Impassable

 “Breaking the Impasse – Electoral Politics, Mass Action and the New Socialist Movement in the United States,” by Kim Moody, 2022

This is a detailed look at the strategy of ‘realigning’ or working for actual change within the Democratic Party – and what Moody thinks will actually succeed in breaking the impasse of U.S. politics.  The former is the method of DSA and Congressional representatives like AOC and ‘the squad,’ which came about after the 2016 democratic-socialist campaign of Bernie Sanders.  Moody is a leftist labor activist and looks at how the centrist, corporate, Democratic Party functions.  The first part of this book is a polemic against the politics of various DSA factions inside the Democrats.  The second part is a polemic dealing with Jane McAlevey and unionism. Given the wealth of information, I’m going to highlight his key insights. 

     1.    First Past the Post / Single Member Districts are not a bar to third parties or a multi-party democracy, as both the UK and Canada attest.    

      2.   The ‘coattail effect’ has declined in value, and is sometimes the opposite.

      3.   Limiting the franchise has been bourgeois policy since the “Progressive” movement of the early 1900s.  This goes far beyond Jim Crow.

      4.   Primaries are a way to undermine popular, democratic and left activism.

      5.   The ‘spoiler effect’ disappears in heavily Democratic urban districts where Republicans don’t run.

      6.   Moody looks at the multiple ways Democratic Party (DP) cooptation works to push dissidents like AOC or Sanders to the center - “upward and rightward.”

      7.   Between 1% and 4% of donations to the Democrats - DCCC, DNC and DSCC - come from labor.  The rest is corporations, lobbyists, lawyers and wealthy individuals.

      8.   Moody takes aim at the Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the Working Families Party and various AFL-CIO PACs, along with advocates of a ‘party-surrogate’ or a ‘dirty break.’

      9.   No one has looked at prior failed efforts to move the Democrats to the left.  History never happened and a spotless mind is best, even though the modern Democratic Party is more centrally controlled, more professionalized and far wealthier than in the past.  It has no members, no voting by members, no way for a majority to actually change the party.

      10.   “Using the DP ballot line” is not just a technical tactic for ‘dirty breakers.’  Advocates of a ‘dirty break’ from the Democrats have no idea when it will happen or towards what, thus leaving it as more of a phrase.

CAMPAIGNS

Moody goes into a detailed analysis of the 2016 & 2020 Democratic Party electoral campaigns, showing how working-class votes in rural and urban districts, Latino votes and even African-American votes dropped in the Democratic Party column, while increasing in the monied, light-skinned suburbs. He shows how ‘education’ is not a good guide to class, as 60% of small business types, who generally vote Republican, don’t have a college degree.  The Democrats ignore rural areas, even though factory workers make up 10% of the ‘rural’ population, not to mention farm, warehouse and retail workers in small towns.  They also ignore the 77 million mostly proletarian non-voters.  Moody calls the Democrats the leading party of U.S. capital at this point, based on their alt-finance / tech funders and their increasing middle and upper-class voting base, in contrast to the unstable Republicans.  ‘Grownups’ Nancy “Silicon Valley” Pelosi and Chuck “Wall Street” Schumer typify this.

CONFUSION

Moody cites socialist A. Philip Randolph’s work in the labor and civil rights movements.  Randolph was not afraid to organize African-American workers independently due to continuing discrimination within the trade unions from the 1920s into the 1960s.  The Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement and the Panthers also organized factories in this way. Moody hesitantly and sarcastically calls independent organization like this ‘identitarian’ or ‘identity’ politics, when it is nothing of the kind. This in a polemic against social-democrat nostalgists (his word) who adopted Bayard Rustin’s 1965 position advocating cross-class unity, a realignment within the Democratic Party and supposedly ‘universal’ policies that ignore racism.  This coincided with a similar tack by Michael Harrington, founder of DSOC, then DSA.

Moody celebrates Black Lives Matter (BLM), which is led by black activists. However in spite of the massive and widespread attendance of millions in BLM protests, no solid, national, radical BLM organization formed.  Across the U.S. there are a number of BLMs whose politics range from black capitalism, unity with centrist European-American Democrats to radical politics against the police state, like defunding and prison abolition. BLM has no penetration into unions or workplaces.  Moody’s position of ‘mass social movements’ as the answer to the stagnant ‘impasse’ that is U.S. politics did not work in this instance.  Something is missing.

BLM in D.C.

The SOLUTION to the IMPASSE?

Instead of an orientation to the Democrats Moody first suggests a grab-bag of movementism – rank and file caucuses, independent unionism, civil rights organizing and mass upsurges such as against police violence and climate change.   Lastly is a focus on union organizing and creating a strike wave.  All well and good.  Yet not a word yet about socialist hegemony, the building of a Left Front or revolutionary organizations, or even independent mass Labor, Black, Brown, Women’s or Left-Populist parties.  Movements come and go – what needs to happen is the building of a permanent socialist oppositional Front that reaches into every sector. 

Engaging in nostalgia himself, Moody writes a retrospective introduced by a quote from Bob Dylan about how to win.  He looks at how a present social-democratic demand like the Green New Deal (GND) can be passed – using the examples of the New Deal in the 1930s and Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, both sparked by mass social movements.  This is very familiar stuff.  The GND is opposed by all Republicans, the majority of Democratic politicians, the DNC, the AFL-CIO and every corporation in the U.S.  It’s a popular front of reaction against a proposal that does not threaten capital except in its jobs’ section and its direct aim at the carbon industry.  That was enough.

UNION STRATEGIES

Focusing on his main area of expertise, union matters, Moody looks at the ideas of Jane McAlevey and her books, among them No Shortcuts. Moody tracks her tried and true methods for organizing:  finding organic leaders within the workplace; mapping the forces within that workplace; escalating collective actions; inoculating members from the barrage of company lies and involving the union organizing crew and members in contract negotiations.  Moody points out that the key person is always the ‘professional staff organizer’ in McAlevey’s narrative.  He knows a true mass movement will have to go far beyond that.  However he does not mention any mass organization(s) that could also provide organic leaders.

McAlevey blames Taft-Hartley and subsequent labor laws; professional union-busting and capitalist globalization as the culprits for the state of the union movement.  What she ignores is the failures of union leaderships according to Moody.  As dialectics would indicate, it is not just ‘external’ things that are relevant – it is ‘internal’ contradictions within unions and the labor movement. Moody instead advocates ‘direct union democracy’ to counter this, not just the ‘representative,’ ‘organizing,’ 'professional' or ‘service’ models of business unionism.  

Moody makes a case again, as he did in his excellent book “On New Terrain,” that outsourcing, off-shoring and importing are not the main cause of job losses.  His statistics show that the major source is automation, lean production, surveillance, labor-management cooperation, increasing labor tempos and resulting productivity increases. Digitization especially has increased labor intensification.  This is why burnout, exhaustion and quits are so prevalent among workers, which is not just the effect of the pandemic.  U.S. productivity is also plunging since May 2021.  Exhaustion like this can be gasoline for a labor upsurge by younger workers - and it seems to already be happening.  

The FUTURE          

The turbulent labor upsurges of the 1930s and 1940s were far from predictable models, in spite of what McAlevey claims.  To Moody, the rolling, bottom-up teacher strikes of 2018-2020 somewhat resembled those methods.  He sees and predicts rising social turbulence throughout the world – economic dislocation, ruling elites losing their legitimacy and extreme political instability. Strikes, including mass and general strikes, have increased world-wide.  He finally addresses the issue of having a mass working class-based party, which he supports, running especially in urban areas where no Republican exists.  He mentions the electoral efforts of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, but not the success of Socialist Alternative in Seattle. This idea of a 'labor party' is part of the Transitional Program.  It challenges capitalist hegemony in the electoral arena, as well as others. 

A useful book, especially in its detail on the Democrats. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “On New Terrain – How Capital is Reshaping the Battlefield of Class War” (Moody); “Reviving the Strike” (Burns); “Embedded With Organized Labor” and “Save Our Unions” (both by Early); “Tell the Bosses We’re Coming – A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21^st Century,” “The Democrats – A Critical History” (Selfa); “Up From Liberalism,” “Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar,” “The Populists Guide to 2020,” “The Unwelcome Guest,” "On the Clock."    

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 8, 2022