MUG’s Vision of Democracy
1917 (Revolution in Russia), George Grosz
Cliff C
Why does Marxist Unity Group organize within the Democratic Socialists of America? Why is MUG obsessed with the idea of democracy and the mass party? What is the strategy of patience? What is the difference between democratic centralism and bureaucratic centralism, and why does it matter? Why does MUG love debate so much? What is protagonism? Who counts as part of the proletariat? Who is the vanguard of the proletariat? What does it mean when MUG comrades say “put members in control”? Why is MUG always talking about programmatic unity, minimum-maximum programs, tribunes of the people? This article is addressed to the reader who holds these questions in their heart but is disinclined to spelunking the depths of a 600-page textbook to find the answers.
Socialism is ultimately a means to freedom. If you don’t have a say in decisions that affect you, you are not free. If you do have a say in the decisions that affect you, your freedom is secured by taking part in democracy. This word once inspired nightmares of guillotines and servile uprisings in the minds of our country’s founding gentry but has since been laundered and repackaged as the spirit of the nation. Today, “democracy” is primarily deployed as an empty rhetorical device signifying geopolitical alignment with the US Department of State. Historical slave societies like ancient Athens, modern European oligarchies, and Gulf State monarchies are all labeled “democratic” while Cuba and Vietnam are called “authoritarian.” A US President losing the popular vote and still taking office is a “democratic election,” but expanding the unelected Supreme Court to better reflect the will of the electorate is a “threat to democracy”, and so on.
Socialists thus have to be precise when we discuss democracy in order to draw out the fallacies behind these prevailing liberal ideas. Bourgeois “democracy” grants freedom to a minority of large property owners and ties the concept of liberty to that ownership, arguing that everyone under capitalism is free because everyone supposedly has the opportunity to become a capitalist. We’re asked to avert our eyes from the disenfranchisement of the laboring majority of humanity and focus on the ephemeral opportunities for sweatshop workers to become sweatshop owners. To be a socialist is to recognize that this vision of individual liberty is incompatible with universal liberation. We want to create a democratic society free from class tyranny. We want to live in a world where everyone gets a say in the decisions that affect their lives, whether it be in government or the workplace.
The men who founded the United States and framed its Constitution did not want such a world to develop. In fact, they explicitly admitted their intention to form a republic impervious to the will of the working classes. This fact leads MUG members to view the US Constitution as our country’s primary political obstacle to democracy. With the goal of a democratic polity in mind, we look to history, political theory, and practical organizing lessons to help us select the tools we’ll use to overcome the tyranny of the Constitutional Regime. This process has prompted many of us to identify an independent mass party of the working class as the best tool for the job. As Lenin once said: “The millions-strong masses…where there are not thousands, but millions, that is where serious politics begin.” DSA currently operates as an organization of political activists in the tens of thousands. We are currently the largest socialist organization in the United States, but still haven’t reached the same percentage of the population that the Socialist Party of America did in the last century. For DSA to become the party of the US working class, our organization needs to function as a microcosm of the wider democracy we seek to establish. In other words, we need party democracy to establish a wider polity democracy. The end goal of a democratic society is something almost everyone in DSA agrees on, but the various wings and caucuses each have different answers for how to get there. The answers to the questions listed above are all ingredients in MUG’s recipe for turning DSA into a functional vehicle for democracy.
Let’s begin with the strategy of patience. This is a term we picked up from Mike Macnair, who wrote about it at length in his book Revolutionary Strategy (2010). It boils down to the idea that socialists should not take state power until a majority of the population agrees with our ideas and is organized to fight for them. Throughout history, socialist parties have attempted to exercise state power before meeting this prerequisite, and each attempt ultimately failed. This mistake comes in two flavors: right and left. The right wing of the socialist movement often seeks to take power by getting elected into the leadership of a bourgeois government, only to end up pinned between the institutional weight of its anti-democratic foundations and the disillusionment of the working class. A few examples– the German SPD’s sporadic coalition governments of 1918-1930 which put the workers’ party in a position of managing capitalist crises, leading to the rise of Adolf Hitler; the French Mitterand government of 1981-1995 which marked the decline of the country’s Communist Party after its stint in government as a junior coalition partner; the Greek Syriza government of 2015-2019 which saw the coalition of socialist parties implement harsh austerity and swiftly lose popular support. Conversely, the left wing of the socialist movement often seeks to take power as a militant minority through armed insurrections which are crushed by reactionary forces and forgotten. Examples of the latter– the German March Action of 1921; the various bombing sprees of the mid-twentieth century by groups like the Weathermen in the US and the Red Army Faction in West Germany; the Shining Path insurgency active between 1980-2018 in Peru.
The strategy of patience requires shunning supposed shortcuts and focusing on the long-haul work of building a socialist majority in the working class. The bourgeoisie can rely on police and military action to enforce their governments’ decisions: we cannot. The bourgeoisie can rely on private mercenaries to terrorize civilian populations and subvert state power when popular forces enter government, but we cannot operate in the reverse. Our only option is to use all available means at our disposal to develop the organized workers’ movement and rally the majority of the working class to support our mission. “Base-building” efforts to form lasting workers’ institutions like mutual aid societies, sports clubs, labor/tenant unions, and more all have a place in our toolbox alongside electoral work. DSA now finds itself in a state of transition as shifting conditions prompt rethinking around our electoral work. On one side we have the previously dominant right wing pursuing a liquidationist strategy of getting electeds into office and using them to secure junior partner status within the Democratic Party. On the other side we have the left wing which was previously uninterested in electoral efforts altogether beginning to craft a more disciplined approach to this work which could lead to the formation of a serious independent socialist party. This party would be the first of its kind in living memory, since the last generation to engage the masses through a nation-wide socialist electoral program has long passed.
In MUG we maintain the necessity of politicizing our base-building and electoral tactics so that all our work is aimed at the same target: the conquest of state power by the working class (in a word, democracy). A key factor in reforming DSA’s electoral program to this end is the adoption of tribunes of the people. These are socialist cadres elected to legislative offices with a different mission than most of their colleagues. Rather than attempting to negotiate backroom deals and secure modest advantages for their constituents, tribunes focus on using their platform to win the working class over to socialist politics. Their best tools for this job are relentless agitation and intransigent opposition. They use every means at their disposal to block the passing of harmful laws, they vote against every budget that includes funding for military or police, they take the microphone at every opportunity to expose the rotten corruption of our constitutional oligarchy and demand that democracy take its place. When they bring popular reforms to their respective legislative bodies for a vote, they refuse to compromise or horse-trade just for some watered-down version of it to pass. With the working class rallied behind them, their message to the ruling class is simple: “Meet our demands or suffer the consequences”. As the organized power of the class grows, so does our capacity to enforce our demands, until eventually the proletariat is positioned to govern.
If we enter government this way, we can hold on to state power even in the face of vicious coup d’etat attempts, right-wing terrorist attacks, and anti-democratic judicial trickery. If we pursue shortcuts through coalitions and compromise, we will be doomed to fail under these pressures. Cuba and Chile offer an instructive case study of this dynamic. Cuban socialists built majority support by involving the people in every aspect of governance, armed the general population, and fostered a revolutionary culture as an alternative to the predominant social mores of the past. As a result, they have withstood invasions, assassination attempts, and terrorist attacks, and remain a socialist nation today. Chilean socialists were elected to government in coalition with centrists in 1970, failed to involve the masses in governance to the degree of their Cuban counterparts, and refused to arm the people, only to perish three years later when their centrist coalition partners backed a CIA-sponsored military coup. The strategy of patience is not just about waiting until we’ve gathered majority support to take power, but also redefining what “power” means by elevating the working class majority to governance. This power is the basis of democracy. We win on this basis so long as it is organized, independent, and aware of its goals.
On to democratic centralism and bureaucratic centralism. These organizational models help us understand the ways in which we can bring the working class into political struggle. The phrase we’ve inherited from the Marxist tradition to describe our version of democracy is “democratic centralism.” This is simply the idea that every individual in a collective body has the right to participate in decision-making, and every individual has the responsibility to carry out the decisions the body makes. Another common phrase to describe this is “diversity of thought, unity of action.” While this sounds easy and uncomplicated on paper, it often takes a wealth of bitter lessons to implement in practice. I’ve found it helpful in this regard to think of organizational mistakes as a resource– every failure builds institutional memory until democracy becomes a muscular reflex. Sadly our movement’s history is littered with examples of organizations theoretically committed to anti-democratic models of decision-making. While some socialist organizations consciously reject the idea of democratic centralism, many others attempt its implementation, come up against obstacles, and make virtue out of necessity.
Some organizations hyperfocus on centralizing or decentralizing their internal structures, which always hollows out the body over time. Exclusive focus on decentralizing leads to siloed projects, hidden informal leadership unaccountable to rank and file members, social clique dominance, and other issues which the feminist writer Jo Freeman termed “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Exclusive focus on centralizing leads to organizational inertia, entrenched formal leadership unaccountable to rank and file members, social cliques elevated to formal committee status through appointments and dubious elections, people voting with their feet by simply leaving or disengaging when they when they lose a vote, and a general lack of collective creativity which all combine to form what we in MUG call bureaucratic centralism. The tyranny of structurelessness, democratic centralism, and bureaucratic centralism all exist in various DSA spaces at the national and chapter levels, with champions of each competing to implement their leadership model. MUG wants a DSA where everyone gets a say, where political minorities are able to organize to win people over and build a majority, and where comrades accept political defeats patiently and continue to cooperate on common projects. This is what democratic centralism meant in the early days of the Marxist political project, and it remains so for those of us in MUG. The rich internal democracy elaborated here is crucial to the project of growing DSA into a millions-strong mass party.
Here we turn to the importance of debate. In the United States most people first encounter debate in one of two ways: high school debate clubs (arguing for the sake of getting better at arguing where interlocutors compete to score literal points) and presidential election debates (spectacles of disagreement between two members of the ruling class representing the same donor base). This leads to a popular perception of debate as pointless and superficial. This perception is further reinforced by a body of academic literature authored by educated members of the politically-enfranchised petit bourgeoisie who are exasperated by having to perform rituals of feigned democracy for an audience of disdained “median voters.” Take for example this excerpt from the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society:
“…a wealth of empirical and anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that arguments are in fact not very efficient tools to change minds (Gordon-Smith 2019; McIntyre 2021). For example, the well-documented phenomenon of polarization (Isenberg 1986; Sunstein 2002) suggests that, when exposed to arguments supporting positions different from their prior views, people often (though perhaps not always) become even more convinced of their prior views rather than being swayed by arguments (Olsson 2013). Frequently, argumentative encounters look rather like games where participants want to ‘score points’ (Cohen 1995; Dutilh Novaes 2021) rather than engage in painstaking consideration of different views for the sake of epistemic improvement.”
Debate doesn’t work, it’s a waste of time, people don’t change their minds, they just get entrenched in their preconceived notions and lash out in anger. This sort of thinking leads people to question the value of democracy altogether. Why should we even include habitually uninformed and politically inactive people in our decision-making process when we already have all the answers? This is historically the unified refrain of every politically-enfranchised class from 17th-century British parliamentarians to Third Period Soviet nomenklatura. Regrettably, it’s also a common notion in DSA. Some comrades, especially among chapter and national leadership, see themselves as professional organizers who know the playbook by heart and view rank and file DSA members as a politically-inert volunteer labor pool. Anyone with strong opinions who challenges the status quo is a disorganizing agitator who must be contained in order to safeguard the important work being done. I call this paradigm “NGO-brain” because it’s the standard mode of operation for most liberal 501c3’s, where many comrades get their first taste of organizing. Thankfully, it’s a bad habit that can be unlearned.
Debate is in fact crucial to the functioning of any democratic body. If comrades are expected to rubber-stamp resolutions and carry out marching orders from leadership rather than participating in strategic discussion, the few are leading the many by the nose. Aside from concerns of disenfranchisement and paternalism, there’s also the problem of inefficiency. An omniscient committee has never been assembled. Widening the decision-making body to meaningfully include rank and file members through democratic debate allows us to view our problems from more angles and discover opportunities we may have otherwise missed. It also gives us the chance to practice comradely disagreement and constructive criticism, both necessary ingredients for achieving unity through diversity. When unity is demanded from the top, it can only be feigned by the bottom. This creates a house of cards that is doomed to fall. We should recall the strategy of patience: building up an organized majority for revolutionary activity. Doing the hard work of building unity from the bottom up is far more capacity-intensive, but once erected its foundation will stand the test of time.
We call our orientation towards this hard work protagonism, and it is crucial to MUG’s strategy. Protagonism is not an act in itself, but a way of acting that recognizes the individual agency of the people we organize. Any tactic can be executed in a way that either condescends to or protagonizes the people. Protagonizing puts the emphasis on asking questions, listening, attempting to learn, and practicing deep democracy. Condescending puts the emphasis on making statements, talking, attempting to persuade, and establishing hierarchies of leadership. Good organizing requires all of the above, but the placement of emphasis is a subtle distinction with significant implications. If people feel led by the nose, they won’t follow us for long. This is often the case in organizations structured around bureaucratic centralism or the tyranny of structurelessness. MUG members tend to view the international proletariat as the collective protagonist in a world-historic battle to liberate humanity from oppression and exploitation. Once we’ve internalized that belief, building relationships with working-class people and putting them in the driver’s seat of democratic organizations is the only rational response. In the day to day, this can look like centering discussions of tactics and strategy in our deliberations, fighting for democratic meetings, emphasizing the political lessons to be learned from the practical work we engage in, and generally treating our comrades as serious partners in struggle.
This is how we rally the class to our politics, a pivotal step in building an independent political party with a mass base of proletarians. It should be noted that MUG’s view of the proletariat includes all those dependent on either their own labor or the general wage-fund for survival, including unemployed and disabled people who rely on social programs rather than private property like stock portfolio dividends or real estate rental income. This definition is especially important at the international level, since the majority of human beings who work for a living are not paid formal wages, particularly in the Global South. The vanguard of the proletariat is simply the contingent of the class at the forefront of the workers’ movement. The striking workers on picket lines, the tenant union members presenting demand letters to their landlords, the canvassers knocking doors for popular ballot measures and electoral candidates. When we join these proletarians in struggle and politicize their practical demands, we spread the good news of socialism and win the working class over to our ideas. MUG’s vision of class leadership involves leading from the front, not giving orders from behind. The vanguard of our class is already at the front: our job as socialists is to stand with them, to learn from them, and to rally the rest of the class to join the fight. Those who criticize from the sidelines are irrelevant. Those who assume leadership of the movement from unaccountable positions of comfort and treat their fellow workers as an inert pool of volunteer labor are doomed to create a hollowed-out bureaucracy primed for cooptation.
This is why MUG comrades commenting on internal DSA politics often employ phrases like “put members in control” or “control the bureaucrats.” We recognize that revolution is not possible without the hard work of professional revolutionaries. Any successful political project requires participants who are dedicated full-time to its work, and those people need to be compensated in order to reproduce themselves. Paid political leadership and organizational staff are an indispensable necessity, but steps must be taken to ensure they do not become the primary decision-making layer of DSA. The rank-and-file membership can and should run the organization. We do as much (or sometimes even more) labor for DSA compared to our paid counterparts, we are just as much members of the working class, and we are capable of intelligent collective decision-making. Democratic practices like voting at meetings rather than asynchronous online setups, employing representative election methods like STV over easily-manipulated methods like Borda, prioritizing compensation for elected leaders over unelected staff, hosting regular Robert’s Rules trainings to empower members to exert control over meetings, and so on are of the utmost importance to maintaining rank-and-file party democracy in DSA.
There is a tendency in the US left, mainly informed by the organizing model of liberal NGOs, which makes a distinction between “professional organizers” and “volunteers.” The former see themselves as the protagonists of the socialist movement, and every-day working-class folks as potential volunteers to be recruited into campaigns. Once a volunteer has accumulated enough political work experience, they can join the ranks of the professionals and become part of collective decision-making. This tendency manifests itself mostly, though not exclusively, on the right wing of DSA. It’s a paradigm that reproduces all of the problems of bureaucratic centralism enumerated above. It ignores the political activity of working-class communities we often don’t see because we’re not present in every struggle. It further ignores that, by nature of being a majority-white organization, we have racial blindspots that cloud our perception of class activity even when we do see it. Being full-time organizers can often give us tunnel vision that only grounding in the working class can ameliorate. In MUG, we believe that the basis of building trust in the working class is by engaging them politically through the medium of democracy. Importantly, we also believe that any worker can be trusted to participate in political decision-making without meeting contrived “professional organizer” criteria.
Now we finally arrive at the question of unity. Through all the methods and postures explored above, MUG hopes to unify DSA on the basis of a written political program (usually called a “platform” in the US). Programmatic unity in our case is the aspiration that DSA members can continue to disagree on and debate finer theoretical points and immediate tactical questions while working together on a long-term plan aimed at a collectively-shared end goal. In other words, the program is the formal basis on which we envision DSA practicing genuine democratic centralism.
There are several ways to frame a program, and we see the classic minimum-maximum program as the ideal model. It comprises two parts: the minimum demands section, and the maximum demands section. The minimum section is a list of political and economic demands which individually would improve the material conditions of the working class as isolated reforms, but if enacted together would constitute the end of capitalist state power and the beginning of the proletariat’s political rule. In other words, the minimum demands would combine to form the minimum basis on which DSA would take responsibility for governance. It should be noted that “governing” differs in the United States compared to the parliamentary systems of Europe for which minimum-maximum programs were originally devised, so in our case this would mean taking executive office. Getting DSA members elected into Congress to act as tribunes of the people by agitating against the two-party oligarchy and pushing for the implementation of our minimum program’s reforms will be a crucial step in the process, but would not entail “governing” in the sense that I mean here. Flowing from this, the maximum section elaborates the goals a socialist government would pursue once in power: a period of economic reconstruction and cultural reconfiguration which would totally transform society as we know it by collectivizing the means of production, abolishing the class system, dismantling hierarchies of identity, and putting unequal exchange between nations in its grave. In short, the maximum section details the socialist government’s transition from the capitalist mode of production to communism.
We would like to see acceptance of a minimum-maximum program and payment of regular dues become the basic requirements for DSA membership. This does not imply that agreement with every aspect of the program would be required or that anyone would be purged from the organization for voicing criticism of it. In fact, we regularly voice criticism of DSA’s current Political Platform and encourage others to do the same. Acceptance of the program only entails a posture of “I agree with enough of this to join, and I’ll work to change the parts I disagree with as a productive dues-paying member.” The program should be updated regularly in order to reflect evolving material conditions and the political will of the membership. This would allow it to serve as a genuine basis for unity in the organization, something we desperately need as conditions worsen and the various wings of DSA drift further apart in response. MUG sees programmatic unity as a necessity for the maintenance of DSA’s “big tent.” Our organization has two other options:
Theoretical unity, in which one wing of the organization imposes itself on the other and everyone is required to rigidly adhere to the ideas mandated by the organization’s leadership, which would result in most people simply leaving the shrunken tent.
Siloed unity, in which each wing and caucus of DSA forms its own committees and working-groups and runs them as factional fiefdoms, refusing to cooperate with others and demanding to be left alone, which will eventually result in the big tent blowing away when the winds of repression inevitably intensify.
Programmatic unity would essentially serve as the stakes keeping our big tent fastened to the ground. It would allow for the open disagreement, debate, and democracy that is essential to keeping people engaged in an organization that doesn’t compensate their labor while maintaining our combined efforts once a decision is reached. The cohesive power of a program will be especially important in the years to come, with the left facing down the prospects of heightened state repression. There is no possibility of a future where socialists in the United States are able to organize openly and with ease. Beyond the obvious ramifications of the second Trump administration, we can also look to the Democratic Party-led Cop City project in Atlanta, the Biden administration’s mass deportation regime, and the ominous Project 2025 which was endorsed by backers of both 2024 Presidential candidates. All signs point in the same direction: the horrors that our government exports across the globe are coming home. If DSA is going to weather the storm, we need a solid program to hold us together.
It is no secret that the Democratic Socialists of America was founded as an explicitly anti-communist, pro-Zionist sect in 1982 with only a few thousand members. It saw little to no growth for decades, eventually becoming a retirement club for Democratic Party-affiliated progressives. This only began to shift when Bernie Sanders ran for President of the United States in 2016 while openly calling himself a “democratic socialist.” Through a combination of search engine optimization, media production, and sheer luck, DSA’s membership numbers exploded over the following years. A new problem arose: the younger cohort of DSA members outnumbered the original sect 15-to-1, and most of them disagreed with the old guard’s commitments to DNC politicking, redbaiting, and active-duty IDF membership. Today our organization looks almost nothing like the original DSA, prompting bitter resignations from the 1980s Cold Warriors. We now find ourselves at the end of a road. We can return to our sectarian roots as some on the right wing of DSA have suggested, or we can forge ahead and blaze a new trail. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth from those who are petrified by any appearance of “infighting” or “factionalism”, but we can see past those labels for what truly lies behind them: democracy.
Marxist Unity Group aspires to unite DSA members around a revolutionary minimum-maximum program informed by the strategy of patience. We want to put members in control by practicing democratic centralism with a rich internal culture of comradely debate. We want to protagonize the proletariat by rallying the vanguard to our organization and elevating the whole class to political rule. In order to achieve this, we recognize the necessity of organizing on every front of the class war. We will fight in the labor unions and tenant associations, in the prisons and migrant camps, in the street confrontations with police and in the halls of government. We want our comrades in elected office to act as tribunes of the people, agitating for our ideas to an audience of millions. This is MUG’s vision for transforming DSA into a genuine socialist mass party. This is our vision for dismantling the US Constitutional Regime and building a true democracy in its place. We would love for you to join us:
