Towards A Socialist Rank-and-File Strategy: The Debate on R4-1 at YDSA’s National Convention
By: Gant R.
The Liberator, April 1919 edition front cover
Introduction
At YDSA’s National Convention this past month, an unlikely source, the generally unpopular Resolution 4, ‘For a Workers Party,’ generated a substantive and clarifying debate on our organization’s rank-and-file labor strategy, albeit indirectly. R4 aimed to elaborate a formal affiliation process between student worker union locals and YDSA chapters in a bid to build direct institutional links between the labor and socialist movements. For the purposes of this article we can leave substantive criticisms of the proposal to one side. Marxist Unity delegates were opposed outright and initially assumed it was supported by the Bread and Roses caucus given their political affinity with establishing a labor party and historic presence in NYU’s YDSA chapter which provided a plurality of the resolution’s co-sponsors. R4, however, turned out to be the initiative of independent delegates without caucus backing.
MUG put forward an amendment to R4, R4-1, which removed the formal structural elements of the proposal while preserving its attempt to raise an important strategic question: how to practically affect a merger between the socialist and labor movements. We believe that the answer to this question is not structural, but political.
R4-1 proposed adopting the tactic of organizing explicitly socialist caucuses in the trade unions in which YDSA has a presence. Much like ‘democratic’ caucuses’ such as Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) and Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) represent the general reform trend within the union movement, socialist caucuses would represent the socialist and independent class party-building trend. From the perspective of the author of this article, it is important to emphasize that we raised building socialist caucuses not as a strategy but as a tactic, one possible road to answering the necessary question of politicizing rank-and-file work towards building a socialist party with a broad constituency in the labor movement.
R4-1 drew from the theory and practice of the “boring from within” strategy associated with the left wing of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the communist Trade Union Educational League (TUEL): a strategy of direct political intervention within the trade unions in order to both win majorities in labor constituencies for socialism and transform them through amalgamation from trade to industrial bodies, as opposed to “dual” or “red” unionism which sought to organize independent unions under socialist leadership. This approach also aligns with another key example of political trade unionism, pre-war German social democracy, where mass unions remained organizationally independent (not being formally affiliated with political parties) but nonetheless were won in aggregate to the different political trends in the worker’s movement: e.g. “Social Democratic” trade unions, “Christian Democratic” trade unions, etc. Further investigation of the historical tradition of socialist intervention in the union movement will remain a high priority for effectively politicizing our labor work in the years to come.
The Debate Around R4:1
MUG and B&R opposed R4 for much the same practical reasons but with vastly different long-term strategic orientations towards the problems raised. From our perspective, R4’s structural approach was ill-fitted to draw out this political debate, and the main value of our intervention was agitational, to draw out deliberative discussion on the serious strategic differences on our organization’s labor policy, in contrast to the largely banal structural arguments for and against the base resolution.
Arguments in favor of R4-1, led by Marxist Unity delegates, were mainly political in that they emphasized the strategies of historical Marxist parties and the broad necessity of building out an explicitly socialist presence in the trade unions. Arguments against, led mainly by Bread and Roses members and sympathizers, raised largely practical concerns. Delegates argued that the approach of explicitly socialist caucuses would separate us from the reform section of the labor movement and that the democratic caucuses are terrains of struggle where we can win over the advanced section of the working class to socialist politics. They argued that splitting the reform movement would produce disunity which would harm our ability to effectively radicalize workers through militant shop-floor struggles. Some delegates also argued that the labor movement itself needs to be stronger before we can engage in explicitly socialist politics within the unions.
It is the opinion of the author that these practical concerns are largely justified, minus the historical argument that high union density is a prerequisite for building a socialist party rooted in the labor movement, which is disproven by the historical experience of the SPA. But while delegates raising these concerns were in lock-step tactical unity behind a rank-and-file strategy oriented around democratic reform caucuses, the debate revealed a serious split among these critics on questions of long-term strategy. While several delegates argued that we were “not there yet,” that the labor movement simply isn’t big enough, militant enough, or independent enough, there were yet others who foreclosed any strategic orientation towards open socialist organizing in the trade unions. This leads to two important conclusions: first, that many who opposed the particular tactic of explicitly socialist caucuses could be politically won over to other tactical approaches to politicizing labor work if these practical concerns go addressed, and second, that DSA’s current orientation to the rank-and-file strategy effectively papers over long-term strategic differences, and one of our main goals should be to clarify these differences through open political debate.
While the base resolution failed by over 90%, R4-1, which we did not whip for, gained a larger minority of 32% of the delegation. This result demonstrated that there is not only a sizable YDSA constituency that explicitly supports the tactic of socialist caucuses, but more importantly, there is a larger base interested in addressing the unanswered strategic problem of how we orient as socialists towards rank-and-file organizing with the horizon of building an independent socialist party.
On the other hand, this constituency is largely political and not sectional, which comes with certain disadvantages. The vast majority of the labor praktiki, the YDSA members currently embedded in the labor movement and those who would be responsible for putting any collective labor strategy into practice, were sympathetic to Bread and Roses’ political arguments, in large part due to that caucus’s long-standing presence in labor organizing work. Winning over this labor constituency will require tying bold political horizons, which understand the historic necessity of the task of building the socialist labor movement, with proposals that address the most basic practical concerns of the labor rank-and-file and emerge from organic and patient tactical experimentation within the labor movement.
Problems and Opportunities for Y/DSA’s Rank-And-File Strategy
As has been argued before, DSA’s normative rank-and-file strategy is already an attempt to politicize the labor movement. But in what direction? It should be clear that there is an extreme strategic divergence between the vision of sections of B&R towards building a labor party with a socialist faction and MUG’s view of the necessity for a mass socialist party with strong roots in the labor movement. This divergence is intimately linked with the question of whether we view our grand strategy of social transformation as taking place through a reformation or an overthrow of the undemocratic capitalist state. These questions are life or death in the longue durée of a radical labor movement under capitalism.
The reality of our approach to the rank-and-file strategy demonstrates both a stunning potential for success and the severe, even tragic, limitations to working principally through the democratic caucuses. The upset victory of Shawn Fain and UAWD's reform slate in 2023, followed in quick succession by the successful Stand Up Strikes at the ‘Big 3’ auto plants in the summer, represented a historic return to labor militancy spurred on by socialists and other radicals embedding themselves in the labor struggle. But many DSA labor leaders are content to pin their hopes and dreams on Fain's cheerful figure and the promise of a General Strike in 2028, papering over the important contradiction between UAW leading the pack on union endorsement of a ceasefire in Gaza and political support for the genocidal Biden regime. On a darker note, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, endorsed by TDU on the “Teamsters United” slate in 2021, recently spoke at the Republican National Convention, courting Trump with dangerous labor-nationalist rhetoric alongside engaging in financial and political support for other right-wing politicians. Time will tell if TDU adjusts its strategy away from acquiescent coalition with O’Brien, but DSA should never be put in a position where we are forced to play junior partner to the Democrats, let alone the Republicans.
Tailing of the democratic caucuses will inevitably commit DSA to political skirmishes that we do not want to fight, and commitments that we do not want to make, political compromises that cleave a section of our likely constituency of radical workers away from socialist labor and force us into permanent alliances with explicitly non, or even anti-socialist currents. We must be clear that the socialist political project does not end with shop floor militancy and a renewed struggle for a bigger piece of the pie for workers under capitalism. Our world-historic mission is to infuse the labor movement with the consciousness and organization necessary to revolutionize the whole of state and society. From A to B contains a whole series of unknowable steps, but we need to be clear-headed about the magnitude of the task handed down to us and articulate a political approach to labor organizing that is up to the challenge.
In my own unit’s organizing committee at the New School in UAW Local 7902, the majority of our leadership and rank-and-file organizers are socialists themselves, but in the face of disunity of the socialist movement and the depoliticizing pressures of labor organizing, political questions have historically been deprioritized. Palestine is the main issue which has managed to break this impasse, which I will return to in the following section. We can and must continue to learn to work within existing labor institutions, but we cannot accept uncritically the depoliticizing pressures of a labor movement which is defined by its relationship to legal and state institutions. And in the possibility of a Trump victory in November which would gut the NLRB, we will need to figure out an approach to these questions, and fast. Pushing the boundaries of the framework of legal unionism which ties labor victories to state recognition is necessary not only to advance socialist politics, but also to build a strong and enduring union movement. We must build a labor constituency disloyal to both wings of the undemocratic capitalist state which will inevitably swing back and forth between pro and anti-NLRB administrations.
How can we win a majority of the labor movement to a program for democracy and socialism? DSA first needs to escape its programmatic impasse ushered in by the collapse of the broadly reformist Bernie Program that guided DSA between 2015 and 2020. And there are reasons to be hopeful. At YDSA’s recent convention, we chartered a multi-tendency Program Committee to put forward a draft proposal at the 2025 YDSA National Convention. And more crucially, YDSA already passed a resolution establishing programmatic acceptance as a basis for membership back in 2023. This will likely be a more protracted struggle in DSA, but the 2024 Program which has come out of the national For Our Rights Committee, and which orients us toward November on a class-independent basis, has demonstrated a move in the right direction even if on-the-ground implementation will remain a major site of struggle. Winning over workers politically to DSA’s program means carrying this internal work towards programmatic clarity to fruition.
The Role of Y/DSA and Alternative Approaches to the Rank-and-file Strategy
There are increasingly two tactics underpinning Y/DSA’s engagement with the rank-and-file strategy as it is taken up by divergent groups: a tactic of organizing through democratic caucuses around bread and butter shop floor struggle, and a tactic of organizing the rank-and-file around explicitly political issues which bring them into conflict with the capitalist state. This latter trend is young, growing up around the labor response to October 7th. And while it remains largely unarticulated, our current political moment demonstrates more than ever the need to intervene politically in the labor struggle. It should also be made clear that these two tactics are not at odds with one another: it’s crucial that we begin to experiment with open agitation around our democratic and socialist program while avoiding a split in the reform movement.
In AFSCME District Council 37 (DC37) in New York City, NYC City Workers for Palestine (CW4P) stepped into the breach as a pro-Palestine rank-and-file caucus in the vacuum left behind by the largely apolitical reform caucus, DC37 Progressives. And in April, rank-and-file workers in the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York (PSC-CUNY) organized a Delegate Assembly (DA) during CUNY’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment which endorsed its ‘Five Demands’ in solidarity with Palestine and for a democratic and accessible CUNY. MUG labor activists’ experience in rank-and-file labor groups like CW4P and the DA are the main impulse behind practical experimentation in our caucus’s labor work. And while the specific tactic of socialist caucuses have been subject to internal debate since an earlier iteration of our Labor Committee drafted a position paper which called for them, in practice our labor work has been far more galvanized by these organizing experiences. It is the author’s opinion that the value of putting forward the tactic of socialist caucuses in R4-1 served an instrumental agitational role in raising unanswered strategic questions around our intervention in the labor movement, while being only one of many possible tactical approaches to the question.
In my local, UAW 7902 at the New School, a Joint OC represents all student workers, both in the bargaining unit for academic workers SENS-UAW (recognized since 2018) and the aspiring unit of non-academic workers, NewSWU. The lack of formal legal recognition for the latter remains a key site of struggle as the administration fights tooth-and-nail against recognition and the high turnover of student organizing poses existential challenges. But a legal loophole and lack of a contract mandating a “no-strike” clause opened the floodgates for union participation in the Palestine Solidarity Encampment which exploded onto our campus in the Spring, protected under concerted worker activity. Student workers set up a picket line outside, eventually voting to go on strike in demonstration of a powerful solidarity between twin struggles, emblematic of a key moment of politicization in the labor movement across the country. This experience, along with the example of the court injunction against UAW 4811’s political strike in the University of California system, also demonstrates the complex interplay between legal protection and legal control in the labor relations system which socialists will need to learn to creatively confront if a political labor movement is to survive and thrive.
As Marxists we have the historic responsibility to transform the labor movement from below, and YDSA is the most strategic pathway to reorienting the politics of DSA’s rank-and-file labor work toward building a socialist labor movement. YDSA is also key for engaging with the student worker movement, which will itself play a historically transformative role in the labor movement at-large. The UAW in particular is an organization uniquely predisposed to active socialist organization: with a reform movement in the saddle, over 65,000 academic workers organized into the international since 2017, and several YDSA chapters directly engaged in large-scale union drives. And democratic caucuses like UAWD, which focus mainly on contesting power in the union at the international level, do not play a major role in how we organize our political interventions on the shop floor. An explicitly socialist intervention need not be at odds with active support for reform victories in union leadership.
Part of this goal means dissident labor factions in YDSA need to organize for political parity with B&R among the rank-and-file labor cadre. And our vision for doing so must be clear-headed. Our labor strategy can only be articulated and ultimately implemented by making political interventions which flow from engaging in practical work, and MUG’s youth wing should make embedding itself in the labor movement a long-term strategic priority. This means engaging deeply with the rank-and-file strategy, helping to organize new unions, and refining our labor program and recruitment pipeline as we articulate a new approach to politicizing the labor movement. We will be best served to win political victories if we take this approach and treat building the socialist labor movement as an open-ended practical and strategic problem to be solved through experience, without tactical prescriptions.