Leftist Tendencies
Disclaimer
Each term used in this article is up for debate, discussion, dispute, and has a century or more of struggle related to it. If you disagree with a definition, that’s OK. People throughout the left ecosystem have been continually challenging previous definitions, theories, and strategies, as conditions and historical circumstances change.
The Left —
“The Left” may be too large of a definition to have any applicable use. To narrow our focus, I will start with a high-level look at the origins of the Left, and then detail some of the traditions that make up the modern Left, particularly inside the DSA.
The Right —
The Left’s counterpart, “The Right” originates from the French Revolution, the preeminent transitional revolution from the Early Modern & Feudal Period in Europe to the Industrial Bourgeoisie-dominated Period we live in internationally today.
The radical anti-monarchy republicans in the French Revolution were the Jacobins, who sat on the left side of the hall, the pro-monarchist conservatives sat on the right, and the moderates, both monarchists and liberals, sat in the middle.
After the French Revolution, “the Left” broke into three distinct traditions:
Liberalism, Anarchism, and Socialism.
Liberalism
Meritocratic • Capitalist • Individualist
Liberals believe in representational government, with a systematic rights system and constitution, written or verbal. They believe the classes of society should work together and be symbiotic; particularly the upper segment of the skilled working class and the lower segment of the owning, bourgeoisie class, the “Middle Class” are their main constituents. Liberals want a society where individuals can produce and work and achieve wealth and comfort through a meritocracy and participate in politics mainly through the lens of voting in elections. Liberals come in many sorts, some more conservative than others. Elements of liberalism have been adopted by the right: republicanism, nationalism, elections, and other vectors of liberal thought have been synthesized by conservatives, especially in republican states.
The critical difference between liberals and anarchists and socialists is that liberals believe the individual is preeminent and individual rights are more important, in most cases, than the rights of the collective society. Liberal revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries brought about the formation of modern France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States.
Left liberals are frequent fellow travelers with the broader left and support social democratic reforms, such as universal healthcare, labor unions, and civil rights. They break with the rest of the left by being pro-capitalism – many times with critiques or desires for ‘reform’ or anti-corruption, but no major disagreements with the tenants of capitalism itself. Left liberalism was and still is to a degree, present in the Democratic Socialists of America, especially before 2016. Many fellow socialist and anarchist organizations accuse DSA of being Left Liberal, but the diversity within DSA proves that as an uncritical understanding of the organization and its internal politics since Trump’s election.
Anarchism
Democratic • Anti-capitalist • Anti-hierarchical
The first anti-capitalist faction of the Left are the Anarchists. Anarchists come in many different forms, from syndicalist, communalist, council communist, Platformists, autonomists, libertarian socialists, and anarcho-primitivist. The word Libertarian, which is commonly used in the United States for the anti-statist Right, originally applied to left anarchists, especially in the European context. Libertarian socialist, council communist, and Syndicalists are the major thru lines of anarchism in DSA, expressed mainly in the Libertarian Socialist Caucus. Anarchists believe that all hierarchy must be justified through democratic consensus; this includes industry, gender and race relations, elections, and the exchange of goods, housing, and the general economy.
Anarchists are anti-capitalists because Capitalism is an unjustified hierarchy dependent on coercion and violence. They are not Marxists because Marxism believes that the state plays a role in revolution, particularly within the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (the working class). Most anarchists (though there are Marxian anarchists), reject Marx’s analysis as unjustified hierarchical thinking. The history of the socialist-anarchist split goes back to the first large-scale organizations on the left in the mid-19th century and continues through to this day.
Anarchism expresses itself through the libertarian socialist revolution in Rojava, Syria, and in the Chiapas in Mexico. It also has a rich revolutionary history in Ukraine, Spain, Russia, the US, and France. The antifascist black bloc that are seen at many protests and uprisings in America and across the world have anarchist roots and support base. Anarchists in the DSA want a more horizontal DSA, where chapters and members decide on campaigns under the consensus model. They, generally, value base building and mutual aid over elections and labor, although the syndicalist branch of anarchism is very labor oriented and has been influential in USian unionism through the IWW and the CIO. (See Lucy Parsons, Peter Kropotkin, Abdullah Öcalan, Nestor Makhno, Subcomandante Marcos)
Socialism
Labor • Anti-capitalist • Materialist
Socialism is an ideologically diverse movement of anti-capitalists who see the necessity of the state in enacting socialist policies. Socialism and Communism are related, but nuanced terms, that mean different things for different adherents. Communism generally means a classless society where the “means of production” (tools, factories, farms, roads, transit etc.), and the fruits of that production are organized democratically and shared equally according to need, not ability to purchase. The abolishment of class has not occurred in any of the socialist projects taken as of yet, so communism as a term is aspirational, more than a thing that exists now.
In the spirit of the early warning, some people disagree with the statement above and have strong coherent reasons for doing so.
The first socialist movements came out of Western Europe and the United States during the early 19th century. Proto-socialists existed in the French Revolution, called the sans-culottes, and they continued to be active in the radical liberal revolutions of the post Napoleanic world. Many of these socialists were utopian socialists who followed a thinker named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who created the Mutualist philosophical movement and was a primary antagonist to Karl Marx. Other early socialist movements were Christian in characteristic, primarily in the United States. Thousands of communal and Christian socialist experiments were attempted by intentional religious communities. Other socialist movements arose out of the nascent labor movement like the Owenites, Georgists, and the Working Men's Parties that were popular in the antebellum United States and had some of their ideas absorbed into the new Republican Party (how times have changed!).Marxism is the most well known and arguably most influential strain of socialism. Marxism was developed by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels who put down in writing the most systematic formulation for anti-capitalist political economy produced at the time. Marx and Engels put forward a revolutionary socialism that required the overthrow of the owning, bourgeoisie class and the “dictatorship of the Proletariat” which would usher in communism. In Das Kapital, Marx’s magnum opus, the mathematics and mechanisms that would herald in world revolution and the start of a new age is thoroughly explained.
For Marx, socialism was a rule of history; inevitable, but requiring the mass action of working class individuals to start the ball rolling. Marx’s critique created the space for many of the movements DSA deals with and works with today on the left. Out of Marx arose Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, market socialism; all out of the Russian Revolution and its effects. New movements attempting to synthesize Marxism and social democracy were developed, especially in the anti communist West, such as Democratic Socialism, among others.
Movements like Maoism attempted to change the proletariat from the laboring factory workers to the peasants in East Asia. In South America, a center for left wing thought and right wing reaction, workers and farmers have created new ideas about what socialism means, from 21st Century socialism in Venezuela, to plurinational socialism in Bolivia, to Kirchnerism in Argentina. African, Middle Eastern, and southeast Asian socialists have presented powerful visions of anti-imperial socialist and communist movements in South Africa, Palestine, Vietnam, Nepal, Burkina Faso and India.
Conclusion
Socialism is growing in the United States and the hunger for a more comprehensive overview of its thought is necessary. The US is home to many important socialists and anarchists to look towards, such as Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King Jr., Eugene Debs, Bernie Sanders, Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, WEB DuBois, Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Paul Robeson, Fannie Lou Hamer, A. Philip Randolph and so many more. The major strains of anti-capitalism in DSA are social democracy, Marxism, Trotskyism, anarchism, and democratic socialism.
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