In “How Not to Unite a Class,” Felipe Bascuñán claims that Class Unity is insensitive to the different experiences of oppression that the ruling class uses to divide and conquer the working class. Bascuñán’s piece sadly mischaracterizes and shows little engagement with Class Unity’s actual stances and arguments.

Our 2021 DSA convention resolutions on amnesty for undocumented immigrants and universal childcare, as well as our call to discipline rogue DSA representative Jamaal Bowman for his flirtations with Zionism, clearly demonstrate our awareness of and concern for specific demands that would disproportionately benefit certain sections of the working class more directly than others. Where we differ from Bascuñán is that we treat these demands as representing the common interests of the entire working class, as Marxists always have, in contrast to an identitarian liberal framing that insists that “those interests that we all share be treated as belonging to this or that group.” In fact, a universalist approach is the only approach that can conceivably cohere a mass working-class movement capable of addressing the root political-economic causes of racial and other disparities.

For all his talk about how not to unite the working class, Bascuñán seems more interested in proving his own abstract theoretical model correct than in taking seriously the interests and desires of the working class in all its diversity. Consider how he approvingly refers to the calls to defund the police that gained steam in the wake of the George Floyd protests last summer as confirmation that “actual movements against racism tend to have no trouble understanding the deep links between economics and racial disparity.” Not only does Bascuñán seem unaware that cash-strapped police departments are often more lethal than better-funded ones, and that several of the whitest (and poorest) states in the country experience some of the highest rates of police killings — he fails to ask whether the call to defund the police is even supported by the working-class black and brown people activists claim it would benefit the most.

The available evidence suggests this is not the case. Only two months after the protests, a widely-circulated Gallup poll indicated that 81 percent of black people wanted police to spend as much or more time in their area. Since then, we have seen a black former police captain win the mayorship of New York City, with substantial support from black voters, after declaring that the defund movement was being led by “young white affluent people.” More recently, voters in Minneapolis rejected a ballot measure to replace the local police department with a department of public safety and to remove the requirement for a minimum number of officers per resident. Support for the referendum was significantly higher among white liberals than among black voters, only 14 percent of whom wanted to see a reduction in the size of the police force a year and a half after the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd at the hands of former cop Derek Chauvin.

This is not to suggest that proponents of defunding the police do not have legitimate and serious criticisms of policing — they do. And we certainly aren’t claiming that all workers are necessarily leftwing. But a new study provides data to support Class Unity’s belief that the best way to appeal to working-class people of all backgrounds is to focus on bread-and-butter economic issues and frame these in universal terms, rather than attempt to split the difference by cloaking them in the woke rhetoric that is so common among academics and NGO activists and so alienating to the majority of workers without a college degree.

But the disagreement between Class Unity and our critics runs deeper than this. In this rebuttal, we will seek to clarify its true nature. Our argument is simple: we believe that the vast majority of the key challenges facing the American left stem from its overwhelmingly middle-class composition, its refusal to acknowledge and mitigate that same class composition, and its habit of projecting the political interests and proclivities of its middle-class members onto the working class proper. The result is all too often a politics that aids and abets the very same ruling-class divide-and-conquer strategy that Bascuñán claims to oppose.

What we propose, in other words, is a class analysis of the actually existing American left, including DSA. Bascuñán’s own argument, on the other hand, is fundamentally idealistic: He advocates that the socialist movement “fight oppression” without ever explaining what this means in political-economic terms or why any socialist would disagree with “fighting oppression” in the first place. For Bascuñán, disagreement with his preferred politics is a moral failing of mysterious origin that emerges fully formed in the minds of his interlocutors, and support for his preferred politics is a moral imperative whether or not those politics make any sense from the standpoint of class struggle. This lack of analytical rigor leads him to confuse his own aesthetic preference for this or that utopian demand with the actual interests of the broader working class, and to fail to understand critiques of this politics from the Marxist left. As we will show in this rebuttal, this is a pattern of behavior in no way unique to Bascuñán: It is rather the predictable and consistent pathology of a left that has been severed from the working class for many decades — decades spent instead in eccentric orbit around mainstream liberalism.

Before we proceed, we must head off at the pass the inevitable and baseless claims that the middle class “doesn’t exist” or isn’t a proper Marxist category. As a matter of fact, Marx himself discusses the middle class at length in both Capital [1] and Theories of Surplus Value [2]. There is an immense amount of empirical data on the existence of the middle class, and Marxist economists and sociologists have dedicated a considerable amount of ink to this fact.[3] What Marx calls the middle class is a group of intellectual workers who do not produce surplus value directly, but rather facilitate the production of surplus value by industrial workers and its realization in the market by commercial workers. The portion of the working class that consists of manual laborers produces and realizes surplus value in industry and commerce, thereby creating the total revenue of all classes in society (e.g. workers, capitalists, landlords). The middle class, by contrast, is therefore what Marx calls an “overhead cost of production” (faux frais de production). It is, in his words, “useful” and “necessary,” but “unproductive” in the sense that it does not produce surplus value, even though it is exploited alongside the rest of the working class. It simply administers the production and realization of surplus value on behalf of absentee owners of capital. The function that the middle class must perform in exchange for its income (“cost of production”) is that it “supervises” and “disciplines” manual workers — either directly via the hiring and firing power or ideologically via authority over norms. And the way in which this economic function is translated into the political sphere is obvious in the character of leftist and liberal-progressive political rhetoric and attitudes towards the working class and its priorities. The middle class in general is preoccupied not with class or exploitation but with correctness and etiquette: It supervises, disciplines, and “educates” other workers at work, and it moralizes and polices people outside of work.[4]

We would like to make absolutely clear that our stance is not that every person from a middle-class background has bad politics, nor that every individual’s politics are mechanically determined by their class position, nor that middle-class people should be somehow excluded from the workers’ movement. The problem is not individual middle-class people. Rather, there is a characteristic kind of middle-class politics, though there may be numerous exceptions. And our argument is that the middle class should not be allowed to dominate the terrain where the workers’ movement should stand, as it does today. This domination results in the hegemony of liberal politics in the institutions of the left, and it leaves the working class, which has now largely ceased to participate in politics at all, without a political voice. We have no hope of resolving this existential threat to our ability to accomplish our stated political aims if we can’t even acknowledge that it’s a problem in the first place.

Marxist analysis, not wishful thinking

A clear marker of the middle-class character of the American left is its inability to apply or even properly conceive of the Marxist critique of identity politics that obtains in essentially every mass-membership social-democratic or communist party on earth. This critique, shared by thinkers as diverse as Eric Hobsbawm and the Indian Maoist revolutionary Ajith, has been most precisely formulated in the American context by Adolph Reed, who has termed identity politics “the class politics of the left wing of neoliberalism.” As such, we reject a key claim of Bascuñán’s piece, commonplace in the DSA, which states that everyone on the US left should be able to understand the fundamental distinction between the sort of superficial tokenism of, say, corporate-sponsored Pride parades and a thoughtfully philosophical and nuanced intersectional socialist project. There is in fact vanishingly little meaningful distinction at all in current US left practice between “fake” liberal identity politics and “authentic” socialist intersectionality. Any attempt to put forward a distinction based on subjective authenticity is itself a symptom of a revived US left that has long lacked a political character. Without a political record to point to, the only recourse is to claims of authenticity.

This politics of authenticity not only papers over the concrete forms by which current unequal social practices are maintained, it also hides the institutional mechanisms by which spurious accusations of insensitivity to oppression (like those central to Bascuñán’s argument) are deployed to undermine and destroy working-class politics. Though this was clearest in the contrived smears against Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, it is also a broad trend successfully employed in undermining workplace solidarity, enforcing labor discipline, privatizing public education, and so on down the list of neoliberal policy initiatives. Bascuñán’s blithe assertion that this is easily distinguished from socialist politics fails to note just how powerfully effective it has been in undermining socialist politics; this glaring omission demands a much sharper analysis.

These are bound to be controversial statements, so we are at pains to locate them in real time and space. The purported distinction between fake liberal identity politics and authentic socialist intersectionality is a fiction, but it is a fiction that persists because it is rooted in a specific political-economic formation. The US left’s population is not only skewed significantly to the middle class, its leadership stratum is skewed to a specific subset of the middle class. The actually existing US left, particularly in major cities, is almost exclusively based in the educated, liberal middle classes, and is completely interpenetrated at the leadership level by the Iron Triangle of academia, media, and NGOs. It therefore not only lacks an independent political base capable of upholding genuinely socialist politics, but is in fact subordinated to capital via these institutions.

In this piece, we will walk through the three legs of this Iron Triangle and clarify how they impact the left. If the US left is to become a serious threat to capital, it needs to recognize its subordination to these institutions, reject their ideology unequivocally, break from its dependence on them by developing its own thoroughgoing independent institutions, hold its elected politicians accountable to those independent institutions, and rebuild its base in the broader US working class. We hope this piece will contribute to dismantling some of the defenses that prevent a proper reckoning with this fundamental problem.

The Roots of DSA Dysfunction

The first thing to understand about middle-class capture of left parties and institutions is that it is not a phenomenon unique to the DSA within the context of the American left (such as it is), and it is not a phenomenon unique to the American left in the context of the global left. Piketty has written of the global emergence of a “Brahmin left,” and the declining share of the working-class vote going to left parties in Europe is a universally acknowledged fact. But this process is much more advanced in the United States than in most other developed nations, and the DSA as a result represents something of the ne plus ultra of middle-class capture of a left organization, at least in the major urban chapters and in many smaller chapters as well.

The historical reasons for the extreme class composition of the American left even in the context of a generally “Brahminifying” global left are straightforward. Almost alone in the developed world, the United States never saw the lasting emergence of a mass-membership social-democratic or communist party. A combination of a non-proportional electoral system, the Red Scare, and Stalin’s insistence that the Communist Party subordinate itself to a popular front with the Democratic New Deal coalition meant that no mass workers’ party ever achieved viability.

As a result, the American left has no lineal descent from or institutional memory of such a party. In Europe, some parties of the left have been able to retain predominantly working-class bases. These are typically post-Stalinist parties such as the Portuguese and Greek Communist parties, whose ideological and organizational rigidity has served to keep middle-class dilettantes at bay. A few other parties, such as the Socialist Party of the Netherlands, were founded with an explicitly “proletarian” orientation that they have largely preserved, though, again, via largely undemocratic means. But even those parties that have become substantively middle class, such as Labour in the UK or the Left Party in Germany, still remember what it was like to have an organic connection to the working class, even if that connection has been severed or is in the process of severing. This means that there are voices within those parties fighting to turn back the tide of middle-class capture, and that the rest of the party by and large cannot simply pretend that the phenomenon isn’t real.

The DSA, on the other hand, never had any working-class social base at all and so has no institutional memory of this phantom limb. The result is a tendency towards sheer denial. Class Unity’s attempts to point out the middle-class skew of DSA as the root of the organization’s fundamental problems have met such strong resistance within DSA that it demands a political-economic explanation. But first, we must underline that it is blindingly obvious. The “do-both-ism” that demotes class to one identity among a proliferating array of countless others is so much a fact of DSA practice that, rather than finding a hive of “class reductionism” in your local chapter, you will more likely struggle to find any working groups or chapter priority campaigns focused on labor issues or class struggle at all, as pressing working-class demands such as universal healthcare are systematically abandoned in favor of middle-class utopian fantasies like abolishing the police or electing “progressives” in coalition with liberals.

The average DSA activist is highly educated, poorly positioned for strategic-industry union efforts, and not particularly interested in such seemingly unglamorous work as salting or militant union revitalization efforts in the first place. This is clear injust need to realize it to achieve real class unity.

Another variation is to tut-tut that “middle class” does not represent a classical Marxist class, as if the confused class position of the US middle class were a flaw in the analysis of anyone using the term. Rather, the middle class exists in a “contradictory class position” in reality, because capital’s response to the radical labor movement has historically blurred class lines via widespread home and stock ownership, consumerism, credentialism, income-stratified urban neighborhoods, and the systematic propagation of bourgeois ideology. To not contend with these realities is to discard genuine material analysis in favor of a “Marxism” so vulgarized as to be unaware of Marx’s own lengthy discussions of the middle class.

Probably the most important factor, however, that prevents a square reckoning with this issue is the brutal demotion of a large portion of the younger, educated middle class into the working class by the long aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, a reality that is probably more responsible for the resurgence of leftism in the US than anything else. The most serious rebuttal against the charge that the US left is too middle-class is the reality that many are in fact currently in the working class, albeit often in a particular subset of devalued knowledge-worker and service jobs. Why trace any problems of the left to a skewed class composition when this proletarianization of the formerly aspiring middle class is so much in evidence?

One answer to this question is that the expectations that many college-educated millennial leftists had of middle-class careers, however, crushed by capital, create predictable problems. Notably, these problems have been encountered before in earlier eras:

Identification with the class interests of the proletariat does not come easy for many intellectuals. They may carry with them the baggage of their initial training and lifestyle: individualism, competitiveness, the attempt to resolve problems exclusively in the realm of ideas, expectations of personal prominence. Throughout history the intellectual who supports revolution has had to struggle with such tendencies. Many ultra-left errors can be traced to these class-based weaknesses.

This is particularly true in a movement that is composed largely of young people — almost entirely less than 35 years old. Many of these people are college educated but are working in situations where many of their coworkers are not. Many have a background of financial comfort and have not resolved their relationship to past or potential privileges. Many have not had the experience of settling down to a long-term commitment to a job, a community, or a family. These are significant characteristics that affect our world view and our methods of political work. Furthermore, the lack of social stability has made it difficult to identify and change the weaknesses that are typical of intellectuals — or, in fact, to recognize and develop the corresponding strengths.

Absent a reckoning with this cultural baggage, many déclassé leftists are not so much the vanguard of the working class but exiles within it, desperate to regain their birthright as its managers.

A more properly materialist point is that the DSA tends to be dominated in practice by the large metropolitan chapters (NYC, LA, Chicago, DC, the SF Bay Area, and so on), whose membership is broadly higher-income and has flexible-schedule employment that allows them an outsized voice in the internal debates of the organization. Those large chapters have also structurally consolidated power: Large strategic decisions are rarely put in the hands of the membership, but are instead solved by a byzantine network of working groups and steering committees filled by those members that have the time to run for those positions. While the national average DSA member may well be déclassé, this is hardly the case for the sector of membership that tends to occupy leadership of the major metropolitan chapters and hence of the organization at large. This leadership stratum has constituted a sort of elite within the organization that has distorted debate around key issues for self-protective reasons.

The emotional charge around the issues of race vs. class and the imaginary specter of “class reductionism” does not, in our estimation, reflect the actual severity of those issues within the DSA but rather constitutes a displacement of the class problem of the DSA onto less threatening territory. Reckoning with the overweening clout of the professional-managerial sector within the DSA is existentially threatening:

Waging war against “liberal elites” dovetails nicely with a conservative agenda or neoliberal project. Affluent liberals can acknowledge their privilege without jeopardizing their meritocratic, technocratic worldview, or their sense of virtue, so long as they adopt the contemporary noblesse oblige of a benevolent and caring overclass. But, for a socialist movement whose ranks draw overwhelmingly from the professional-managerial class and the downwardly mobile middle class failsons aching to join them, acknowledging the antagonism between its existing membership and the rest of the working class calls the entire political project into question.

Rather than confront this uncomfortable problem, a typical DSA internal debate revolves around the question of whether a given issue would be “alienating to potential allies,” a subjective standard that gives broad room for self-selected representatives of marginalized groups to narrate stories where some members of the group might be harmed by a given initiative. Their opponents can then either acquiesce, choose to ask for concrete evidence and risk seeming insensitive, or narrate a more convincing counter-story that convinces fencesitters that not taking up the initiative would harm potential allies more. Mysteriously, the “potential allies” in these marginalization stories seem to always be offended by the same things as a literature postgraduate at Bard. Bascuñán’s own critiques of Class Unity fall squarely into this genre.

We seek to cut through this idealistic fog and situate the DSA’s problems in the concrete institutional context of the professional left’s iron triangle of academia, media, and NGOs. Only by rejecting the paltry standard of current DSA debates can we hope to deescalate the emotional charge around these issues, point the way out of the particular vampire’s castle we currently find ourselves in, and refocus on the institutional realities limiting the political effectiveness of the modern US left.

The First Leg of the Iron Triangle: Academia

As an organization overwhelmingly composed of college graduates, often of elite four-year colleges, the DSA rank and file are molded by institutions whose primary purpose in American society is laundering class stratification into merit and rationalizing ruling-class dominance. It is a mistake, however, to assume that this is primarily accomplished by a thoroughly post-Marxist curriculum that has banished class analysis from all but a tiny fraction of lecture halls. Rather, it is the fixed features of academic life outside the classroom that matter in molding the identity of future DSA leftists: the admissions process, the peer network and job search, and the campus activist experience.

For brand-name universities, the admissions process is fundamentally one of learning to narrate an identity (specifically an identity that admissions officers want to hear), and that entails a projection of the US elite’s self-image as a multiethnic meritocracy on to the student. As Blake Smith writes,

What is new about education’s turn to woke identity politics is not the fact that administrators and faculty are influencing students’ sense of self, but rather the sort of values that the new ideal personality is supposed to uphold. The contemporary ideal, increasingly, is no longer someone so charmingly personable that others forget he is in fact a ruthless competitor, but a person who so convincingly narrates her having overcome some kind of social injustice that others forget she is in fact a beneficiary of systems of privilege [emphasis added].

In this process of a primarily suburban and urban multiethnic middle class squeezing themselves through the admissions keyhole, they learn to weaponize their own identity markers to simultaneously improve their chances of succeeding and disguise the ruthlessness of that climb in the language of social justice. They bring these habits into DSA leadership in largely unaltered form.

The networking and job-search process teaches another destructive norm to students as they attempt to climb into the professional stratum: Never say anything bad in public about your fellow professionals. You will likely depend on them for a crucial job connection someday, so be a team player. While this may seem like simple courtesy, it is terrible for democratic debate in left organizations, where, more often than not, apparent disagreements over principle are in fact suppressed personal rivalries.

The experience of campus activism is molded by the regular turnover of students. Experience is in short supply, and activist group leaders therefore can choose successors based on personal friendship or deny them based on personal hostility. Campus activist organizations are also molded by campus administrators who have professionalized the management of student protest, providing a safety valve for unrest alongside symbolic concessions that limit any threats to the operation of the institution. Rebellion is literally priced into the college experience.

The ritualized narration of identity oppressions by the privileged, the cliquishness and glad-handing masquerading as comradeship, and the deflection of dissatisfaction into safe channels are all epidemic features of left politics as a whole precisely because the same people who learned these behaviors in college are now the large majority of participants in the US left. This reality is why we have observed that the DSA’s “skewed class composition has hardened into an impenetrable middle-class subculture that reproduces the pathology and dysfunction of campus activism.”

Finally, we note that the retreat of many radicals into academic careers has had a deforming effect on the left’s understanding of its own priorities. Academics are incentivized to produce conventional-wisdom-upsetting new ideas, to upstage one another. This drive for novelty is at odds with the fundamentals-based, coalition-oriented, and often, frankly, tedious work of workplace organizing. A characteristic example of this “attempt to resolve problems exclusively in the realm of ideas” is Bascuñán’s treatment of race and class.

In examining race and class, Bascuñán argues that a wholly abstract understanding of “class” can’t elucidate complex empirical realities such as group differentiation or competition among workers. But for us this isn’t the point of contention — it’s rather the question of how those particularities continue into the present day, what historical changes they’ve undergone, and how they can be addressed. Bascuñán answers this with bog-standard liberal intersectional rhetoric that abounds in the same kind of ahistorical abstractions that he claims to overcome.

Bascuñán’s account of racism draws from various historical periods like the New Deal and Jim Crow to highlight racialized policies that created the historical conditions for today’s disparities. He gestures towards history in an attempt to explain the present, but his explanation raises more questions than answers: “Schools also remain segregated, and in a country that funds public education by local property taxes, the reproduction of disparate life outcomes along racialized class lines unfolds without needing overtly racist legislation.” If Bascuñán’s point here is to simply point out that racial disparities still exist, then his analysis is as uncontroversial as it is vacuous: racial disparities are real, but they’re the result, not the cause, of what he’s trying to analyze. And if overt, institutionally sanctioned racism isn’t needed to maintain racial disparities, then what is?

Bascuñán’s contemporaneous examples of Reagan’s demagogy about “welfare queens” and “the culture of policing” are unconvincing explanations for why stark racial disparities continue into the 21st century. They are unconvincing because they equivocate. In attempting to demonstrate the present-day continuity of racism as a “real material force,” Bascuñán blurs the distinction between present-day racist attitudes held by certain individuals and racialized social practices, such as racial discrimination in unions or Jim Crow segregation. While racist attitudes are obviously necessary to justify racialized social practices, and while they can serve to justify racial inequalities more generally, they cannot explain the continued economic existence of the latter. For this reason, fighting against vague constructs like “chauvinism” cannot bring about material change, because “chauvinism” isn’t a material category. Buscuñán himself notes that “workers don’t struggle against an abstract social relation” (such as “white supremacy culture”), they struggle for specific material goals such as civil rights, anti-discrimination laws, equal housing, and employment, and integrated schooling.

Bascuñán points to such material goals to gloss over the fact that his own (and the DSA’s own) “antiracism” is not programmatic or policy-based, but cultural. He emphasizes “the interpersonal side of oppression” and “chauvinistic attitudes on the Left,” rather than understanding how the incentives of capital accumulation produce uneven social outcomes, regardless of personal attitudes or beliefs. Despite Bascuñán’s supposed dismissal of liberal antiracism, he shares with it the conviction that racial inequalities are perpetuated by a nebulous “racism” that must be fixed by culture.

Since Bascuñán is unable to reconcile his cultural politics with contemporary political economy, his understanding of “oppression” results in the same view of “transhistorical forces with their own autonomous logics separate from capitalism” that he criticizes. Given this, his phraseology about “the particular and the universal” is meaningless, since he reduces the notion of class struggle to a simple collection of “all struggles against specific forms of oppression” with no unifying relationship to capitalist production. As we recently noted elsewhere, such an analysis requires nothing more than “ordinary, honest liberalism, the ideology of individual rights, which is prevalent in developed capitalist societies.”

Bascuñán is unable to offer any concrete guidance for DSA’s day-to-day political work. Since his “antiracism” is cultural rather than programmatic, he fails to actually establish any practical distinction between our “class reductionist” politics and his “intersectional socialist” politics. Both police reform and Medicare for All are universal policies that would help all workers, while disproportionately helping minority populations. To frame one as “anti-racism” but not the other is to draw a distinction without a difference. In the final analysis, we find that Bascuñán’s “intersectional socialism” either amounts to the same thing in practice as our “class reductionism,” or it serves to channel popular energy back into the predominant liberal race-relations framework, where it can be safely neutralized and subsumed by opposing class interests.

The Second Leg of the Iron Triangle: Media