Good for the Gander!

(A Political Examination in the form of a Reply)

by P.K. Gandakin

April 21, 2024

This article was written in response to Drake Berkman’s ‘What’s Good for the Goose?’ which can be read in full here.

Cosmonaut has recently published a letter by Drake Berkman about Geese magazine. In the letter, Berkman responds to our first issue, and outlines his disagreements with us in broad strokes. In short, Berkman’s main complaint is a “want of the promised new substance that was not to come.” But he seeks that new substance from the standpoint of the old, and he sees new substance only through the lens of the old. With this in mind, this letter is less a response to Berkman directly than an addressing of his want for “new substance.”

As a result, this article will be structured as I) a clarification of our magazine’s approach to politics in broad strokes, II) an examination of Berkman’s conception of Geese and where we break from it, III) a brief note on Geese’s view of the popular front.

I. Clarifying Geese

What is Geese? Berkman seems to conceive of the magazine as a splinter from the Communist Party USA. He writes:

Here or there already, I’ve seen readers put that what Geese really desires (perhaps in the “super-political” sense) is a Communist Party USA which is open to factions, of which they would constitute one anti-economist trend. […] Herein is a tendency that aligns in toto with the program of a party, but tactical criticism of that party has driven them out.

Of course, the error here sits on our shoulders. In distinguishing ourselves from our past, we open ourselves to being defined by it. The disagreement Geese has with the CPUSA, however, is not merely tactical, or political, etc., but fundamental and essential. It isn’t about tactics, but what it means to have a tactic—not politics, but what politics means—not the Party, but what the concept of the Party concretely, actually is. Is the disagreement theoretical? That would be convenient for both ourselves and our critics, because it would mean that all we would have to do is devise a better theory, and all they  would have to do is condemn us as over-intellectual. Unfortunately, if Dante is delving into Hell, we are right behind him. From the perspective of historical materialism, Geese represents a contingent and historical moment in the development of the communist Party. We are not offering absolute truth, but attempting to move communism forward. This moment did not begin with us, and it will certainly not end with us—but here we are, nevertheless.

This moment is the moment of rupture with economism, a rupture that has invariably been necessary in the history of every communist movement. Economism understands social life as being structured and reducible to economic concepts, which are given an absolute and determinative role. Think vulgar base-superstructure theory. It sees everything through the lens of ‘objective’ economic structures and excludes the cultural, volitional, and so on, as superstructural or epiphenomenal. But within the concrete, abstract disquisitions on economic structure or the commodity-form necessarily play second fiddle to the actual expressions of those concepts in a concrete social formation. A more extended criticism of this thesis will have to wait for another time. For now, we can look at Gramsci. In the Prison Notebooks, he writes: 

The attitude of economism towards expressions of political and intellectual will, action or initiative is to say the least strange - as if these did not emanate organically from economic necessity, and indeed were not the only effective expression of the economy [my emphasis].

The key for Gramsci is that the political or the cultural and so on cannot be reduced to the level of the economic or otherwise made to conform with Marxist categories and laws. Rather, they represent the actualization of those laws in concrete existence. The political and so on are not epiphenomena merely representative of or obscuring the ‘truth’ of Marxist analysis but are themselves the only ‘truth’ that can be ascribed to them at all. If this is the case, that, e.g., a given political tendency represents a given economic trend, then this means not that the particularity of that political tendency—its ideology, its affective aspects, etc.—is irrelevant, but that within those complexities is contained the economic trend in its most developed and complete form.

This is of course in line with Marx’s own approach, for whom the economic structure could only be analytically separated from the rest of society, but which was united completely in actuality. Marx’s own flexible use of economic categories, and his struggle in translating them directly to the political level (e.g. the famous difficulties in writing the third volume of Capital centered on the state), should indicate that this area is underdeveloped within the theory. This underdevelopment is an opening that forms the basic groundwork for the development and criticism of Marxism throughout the 20th century. It is in response to this, f.e., that Lenin develops the concept of economism for the sake of emphasizing the essential role of the political against the economic reductionists; later, this avenue is developed even further within Marxism along anti-racist, feminist, populist, etc. lines; and, outside Marxism, primarily through linguistic and discursive theory. Whatever each of these tendencies do, however, the point for us is not to break with Marx, but to continue his project and concretely understand the conditions of the actualization of the communist Party. As J. Ryder writes in his Problems of Economism:

In a world of classed antagonisms that have taken on complex and advanced cultural expressions unique to the American experience, our communists have sought only to dumb down and attempt to formulaically resolve contradictions through narrow conceptions of terms like ‘class war’ and ‘working class’. What is required is a renewed understanding of what it means to be a communist in the United States in 2024; one which accepts new and changing political dynamics and trends as necessitating a correspondingly transformative approach, one which prioritizes politics and their ends over idealistic virtue signaling and self-fulfilling bureaucratic pseudo-parties.

This means that these developments and criticisms cannot be understood one-sidedly as ‘revisions’ or ‘attacks’ on Marxism. They might in fact be both. But, at the same time, Marxism learns from the whole tree of life. As Sarkozy writes in Tutorial Marxism:

In the context of communism, we remain genuinely, and not just in name, anti-dogmatic if we take up an approach to communism that, instead of swearing fidelity to a single way of thinking, employs the vast army of theory afforded to us by all past and present human knowledge. […]

In practice, this approach would be an attitude that is the process of creation and redescription - the creation of new concepts and redescription of old ones.

Understood from this angle, these critiques and developments offer sophistications of Marx’s original categories that render them more capable of grappling with the complexities of concrete reality. For the sake of example it will be useful to point to an individual like W. E. B. DuBois who, through the development of the concept of “wages of whiteness,” did not mechanically conjoin anti-racist theory with Marxism as externally related theories but instead developed within Marxism a more complete picture of how class-identities are actually articulated within concrete historical formations, closing the gap between production conceived purely at the economic level and production as a social process. ‘Class’ is an abstract category which, in every actual manifestation, necessarily is constructed socially and historically, and consequently must be investigated concretely in its deviation from its ideal model. 

Is Berkman an explicit defender of economism? Of course not; he opposes it. But economism is not something like a tumor that can be surgically removed with precision, leaving the rest of the body intact. Many ‘anti-economist' trends of today think that they can move beyond economism by simply stating that they are against it and then quietly putting it to the side. To really get at economism, however, thoroughly and consistently, requires understanding it as structural of our entire approach, and so challenging our entire approach (yes—our, too, for if economism is a stage, it is one we all have to struggle through via criticism and political work, and any tendency, even if genuinely critical, is structured by its logic).

One such attempt at revaluation is in the concept of “super-politics,” which Berkman seems to misunderstand. He writes, as we saw earlier:

Here or there already, I’ve seen readers put that what Geese really desires (perhaps in the “super-political” sense) is a Communist Party USA which is open to factions[…]

The use of “super-political” by Berkman is quite strange here. I confess I do not fully understand what it is supposed to mean in this context. It doesn’t comport at all with how Scottie O. presents the concept in Political Realignment Leading up to the Civil War, in which he writes:

Super-politics, briefly put, refers to the totalizing reference point at the heart of any given political order and which every other political agent is articulated through. All political intervention finds its meaning through the logic of this super-politics, which is similar to the American concept of the “party system.” […] Super-politics is in effect, the system which imbues meaning into the actions and words of political actors, it is the system of ‘meaning’ in politics as it emerges through unique and definite historical moments.

I think that this would be much easier to understand for Marxists wary of “new substance” if we present it in the style of “old substance.” As we saw earlier, class as an economic category is an abstraction that exists only within the field of political economy. In every particular concrete formation, class is articulated specifically. In the United States, f.e., it is structured by race, regional cultures, politics, etc. If it were the case that class were not structured in this way, or that these factors were purely external to class construction, then the basic strategy and tactics of the communist parties would remain the same throughout history. This would be strictly anti-Marxist. Lenin writes:

Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by not binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle. […] Under no circumstances does Marxism confine itself to the forms of struggle possible and in existence at the given moment only, recognizing as it does that new forms of struggle, unknown to the participants of the given period, inevitably arise as the given social situation, changes. In this respect Marxism learns, if we may so express it, from mass practice, and makes no claim what ever to teach the masses forms of struggle invented by “systematizers” in the seclusion of their studies.

As the “social situation” changes, so do the “forms of struggle.” A particular “social situation,” broken down, is the particularities of culture, race, ideology, etc. A class that is constructed within a particular social situation necessarily expresses itself in a form that reflects that construction. This is the only way to give real meaning to Lenin’s slogan of a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.” This slogan isn’t an individual call for individuals to study hard, but a structural thesis on the orientation of the Party towards a given political conjuncture. The Party ‘should’ not engage in “concrete analysis,” it absolutely must if it seeks to be a genuine expression of a historically determined social class. In extremely oversimplified terms, “super-politics” is “concrete conditions” understood at the level of political identity-articulation. It is an acknowledgement that class-identity is not strictly identical with abstract economic concepts but articulated within a full cultural and political context. 

Further examination of “super-politics” is better left to Scottie’s essay. For now, it will suffice to specifically clarify Geese’s own status. The Bolsheviks were not a party. Mao was not a party. Browder was not the party. They were within parties. They were tendencies. Even within the Bolsheviks, there was open struggle on all questions, between the Machists and the traditional dialectical materialists, between the Otzovists who wanted to boycott the Duma and Lenin’s own position of critical engagement, etc. Everyone today wants to write a program and give a prescription—let them scribble away. Geese’s position is not: ‘here is our program, here is Absolute truth’; our only goal is to investigate and construct the necessary preconditions necessary for an actual communist intervention in the current conjuncture, which has nothing to do with political posturing. To explicate this view further, let us look at Berkman’s criticism of our “ganderous rag” and see if we cannot distinguish ourselves from the picture he paints of us.

II. “The Communist Movement needs to be Raised to a Higher Level in National Politics through Liquidation”

Berkman does not give us too much to work with. But we can reconstruct the thesis he assigns Geese and, by examining it, expand on our substantial disagreements. Even in its basic framing, we can already see the central point of tension between Geese and the tendencies of Marxism that Berkman, Cosmonaut, the CPUSA, etc. all represent. Berkman writes:

Many of Geese‘s criticisms I agree with, though I don’t agree with a single one of its proposals, save for the general idea that the communist movement (which I contend is the democratic movement) needs to be raised to a higher level in national politics. Though who actually opposes that?

Who actually opposes that? No one indeed. If only it were the case that the left were dominated by individuals who insisted on the importance of abandoning national politics—then it would be very easy to aim the artillery at them and let loose. Unfortunately, we all do seem to be convinced of this point, and we have been for over a hundred years, and yet being raised to the national political level eludes us. Berkman continues:

No to the liquidation of the coming Democratic Socialist Party into the ‘national political life’ of the country.

What does Berkman mean by liquidation? Assumedly, he is responding to the following thesis developed by Scottie O. in Towards a Socialist Intervention:

There can be no doubt that the overcoming of the current order is the ultimate aim of our movement; the process of overcoming however, is found directly within the development of that order—in its exhaustion through political struggle.

This is tied to the concept of “super-politics” (here, the “current order”). “Super-politics’ means that politics is concrete, it is objective, it is tied to the activity of the hundreds of millions, not to the whims of activism. A hundred—a thousand programs—can be fired at the bourgeois state; so long as the “super-politics” are not concretely analyzed and criticized, and a specific political relation is articulated by the communists in relation to that “super-politics,” each program will find its ultimate home not in the halls of power but in Arial 14-point flyer text, or perhaps a website. A favorite passage of Lenin’s, quoted in Why Geese?, is as follows: 

The question is not whether this or that Social-Democratic group will want to dissolve in bourgeois democracy […] They may not only proclaim such “independence” but even retain it formally, and yet it may turn out that their hands will nonetheless be tied in the struggle against the inconsistency of the bourgeoisie. The final political result of the revolution may prove to be that, in spite of the formal “independence” of Social-Democracy, in spite of its complete organizational individuality as a separate party, it will in fact not be independent, it will not be able to put the imprint of its proletarian independence on the course of events, will prove so weak that, on the whole and in the last analysis, its “dissolving” in the bourgeois democracy will nonetheless be a historical fact.

The import of the discussion on economism here should be clear; if it is the case that class is historically constructed, then the practices of that class, viz., the “super-politics,” is the actuality of class struggle at its current stage of development. If communism is a mass practice and not voluntarist activism, this means that it can only emerge out of that ‘super-politics’ although as a critical rupture with it. Scottie continues: 

This [sectarian] view fails to see that whichever political battle is being waged on the national level is not the “calculated machination” of a group of men in suits in a room somewhere, but a culmination of the country’s history up to this point—of all real, objective social activity.

So far, this is all things we can all agree on. But while everything is fair in philosophy, things become quite contentious in class war—and Scottie becomes quite contentious when he dares not only to theorize abstractly but concretely apply this thesis to the political struggle. The only logical conclusion of an emphasis on the concrete is a focus on the concrete. He continues: 

So instead of letting our politics be obscured behind (or to the side of) the contemporary political struggle for democracy, we must join the contemporary political struggle—on the side of this progressive cultural bloc, which is struggling for democracy, in order to further its constituent movements and to expand their aims beyond the limits of what is possible under the current political order.

Politics are concrete!—yes. Politics are mass practice!—yes. When thinking about theory, everyone agrees. When thinking about history, everyone agrees. But when it comes to politics—not past politics, not tomorrow’s politics, but current politics—stating that this concrete mass practice is politics is, for our economists, absolutely unacceptable. In any case, we have an understanding of Geese’s purported liquidation: as internalization or immersion within the national political struggle by communism.

So we have the thesis that Berkman attributes to Geese magazine: we believe the communist movement needs to be raised to a higher level in national politics through liquidation (i.e., immersion, internalization, etc.). If we are supposed to take credit for something, however, it is only right that we be given permission to examine it to see whether it is really satisfactory. Let’s do so, word by word:

First, Geese does not believe that the communist movement needs to be raised to a higher level… There is a curious trend characteristic of all movements when forced into isolation, where the movement takes precedence over the tasks of the movement, and it is as if the ‘communist movement’ is supposed to take precedence over communism itself, or as if the group that formally identifies itself with communism is communism. But the idea of the ‘communist movement’ is an absurd abstraction inherited from the activism and metaphysics of liberal movementism, not Marxism. The communists do not have a ‘movement’ because we are not a religious group or a social club (neither, in the same vein, do the Democrats or Republicans or Bolsheviks or the King of England have or had ever had a ‘movement’). The communists have a Party and the communists have social classes the Party relates to. These are its only terms. 

I saw the consequences of this ‘we are a movement’ mindset frequently during my time organizing in the CPUSA and elsewhere on the left: any mistakes or failures were excused by the notion that we were ‘all in this together,’ theoretical education amounted to ‘this is what Marx (or Lenin, etc.) wrote’, any disagreements or interpretations out of the norm were deflected with ‘but we’re all communists, and communists don’t believe that, they believe this’ or simply ‘we shouldn’t let theory get in the way of unity in practice,’ and so on. As comrades, we were supposed to protect and uplift each other, believe that internal criticism and discussion would lead to productive change, etc. And don’t get me wrong—these people have struggled immensely and suffered immensely ‘for the cause,’ and I’m all for kindness and constructive criticism. But when it comes to political tasks, only political attitudes are of any use. And this is the point. The invariable result of this attitude was a coldness towards mass politics (an isolation that was coded in condemnations of “liquidationism,” etc.) in favor of preserving the subculture. However, as a communist (rather than as a ‘communist movement member’), the most minute and meager struggles and sacrifices on the part of the masses infinitely exceed in importance the most extensive labor and sacrifices faced by communists, not because I like the masses or dislike communist cadre, but because I believe the masses make history! 

Sure, I’ll do (and did) things like jail support, I helped comrades in times of need, and was helped countless times by people who I hold dear to my heart till this day and would still go out of my way to support if ever required—but ultimately, whether admittedly or not, it was in the capacity of friends, individuals, etc. that these actions were performed. And ‘friend’ is, unfortunately, not a category at the level of world-history. Formal ideological identification has little (not nothing) to do with political struggle. Geese has no desire to do anything for the communist movement, as the communist movement is not our object, the people, the masses, the proletariat, whichever you prefer, are, and communism as a political and historical movement rather than a volunteer group can only emerge out of the activity of the people and not the actions of individual activists.

Second, Geese does not believe that the communist movement needs to be raised… There is no necessity in politics. The communists do not need to do anything because the people are not passive puzzles that can be solved with the right tactical answer, they are creative actors that are actively constituting politics, even if they do so without consciousness of their own role. If everyone protests, then a protest is necessary, if everyone strikes, a strike is necessary, etc. The activity of the Party in relation to ‘super-politics’ should be understood as being one stream of political practice within a wide ocean that it also plays a larger or smaller role in constituting and thereby deciding collectively as a society what is or isn’t necessary. Practice is constitutive, not superficial—again, the masses make history!

Third, Geese does not believe the movement needs to be raised anywhere, because raising is not the task. The conception of the Party (or the ‘movement’) as a formal organizational body composed of individuals brought together by a shared ideology, etc. is an activistic and academic understanding of the Party. It conceives of the Party’s task as convincing individuals through propaganda or appeal to their rational interest, or by building ‘good will’ in communities through organizing, activism, mutual aid, etc. It pretends activists are the only meaningful element in social life; it’s a Florence Nightingale-flavored Blanquism. 

At the theoretical level, this mindset expresses itself in the call for an ‘application’ or a ‘reinterpretation’ of Marxism in the 21st century. Geese, however, thinks communism has nothing to do with ‘applying’ or ‘reinterpreting’ theory, but with concretization. This distinction is subtle and difficult to place in words but essential. The activistic mindset understands political work as a sheerly technical process that is achieved through the correct actions and decision, i.e., effective organizing, pamphleteering, correct coinciding with rational interests, etc. But this treats the existing political structure as an arbitrary and essentially neutral field (—rather than as a “super-politics”!). Liberalism, e.g., is treated as popular because the people have been convinced of it through news media, or because the Democrat Party has access to so much funding, etc. Historical materialism inverts this relationship: because liberalism as a politics is able to effectively play the role of structuring and expressing the mass practice of concrete social groups that exist in a concrete historical formation, it consequently (as a logical consequence rather than a historical or temporal one) also dominates the ideological superstructure, possesses the ability to direct the distribution of social surplus, etc. The origin of the power of the governing class (i.e., the social group that directs the state) is not in the mere possession of that power per se; the state, rather, is how the totality of political practice necessarily designates which ideology and social group accesses institutional power.

This point makes clear the importance of the displacing of emphasis from the communist movement to the proletariat as a whole. There is nothing the communist movement can do to ‘rise’ to a higher level in national politics. If we agree that the masses make history, consistently following this thesis means that the masses are already, right now, making history. Revolution cannot be conceived as the top of a ladder with multiple steps that you can sequentially climb through instrumental action—not a matter of moving from a sect, to a large sect, to a small mass party, to a big mass party, etc.—but as being tied to and determined by the relation of the Party to national political life qua mass political practice. Instrumental action is not how the Bolsheviks, or the German SPD or KPD, or Mao’s CPC, or any party ever in the history of humanity has ever become a meaningful political force. The Bolsheviks became the dominant party in Russia in 1917 because they were able to effectively articulate a concrete ideology capable of structuring and guiding the political practice of the Russian proletariat in its relation to national political life, not because they did a bunch of mutual aid and flyering. “Bread, land, peace” trumps organizing every time. This doesn’t, of course, mean that activism or propaganda is not necessary—it does mean, however, that both are and always have been  subordinate to politics as both the origin of their actuality and the source of their significance.

Everyone supports raising the movement to a higher level in national political life. We do not. This attitude is exactly how communism is precluded from being part of national political life. The entire point of historical materialism is that history does not proceed according to the immediate whims of social actors, but is determined by the whole of historically constituted social practice in the process of its development. National political life is not something that can be reached, because it is not a goal or an object, it is a mass practice. This basic reconceptualization is necessary to understand, further, why we disagree with being characterized as liquidationists and consider our disagreement with the Communist Party USA to be over essential politics rather than tactical differences. This will also hopefully be some new substance: the Communist Party USA is not right-deviationist from anything except for the most superficial perspective, but is, concretely, in its practice and in its politics, a textbook example of left-sectarianism in the same genre as basically all radical leftism in the United States. The American left is obsessed with activism and ‘doing things’ the same way that an old man is obsessed with going out every weekend to play football. Chronic incapacity breeds a fixation on physical action. If we want to understand left-sectarianism and right-opportunism, we have to look at the content of programs, which has nothing to do with the formal terms or propositions contained within the programs themselves—but which is only explicable reference to the relation that program has to the political practice of society as a whole and of social groups within society in particular. The Communist Party USA has the exact same approach to politics as the remainder of the subcultural left: write a program you think will appeal, and then get out there and try to give it to people. The CPUSA thinks that talking about democracy and beating Trump is appealing, another organization thinks that talking about how both Biden and Trump are bad is appealing, etc. There is functionally no difference between one program and the other, and if the RCP, IMT, and CPUSA all woke up one morning and decided to rotate their programs there would be zero change in their actual activity or their actual relation to social groups in the United States, because politics is not a matter of ‘appealing to’ or ‘winning over’ people but, again, an objective social practice.

Fourth, Geese does not believe the communist movement needs to be raised to a higher level in national politics… This one is fairly straightforward. The idea that there are levels or steps in politics is the product of a purely activistic standpoint that identifies itself with instrumental action in the most narrow sense it can be taken. As an individual, you start in your immediate community (‘community politics’), you expand and start having an influence on your city (‘local politics’), then you grow enough to start influencing your state government and electing representatives until, finally, you’ve convinced enough people that you can start swinging your weight around at a national level and threatening the state. There is no ‘higher level’ of national politics; the entire thing is national politics. This is what “super-politics” is all about. Local, state, and national politics are organic components of the national political life as a whole. The idea that your ‘local community’ cares more about City Council and potholes than they do about who is or isn’t President is pure cope. There is no gradual transition; it’s all one structure. Liberalism doesn’t differentiate between a national level of struggle and a local one except at the limitedly empirical level. Geese doesn’t think the communist movement, or any movement really, should strive for a higher level in national politics—national politics either is or isn’t. A case example: DSA is a great organization that spent many years organizing, sustaining itself, getting the message out, etc. But 2016 wasn’t the result of a critical mass of activism finally bearing fruit, it was a result of politics. Bernie, the election of the Squad, the membership surge of DSA, etc., had everything to do with the shifting political consciousness of the country in the face of the exhaustion of Obama-era liberalism and its consequent inability to articulate an ideology that was able to structure and guide mass political practice in a new era. Liberalism’s middling response to the economic crisis, its inability to inspire, its inability to effectively cognize and respond to the conflicts and struggles of the day—all this led to the explosion of the left and even Bernie Sanders, not organizing.

This does not mean organizing is not necessary. To be clear, organizing is necessary. Propaganda is necessary. No movement can exist without it. The point is just that politics is not structured according to organizing, but is an objective practice with its own arc of development that needs to be analyzed in relation to organizing, economic change, cultural shifts, etc., but which is emphatically not an epiphenomena or derivative of any of these one things. Since this point is a little strange for a culture inundated in activism and empiricism, and easily subject to misinterpretation, let’s try to illustrate it concretely. Both theory and practice are subordinate to politics, with politics being understood as the intellectual and structuring expression of a social mass’s political practice. If the Party does embody a genuine political relation of social mass to state, the previously enumerated activism and even economistic theory would acquire a new significance. Mutual aid (or food distribution), for example, when engaged in by an isolated sectarian group outside political life, is indifferentiable from charity and does not contribute at all to the creation of a political movement. On the other hand, when such an activity is engaged in by a formation that genuinely represents the political orientation of a given social mass, that food distribution becomes infused with the morality and ethics attached to that political orientation and acquires a higher importance. An example of this can be found in the practice of the Black Panther Party. Its original founders, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, began with the articulation of a Ten-Point Program that expressed the antagonistic relation of their local community, and, later, broader segments of society, towards the American state and the dominant articulation of social groups. Newton began building the BPP by showing up to bars and talking to people about politics and about the program, not about what he could ‘do’ for them. Later, as the BPP grew, it began engaging in economic activities such as its famous breakfast program for schoolchildren, etc. Because they had achieved an actual representation of a political relation, these activities become means of solidifying the BPP’s relation to its community and highlighting the failures of contemporary society in providing for the underprivileged rather than empty motions indifferentiable from those engaged in by the Red Cross or UNICEF. The breakfast program as an extension of the Ten-Point Program served to strengthen and grow the BPP, and made the breakfast program itself significantly more popular and effective, while similar actions by activists disconnected from politics instead consistently result in a failure to achieve long-term gains and recurrent patterns of exhaustion and burnout.

Fifth, Geese does not want to raise the movement through liquidation (or immersion, etc.). We’ll keep this short. Even if we wanted to liquidate the Party, we couldn’t—what, exactly, would we liquidate? The “coming Democratic Socialist Party”? We hope that the membership of this “coming” party, when they come, will understand liquidation of the party as relating to the question of that party’s relation to the social group it politically represents, and not as a question of repeating, over and overagain, slogans about the independence of the party. In fact, if this “coming” party does begin to do the latter, that would probably be the time to say sayonara to it and start over. As we can see from the current agglomeration of left-sects, the formations most obsessed with liquidation are invariably the ones who despite organizational independence have already liquidated themselves practically from the perspective of their relation to national political life.

As discussed above, our ‘liquidation’ amounts to the following acknowledgement on our part, said nicely by Scottie:

Communism is not something which is supposed to ‘fall out of a coconut tree.’

Recognizing that there is an existing national political life, that mass practice is ongoing, and that it takes the form that it is currently, actually taking is not liquidation, it is acknowledging that sloganeering and activism is insufficient from a structural standpoint. I do not like the Democrat Party. But the two-party system is the institutional expression of mass political practice, and communism will only ever be a product of rupture with it as mass practice. The nuances of our particular relation should be discussed, but the starting point must be the essential thesis that rupture will never be brought by an external organization or party, no matter how sophisticated their theory or extensive their activism is (—and our theory is almost never sophisticated and our activism is almost never extensive!). Further, importantly, our level of activism and theory has nothing to do with unity, or discipline, or trying harder—again, as examined earlier, it is ultimately rooted in our relation to the masses! The Democrats are not in power because they are better at politicking than you are. The Democrats are good politicians because they are in power, i.e., because they are the expression of mass practice, which is the real and only origin of all subjective ‘talent,’ ‘creativity,' etc. from the perspective of history.

Besides, to prate on about liquidation in a period of total isolation of the communist left is rather absurd. Probably much material for psycho-analysis can be derived from study of subjects who, despite being almost completely marginalized in society, fear above all that the danger comes from veering too close to other people. 

III. The Unpopular Front 

As a side note, it will be fruitful to briefly discuss Berkman’s claim that we are supporters of the popular front thesis. Berkman writes:

To suppose that a higher intellectual foray along this over-tamped path would generate something new is just sophistry. In other words, the criticism of the popular front is the criticism of Geese.

We disagree on two counts. First, that Geese can be identified with the popular front. Second, that criticism of the popular front, while perhaps an “over-tamped path… is just sophistry.” Unfortunately, the fact that the echoes of the popular front, the united front, etc. still reverberate in the heads of 21st century communists in America is proof that systematic criticism of the concept has not been performed adequately. Such a systematic criticism will not be engaged in here (although readers should look out for such a criticism in the form of an extended essay in the future), but we can throw out some provisional points.

The popular front should be rejected, we hear, because it subordinates the party to liberalism, because liberalism will betray any alliance it forms with the communist left, because it leads to an abandonment of positions that must be maintained out of principle, etc. These criticisms are rather silly, and the above should already indicate the basic lines of disagreement. The relation of the Party to liberalism or the non-communist left is not something that can be determined a priori or even through historical experience. The activities and orientations of the Party and the political forces in society more generally are only interesting insofar as they are living practices, i.e., insofar as they are actual and guided not by an esoteric underlying Truth but that practice itself, the relation of those groups to each other and each others’ practices, etc. From a metaphysical or theoretical standpoint, Geese is neutral on the ‘popular front.’ Historical examples can only provide approximations that function as advice or opportunities to exercise our critical thinking skills, insofar as each historical conjuncture is essentially different. Further, the criterion on the truth of the popular front is in practice—but the result of practice comes afterwards. For those of us actually engaging in political practice, the historical moment is unfinished and the validation or refutation of our approaches remain on the other side of time. The popular front, and tactics and strategies more generally, are not instrumental actions that can be verified once and for all but, for the Party, are only subjective means of relation to national political life. 

From this perspective, the popular front is completely dead. It refers to the relation that a communist party and its social base should form with the other parties and interest groups in society. In the 21st century, however, we neither have a communist party with a social base nor a society structured on the basis of interest groups. There is no Party to form a popular front, and no groups with whom to form it. It is unclear what application of the ‘popular front’ would even mean in our context, whether treated as something to oppose or something to follow.

Theoretically, however, the popular front is also insufficient. It treats the task as building alliances between articulated political groups, but, understanding a concrete social formation as a “super-politics” that articulates the social and political groups within it, the task is shifted towards a rupture with that system of articulation in the first place. Insofar as hegemony and articulation are understood as concrete social practice rather than abstract and independent institutions, this means also that this rupture can only come out of that social practice, not through instrumental action of isolated activists. Both the popular frontists and the critics of the popular front lead themselves down the path of liquidation and sectarianism by understanding politics along the lines of activism qua instrumental action and politics qua rational argumentation and appeal, and from this “substance” the only thing that can result is the circling of wagons. What is needed is a shift of perspective. Geese is anti-economist, but we want to be anti-economist consistently. We do not understand anti-economism through the lens of economism, i.e., as the task of selecting the ‘right’ action or ‘right’ program, but through the lens of historical materialism, which understands politics and ideology as concrete practices internal to the formation of actual class-identities. 

With this in mind, there is nowhere else to turn except national political life—there is no hidden and secret revolutionary proletariat waiting to receive a call to action, no economic law that promises to sweep away in one motion the two-party system, etc. For a political party, there is only politics, there is only political struggle, and there is only political development. We are not an ideological grouping, in the sense that we share a common program, or a common intellectual fidelity to, e.g., pragmatism, but we are political in the sense that our entire concern is to motivate a transformation of communism’s (not Marxism’s, not the left’s) relation to the only place at which politics really exists, national political life.

It will suffice to end this letter in the way Why Geese? ends. Hopefully, this quote is interpreted in a new way, with new significance, after the above. In Why Geese?, the editorial team of Geese writes:

Our thesis can perhaps be summed up in other, more famous words:

‘We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.’