Editorial Statement
Spadework is a new project from Communist Caucus, an organized tendency in the Democratic Socialists of America that seeks to test and refine the hypotheses formed by day-to-day organizing work in the tenant and labor movements.
As we launch this new publication, ICE agents continue to kidnap our neighbors and coworkers, the Zionists bomb Gaza despite a ceasefire, and the far-right is on the offensive around the globe. The injunction to “organize” in the face of such threats is necessary but insufficient. What we really need is not just a generic call to action, but a conceptual and practical framework for how we might conduct political work and test our assumptions in the course of class struggle.
Spadework will be a venue for comrades in Communist Caucus and beyond to reflect on our organizing successes and failures, and to develop those frameworks which emerge in the course of struggle. It takes its name from a concept developed by communist and antiracist organizer Ella Baker (via Alyssa Battistoni’s 2019 essay “Spadework”). As Battistoni takes it up, spadework is “the hard labor that prepares the ground for dramatic action.” The wager of this publication is that some of that hard work is conceptual, and is born in the careful, methodical work of reflecting on our practice in the present conjuncture.
We start from three premises that must occupy the core of communist practice today: combating proletarian disorganization, combating depoliticization, and taking seriously the notion that workers think — that people generate thought as they engage in day-to-day struggles. Spadework is, above all, a place to consolidate and advance the thought that emerges from struggle.
Proletarian Disorganization and Class Composition
As we argue in Our Moment, any analysis of the present needs to start with the profound disorganization of the working class, the signs of which are everywhere.
The thesis that proletarian disorganization is the central problem confronting socialists and communists can be understood in two distinct ways. First, it can be taken as a statement about the historic degradation of working class organizations wrought by a half-century of neoliberalism. This manifests in phenomena like low union density and the breakup of working-class institutions. But to pose the problem of disorganization at this level is still to conceive of “organization” abstractly. The implication is that organizing is a mechanical process, and the task of organizers is to discover, then apply, the right organizing methods. Density can increase or decrease; organizations can be built or dismantled. From this narrow understanding, we ultimately land in nostalgia: The task is always to recapture the lost organization of an imagined class unity that can either be broken up or put (back) together.
But there is another way to view proletarian disorganization. This starts not from an abstract and quantitative sense of organizing, but instead from the framework of class composition. In this view, disorganization is itself a specific form of the organization of workers by capital and for capital. Disorganization is just shorthand for the fact that capital always and everywhere composes the working classes in particular configurations that are already divided by job, skill, sector, race, gender, nationality, citizenship, and a myriad of other fault lines. Put simply, capital produces the working classes as disorganized, atomized and divided. When we say that the problem we confront as communists is the problem of proletarian disorganization, this is what we mean. The task is not just mechanically increasing the density of organizations, but rather of comprehending and combating the ways in which the working class itself is produced in disorganization.
This means that we cannot content ourselves with a mechanical notion of organization as simply applying correct “methods” to increase density. Organizing is itself a political project. It starts with what our comrades at Notes From Below call a political leap — with people who are divided seeing their struggles as part of a single, unified, political fight, thinking together, strategizing together, and acting together. We do not conceive of our task as “organizing the unorganized” as one would organize their sock drawer. Nor do we see our work as “base-building,” which always carries with it a whiff of instrumentalization (a base is built so that you can then erect something else, a second-order politics, on top of it). Rather, we see our project as “doing politics at the base,” a subtle but crucial distinction that highlights the bringing into existence of a working class capable of thinking and acting politically, of comprehending its position and acting to change it.
This is not primarily a project aimed at raising the level of class consciousness. It’s a project of organizing people across the divisions that block their politicization, for proletarian recomposition.
Against Depoliticization
This leads us to the second premise that animates our task as socialists: combating depoliticization.Even with the explosive growth of the socialist movement in the last decade, and the steady reemergence of organized labor as a real political force, the conjuncture is characterized by profound depoliticization. Politics is reduced to a periodic electoral choice between a greater and lesser evil to administer what already exists. There’s a very real danger that socialist organizing gets tethered to this thinned-out notion of politics, and in our organizing work we must carefully avoid the trap of fighting to be the most competent and humane administrators of what already exists.
For us, depoliticization must be conceived of as an organizational problem, rather than one of consciousness-raising. We don’t call for endlessly perfecting the right line or program in our heads and our writing, as though workers just need to “hear the good news” (or the right program) from socialists to beat apathy. Instead, we work to compose collectivities that can think together, reflect on their activity together, and overcome the pervasive sense that there is no alternative to the world as it exists. Fighting depoliticization in a world characterized by proletarian disorganization means that communists must bring together groups of workers in struggle and open up spaces where workers can reflect, strategize, learn, and experiment collectively.
We also recognize that there are forms of depoliticization specific to the left, even those that use the words “communist” or “revolutionary” but nevertheless take the form of what Asad Haider described as “total affective investment in the necessity of the existing world.” One form of this leftist depoliticization is a revolutionary nostalgia that avoids engagement with current conditions and instead sees the present as just another instance of the past. Some comrades don’t see a living and contingent set of conjunctures, but an archive of arguments and organizing models from which to pick and choose. Whether the aim is a Green New Deal, a recreation of the German Social Democratic Party’s form, or the Popular Front, this approach affirms what already exists by denying the contingency of the present. It refuses the need to experiment, to develop new political forms, to collectively and ambitiously think about the current terrain.
Another mode of depoliticization is “adjustment,” defined by Haider as “condescending rejection of any organizational process which does not have the state as its object.” On the left today, there is much grandstanding about “needing to win,” which is assumed to only be possible on the terrain of the legislative state. Instead of politics being, as Alan Badiou articulates it, the mass struggle of working people operating under the hypothesis that the existing world is not necessary, it is reduced to a few talented individuals legislating on our behalf. If those outside the state have any political agency, it is at most to canvass for progressive candidates, while any autonomous initiatives — such as union struggles or social movements — must be subordinated to a legislative agenda determined by a core group of socialist politicians.
Ironically, many left critiques of electoralism criticize its content rather than its form, implicitly accepting this framing by focusing on a particular elected official’s rhetoric, thus affirming that politicians are the only meaningful protagonists in class struggle. We are not allergic to struggle at the highest level of the state; we have seen repeatedly that this can play an important role in the working-class political composition and can catalyze new initiatives for and by the class. But, as Haider argues in his citation of the Congolese theorist Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba: “To reduce every political capacity to a state capacity is to abscond from politics.”
What both these modes of depoliticization share is disregard for experimentation, disengagement with the present, and the belief that working people themselves are not in fact capable of successfully struggling against their everyday exploitation. In DSA, even as nearly all factions profess that “every cook can govern” in some form, the implicit assumption in our political work is that astute socialist organizers should impose from above a prefab model for doing politics, whether that model comes from Lenin, Kautsky, Bernie Sanders, or Jane McAlevey. The belief is that politics is not something working people can originate. In other words, it’s a politics for the working class, but not politics by and of the working class.
People Think
Depoliticization then points us to the third premise from which the Communist Caucus and Spadework embark: a politics that centers the fact that people think.
This sounds almost trivially true, butmuch organizing on the left is oriented towards denying this principle. To take seriously the fact that people think is to stop approaching political expertise as a commodity that we just need to transmit to a workers’ movement. It is to start from the notion that working people are engaged in day-to-day struggles that lead to the political insights needed to make interventions themselves. Whether through conversations on the shop floor, at the dive bar with coworkers, with neighbors passing by in the stairwell, or sitting across from their families at the dinner table, workers are constantly thinking about and theorizing those struggles.
It’s not the job of politicians or the DSA to bring the “correct” political insight to workers’ struggles from the outside. Rather, we should be creating spaces for workers to articulate their own answers to the most pressing questions of our moment throughout the course of collective struggle. It’s true that the thinking coming out of workers’ struggles is unevenly developed, and objective barriers exist that must be overcome. For one, it’s not a habit of most workers to engage in written forms of thinking — and it hasn’t been the practice of editors to encourage workers to write about their struggles. This means many political insights of working people have remained limited in their reach.
We are absolutely committed to building spaces where people can overcome barriers and think together about how to transform their world. Spadework is one venue to do this. Here, we turn to workers’ insights in order to construct a political framework that emerges from them narrating and analyzing their own collective experiences.
Ultimately, this calls for a far more experimental politics than is on offer in most of the contemporary left – a politics that takes workplace and tenant struggles as laboratories for new organizational forms, for understanding and seizing power. It is workers themselves who must do this experimentation. We aim to operate in a mode akin to the experimental and experiential pedagogies of figures like Paolo Freire, Miles Horton, Ella Baker, and generations of organizer-pedagogues who approach workers in struggle as comrades to learn and think with.
Spadework is intended to foster these projects. To confront the openness of this moment not with the correct theory based on our expert study of the past, but with a humble conviction that working people themselves are constantly thinking and are truly capable of doing politics. As communists, we understand our task to put actual, thinking workers in communication with one another, to grow and learn together through the course of struggle, and to facilitate the political leap from the base, moving from geographically or sectorally specific issue campaigns to a unified struggle against class society as a whole. Only then can real transformative politics emerge.
