of base-building to point trans organizers away from their communities towards ‘the people,’ rather than seeing the revolutionary potential in their own spaces? Would that have been better?
In focusing ourselves on economistic mass organizing, base builders justified our work by saying that politics is not necessary for the working class in this juncture. We then created mass organizations which had no political reason to unify, to scarcely even exist, because our goal could only ever be vague and self-reducing. Further, because many of us were ashamed of the nature of our realization that we should avoid politics, we stayed away from all segments we deemed ultraleftist, subcultural, and since potentially socialist or threatening, not working class. The failure of base builders to create a unifying political organization stems from the same economism which led them to ignore the nature of their cadre. Marxism is not the dissolution of the socialist movement. It is not socialists patronizing any section of the workers we can get our hands on. It has to be the merging of the socialist movement with the most advanced section of workers. I must say that I, and almost every other person living in the United States in 2022, have only a slight idea of what the success of such a merger would look like. But I know that many of its failures looked like the MC.
Socialists must do what only socialists can do
“With your eyes open, or your eyes closed Take a moment to connect with where you are”
–Parquet Courts
It is the task of communists, in this and all moments, to unify the advanced sections of the working class, bring up the intermediate sections, and isolate the backwards sections. To engage in this work we have to recognize that anyone we interact with has a pre-existing awareness of their situation. That our goal is not just to win vaguely defined campaigns and policies, to find some group of ‘normal people’ who have never once thought about their lives and fill their minds with predetermined correct ideas, but to develop a socialist vision which we both bring people into and redefine as we work with others. That those who are ‘already convinced’ of the necessity of socialism do not come to us with their brains pre-filled with all the right information, and for that matter neither do we. This realization requires that we constantly weave ideological work into our organizational work if we are not just going to reproduce the class barriers of our society within our organizations. If we were to build a MC’ of political vision which brings the workers and socialist movements together, we must go through a long process of articulation and cohesion, of compromise and influence, of communication of ideas between people who agree on those ideas. In short, we needed to unite with the most active segments of the workers movement, and from there needed to educate our lowest comrades to the highest levels. By focusing our eyes on ‘normal workers,’ base-building and its offshoots pointed us in the exact opposite direction.
Mass work is still important. Socialists should be directly involved in movement work and building tenant and workplace unions, and we should do it openly as socialists and in a way that is consistent with our socialist ethics. In the United States of 2022, only socialists and communists care about building democratic organizations of the workers and oppressed, which can survive through more than one generation of cadre. But this work should also, must also, be predicated on the innate human desire to learn, to share one’s knowledge, to grow yourself. We live in a society rife with class oppression, racial oppression, gendered oppression, and if we avoid confronting these oppressions we cannot expect them to dissolve automatically. We must intentionally make people into socialists if we want people to become socialists.
This is why we say “we need theory.” Theory is the generalization of experience. Because theoretical development was not only neglected but doctrinally sidelined, because MC viewed conflict as something to be avoided rather than something that could generate further clarity to our politics, we crystallized our political vision into the writings of a series of still inexperienced theorists, with the work we did afterwards merely improving on the administration of those ideas. Without an open conflict on the nature of base-building, the experiences of local organizations remained local, and the loop between theory and practice was broken. This led to a situation where a group of locals nominally united over a shared strategy began diverging wildly. The centralizers’ were correct that MC needed to increase its organizational coherence, and that mass work unmoored from the goal of building a party of the working class becomes easily co-opted into red charity. But a party is not just an organizational structure or the name of an organization. A more centralized MC would not be a party any more than a more centralized DSA would, because building the party is also a conscious effort, requiring that we work together to understand our conditions and selves towards the end of an agreed upon strategy. In this sense the ‘network’ faction was correct: MC was not aligned properly for the project of building a party and doing so could only ever have led to the results we currently live under.
MC’s death does not end the project, nor does it make the experience of MC irrelevant. MC’s problems, where lack of theorization led to a disconnect between theory and practice, and then between the practices of different groups, are not just applicable to MC but to the whole of the Left. At the same time, because these problems manifest in every organization, that means that the project of bringing these experiences together, to scientifically analyze the project of organization, is just as imminent as it was when my comrades and I proposed such a project hoping to prevent MC from dying. But on the other hand, the materials of a revolutionary party are still all around us, and it is still our duty to cohere those elements together, through struggle and education. That is what Circles Magazine will be. A space for reflection, a collection of comrades who want to see the stakes in any conflict, a place where we can turn the mere amalgamation of experience into strategic knowledge. We view leadership as conflict resolution plus education, that conflict resolution requires going to the core of our strategies and analyzing them to see if we are operating correctly, and that education requires that we bring ourselves to the highest levels and agitate within our mass work to bring our comrades to that level as well. We seek to become a strategic center where leaders from across the Left can further develop the knowledge they have of their surroundings and of the mass work they do. With this project, we hope to provide a satisfactory next chapter to the freshness and excitement that base-building originally had. To help existing collectives work through conflict in a way that clarifies their politics, that sifts between good and bad ideas, that helps generalize the work we do to make it easier for new and smaller collectives to improve on themselves, and to “go past a belief in the possibility of revolution and to begin practicing towards its reality.”