With the pop­u­lar­i­ty of politi­cians like Bernie Sanders and Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez and the explo­sion in mem­ber­ship in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca (DSA), social­ism is all of a sud­den cen­tral to the nation­al polit­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion. And it’s hap­pen­ing in the Unit­ed States. Despite being a coun­try long argued to be unique­ly aller­gic to all talk of class con­flict and any alter­na­tive to cap­i­tal­ism, here we are, watch­ing many Amer­i­cans ques­tion whether we should remake our polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic sys­tems from top to bottom.

Politics is addition — you need to get more people on your team.

But this isn’t the first time mass num­bers of peo­ple in the Unit­ed States have con­sid­ered social­ism. The last time was half a cen­tu­ry ago, when the New Left raised ques­tions about cap­i­tal­ism, impe­ri­al­ism, racism, sex­ism and much more. At the tail end of the 1960s, those ques­tions were tak­en up by the New Com­mu­nist Move­ment (NCM), a col­lec­tion of groups in the Marx­ist-Lenin­ist tra­di­tion. While the move­ment was made up of orga­ni­za­tions that had dif­fer­ent answers to burn­ing polit­i­cal ques­tions, on the whole, these groups were inspired by the left-nation­al­ist projects of the day, includ­ing domes­tic move­ments like the Black Pan­thers and Puer­to Rican nation­al­ist groups, and inter­na­tion­al com­mu­nist move­ments in Cuba, Viet­nam, and espe­cial­ly China.

Max Elbaum was deeply involved in that move­ment. After join­ing Stu­dents for a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Soci­ety (SDS) as a col­lege stu­dent in Madi­son, Wis­con­sin, Elbaum co-found­ed the NCM group Line of March. He end­ed up devot­ing his life to var­i­ous move­ments against war and racism, and served as the edi­tor of the left­ist mag­a­zine Cross­Roads through­out the 1990s.

Elbaum is the author of Rev­o­lu­tion in the Air: Six­ties Rad­i­cals Turn to Lenin, Che, and Mao , reis­sued in April by Ver­so Books with a new fore­word by Ali­cia Garza, cofounder of #Black­Lives­Mat­ter. Though he was a par­tic­i­pant in some of the orga­ni­za­tions and cam­paigns and the over­all move­ment that he chron­i­cles in the book, Rev­o­lu­tion in the Air takes a more dis­pas­sion­ate look at the NCM, fair­ly weigh­ing its achieve­ments and missteps.

It’s hard to come away from read­ing Elbaum’s book with­out think­ing that the move­ment made far more mis­steps than achieve­ments. As we explore in our con­ver­sa­tion below, the move­men­t’s ori­en­ta­tion towards ​“Third-World Marx­ists” and left nation­al­ism gave it some redeem­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics, like its stead­fast com­mit­ment to anti-racism and cre­at­ing a mul­tira­cial move­ment. But it also quick­ly became a move­ment rife with unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic behav­ior, obsessed with doc­tri­nal puri­ty, and ori­en­tat­ed towards regimes like Chi­na that rad­i­cals lat­er real­ized were far from suc­cess­ful demo­c­ra­t­ic, social­ist societies.

This is a his­to­ry that’s worth exca­vat­ing in its own right, giv­en how sig­nif­i­cant the NCM was at the tail end of the New Left. But it is also his­to­ry that rad­i­cals today would do well to wres­tle with. Social­ists in the 21st cen­tu­ry don’t have to com­plete­ly rein­vent the wheel — they can learn from the often-hero­ic efforts of rad­i­cals sev­er­al decades ago. Rev­o­lu­tion in the Air is essen­tial read­ing for the new gen­er­a­tion of rad­i­cals that wants to get anti-cap­i­tal­ism right this time, avoid­ing the same sec­tar­i­an, unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic, puri­ty-obsessed mis­takes that the past gen­er­a­tion of Marx­ist-Lenin­ists did.

I recent­ly inter­viewed Elbaum about his book. Our con­ver­sa­tion focused on the his­to­ry of the NCM and — espe­cial­ly — what it can teach mem­bers of the DSA.

Mic­ah Uet­richt: Let’s start with the basics. What was the NCM?

Max Elbaum: The NCM was an effort by sev­er­al thou­sand peo­ple to revi­tal­ize com­mu­nism, dur­ing a peri­od when tra­di­tion­al com­mu­nism had been stag­nant. It evolved out of the rad­i­cal move­ments of the 1960s and had some momen­tum on the left from the late 1960s into the 1970s. At that point, it was the pre­dom­i­nant trend with­in the Left. It had the high­est pro­por­tion of peo­ple of col­or and some influ­en­tial polit­i­cal initiative.

It ran into dif­fi­cul­ties into the mid- to late-1970s. Some parts car­ried on into the 1980s, but was fin­ished as a coher­ent force by the late 1980s.

Mic­ah: What was meant by ​“com­mu­nism”?

Max: The move­ment arose at a time when Third-World rev­o­lu­tions were shak­ing the empire, and when sev­er­al of the lead­ing orga­ni­za­tions with­in those rev­o­lu­tions iden­ti­fied with Marx­ism-Lenin­ism — ver­sions of it that were not strict­ly with­in the ide­o­log­i­cal niche of the Sovi­et Union, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty and the Cubans. The NCM iden­ti­fied with those move­ments polit­i­cal­ly and ide­o­log­i­cal­ly, and defined itself as build­ing a gen­uine­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary par­ty as opposed to what it saw as ​“reformism” or ​“revi­sion­ism” of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty USA.

The idea was to build a new rev­o­lu­tion­ary van­guard on the basis of a more ortho­dox, left ver­sion of Marx­ism-Lenin­ism, one espe­cial­ly inspired by the lib­er­a­tion move­ments then exist­ing through­out what we called the Third World.

Mic­ah: Why was the NCM so ascen­dent in the post-New Left?

Max: It attract­ed a plu­ral­i­ty of peo­ple who turned to rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics — not nec­es­sar­i­ly a major­i­ty, but a plu­ral­i­ty. It was par­tic­u­lar­ly strong in free­dom move­ments from com­mu­ni­ties of col­or among those who turned to rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics. Peo­ple who went into it had an extreme­ly strong com­mit­ment to rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics and made sus­tained efforts to sink roots in the work­ing class and oppressed communities.

The largest left news­pa­per of the time, the Guardian, embraced these pol­i­tics. It was a time when the Chi­nese, Viet­namese and Cuban Com­mu­nist par­ties and oth­er left-led nation­al lib­er­a­tion move­ments had very high pres­tige, and this move­ment iden­ti­fied with those forces. All of this gave the move­ment initiative.

Mic­ah: Your book isn’t real­ly a defense of the NCM. Most of it is quite crit­i­cal. But you also repeat­ed­ly point out some of the pos­i­tive fea­tures of that move­ment. Can you briefly sketch out the good and the bad from those movements?

Max: My book is an effort to doc­u­ment what the move­ment did and thought and what its com­po­nents and parts were. So in a sense, it’s resource mate­r­i­al for peo­ple to draw their own con­clu­sions of what the strengths and weak­ness­es were. (Though I do, at the end, draw my own bal­ance sheet.)

For my part, on the pos­i­tive side, the move­ment did see how cen­tral empire-build­ing and racism were to U.S. cap­i­tal­ism. There was a strong com­mit­ment to sink­ing roots in those com­mu­ni­ties that had the great­est poten­tial to make rad­i­cal change. The move­ment grasped the impor­tance of col­lec­tive action and the idea of peo­ple pri­or­i­tiz­ing polit­i­cal activ­i­ty and advanc­ing it in a col­lec­tive way.

The move­ment did make some head­way in break­ing out of a U.S.-centric view of the world. And there was an attempt to learn from and offer ideas to rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies in oth­er coun­tries, and a strong sense of inter­na­tion­al­ism. In its ear­ly years, cer­tain com­po­nent parts did some inter­est­ing work on U.S. pol­i­tics, espe­cial­ly on the par­tic­u­lar role of the spe­cial oppres­sion of com­mu­ni­ties of color.

On the neg­a­tive side, all sides of the move­ment were afflict­ed with a mis­as­sess­ment of the con­di­tions in the coun­try, espe­cial­ly the resilience of cap­i­tal­ism. Lots of peo­ple were off-base in the late 1960s and 1970s, but the move­ment couldn’t adjust when it became clear that the motion of nation­al pol­i­tics was mov­ing to the right.

The ide­o­log­i­cal frame­works of the dif­fer­ent com­po­nent parts of the move­ment were rigid in their quest for ortho­doxy — see­ing Marx­ism-Lenin­ism as a kind of omni­scient sci­ence. Those ide­o­log­i­cal frame­works were off-base.

The move­ment was gen­er­al­ly afflict­ed by ultra-left ten­den­cies and a ten­den­cy to polar­ize forces that weren’t, in their view, as rev­o­lu­tion­ary as them. The mod­el of orga­ni­za­tion the move­ment imple­ment­ed was ​“minia­tur­ized Lenin­ism”; we essen­tial­ly built small sects instead of flex­i­ble, mass rev­o­lu­tion­ary groups. This was relat­ed to our mis­as­se­ment of the his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions. There was a pro­lif­er­a­tion of sec­tar­i­an atti­tudes over polit­i­cal dif­fer­ences, some of which were impor­tant but many weren’t.

Mic­ah: What was the ori­en­ta­tion towards sup­pos­ed­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary states like Chi­na and the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party?

Max: The move­ment had dif­fer­ent com­po­nent parts on that ques­tion, but it tend­ed to over­es­ti­mate both the strengths and the poten­tial for build­ing a new soci­ety of the coun­tries that had had rev­o­lu­tions in the under­de­vel­oped world. It was most pro­nounced in the sec­tions of the move­ment that looked to China.

In the late 1960s and ear­ly 1970s, there was a much broad­er lay­er of the Left beyond the NCM that was infat­u­at­ed with Chi­na. The Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion was pre­sent­ed to the world as a grass­roots ver­sion of social­ism, more demo­c­ra­t­ic than what had tak­en place in the Sovi­et Union. In ret­ro­spect, that was very off-base. But impor­tant parts of the NCM fell into that trap.

Oth­er sec­tions of the move­ment were more sym­pa­thet­ic to the Cubans or Viet­namese, and had a some­what more bal­anced view of the strengths and weak­ness­es than those who fol­lowed Chi­na. But even there, it was con­nect­ed to the view of Marx­ism-Lenin­ism that was dog­mat­ic. The nature of these coun­tries, espe­cial­ly on the issues of democ­ra­cy, was off-base. Pret­ty much the whole NCM accept­ed the idea of the one-par­ty state and com­mand econ­o­my as mod­els of social­ism. Most of the Left now is in a much dif­fer­ent place about the one-par­ty state, and the ques­tion of the eco­nom­ics of social­ism are up in the air.

Mic­ah: In the late-1960s and ear­ly-1970s, the NCM was the dom­i­nant rad­i­cal left­ist for­ma­tion in the Unit­ed States. Today, it’s the DSA. The obvi­ous ques­tion one has in read­ing your book is what the lessons for DSA are.

Max: There are a few. One, you have to con­stant­ly assess and reassess the his­tor­i­cal moment. What stage of the mass strug­gle are we at? What’s the poten­tial for change at a giv­en moment? How do you avoid think­ing that we can make all kinds of gains that actu­al­ly aren’t pos­si­ble? On the oth­er hand, how do you avoid mak­ing the oppo­site error and then falling into pas­siv­i­ty and not push­ing the enve­lope as far as it can be pushed?

Anoth­er is, how do you build a move­ment that inte­grates strug­gles for racial and gen­der jus­tice and the class strug­gle that gives due weight to those spe­cial oppres­sions? The NCM has some lessons, both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive, in how you build a class move­ment that deals with the cen­tral­i­ty of racism and how chal­leng­ing it is to build a mul­tira­cial move­ment on that basis.

There are also lessons about inter­na­tion­al­ism and avoid­ing the U.S.-centric men­tal­i­ty, while at the same time not try­ing to emu­late mod­els from oth­er coun­tries that won’t work in the Unit­ed States. There’s also some oth­er issues about orga­ni­za­tion, col­lec­tive work, try­ing to put polit­i­cal dif­fer­ences in a sense of pro­por­tion. That last one is always a chal­lenge: how you fig­ure out which dif­fer­ences of opin­ions are worth a seri­ous strug­gle over, and which issues are sec­ondary or tertiary.

Mic­ah: The NCM had a basic coher­ence around Marx­ism-Lenin­ism. The DSA has noth­ing like that. There are prob­a­bly a major­i­ty of mem­bers who claim no par­tic­u­lar social­ist tra­di­tion and just like Bernie Sanders and poli­cies like Medicare for All. There are anar­chists, there are Trot­sky­ists, there are Marx­ist-Lenin­ists. The ide­o­log­i­cal spread in DSA is quite wide. This pos­es a par­tic­u­lar set of dif­fi­cul­ties. Is there any­thing on this front that DSA can learn from the NCM?

Max: The NCM believed in build­ing orga­ni­za­tions on the basis of a com­mon ide­o­log­i­cal frame­work, Marx­ism-Lenin­ism. DSA is a whole dif­fer­ent sto­ry. It’s unit­ed on a polit­i­cal pro­gram, social­ism. You don’t have to adhere to a par­tic­u­lar ide­ol­o­gy to be in DSA. One of the lessons of NCM is that there are grave dan­gers in orga­ni­za­tions formed on the basis of ide­ol­o­gy. They tilt an orga­ni­za­tion in the direc­tion of ide­o­log­i­cal purism, mak­ing every­thing con­sis­tent with an ide­o­log­i­cal tra­di­tion, giv­ing undue author­i­ty to the top lead­er­ship which sup­pos­ed­ly has mas­tered that ideology.

You have a dif­fer­ent set of prob­lems when you’re unit­ed on a polit­i­cal pro­gram as opposed to an ide­ol­o­gy. But groups unit­ing on an ide­o­log­i­cal basis leads to a lot of prob­lems. In the NCM, it was a split­ting dif­fer­ence over what your assess­ment of Stal­in was. This isn’t pro­duc­tive. It sti­fles all kinds of inter­nal debates.

On the oth­er hand, there were cer­tain fights that the NCM had that were nec­es­sary to have. The biggest one was in the mid-1970s, when Chi­na shift­ed its for­eign pol­i­cy course to align with U.S. impe­ri­al­ism against the Sovi­et Union, argu­ing that the Sovi­et Union was the more dan­ger­ous of the two super­pow­ers. Who was the main dan­ger in the world? That was a fight you had to have. The peo­ple who believed that the Sovi­et Union was the main ene­my end­ed up sup­port­ing NATO, and oppos­ing demands to cut the mil­i­tary bud­get, on the grounds that the U.S. had to be part of a unit­ed front against the Sovi­et Union.

You had to have that fight. All kinds of things about where you stood in all kinds of issues of the class strug­gle depend­ed on what side you were on in that fight.

Mic­ah: Some activists who con­sid­er them­selves peo­ple who just want to ​“get things done” might respond to that ques­tion and ask, ​“What does this ques­tion of ally­ing with or against one super­pow­er or anoth­er have to do with me get­ting things done orga­niz­ing with the work­ing class?”

Max: To answer this ques­tion, let’s take the Poor People’s Cam­paign today. It’s a cam­paign against the three great evils that Dr. Mar­tin Luther King iden­ti­fied — pover­ty, racism and mil­i­tarism — as well as fight­ing for the envi­ron­ment. If you think the U.S. mil­i­tary is going to play an impor­tant pro­gres­sive role in the world, you’re not going to take a stand in a cam­paign like this one against U.S. mil­i­tarism — in call­ing for cut­ting the mil­i­tary bud­get, or oppos­ing U.S. inter­ven­tion around the world. This issue cuts to the heart of all kinds of things — hous­ing, health care, demo­c­ra­t­ic rights, sex­ism, all of it.

Mic­ah: That makes sense. But of course, an orga­ni­za­tion like DSA can’t address every sin­gle issue all the time.

Max: An orga­ni­za­tion like DSA today has to think about which issues offer them a chance to direct­ly impact soci­ety, as well how to orga­nize today in a way that lays the ground­work for more advanced strug­gles tomor­row. Then, you have to think about how to get enough uni­ty of action to make the orga­ni­za­tion a coher­ent force. That’s the frame­work you have to use.

The major­i­ty of a demo­c­ra­t­ic orga­ni­za­tion will choose a direc­tion based on the key things that are need­ed in a giv­en moment: health­care reform, defeat­ing the white-nation­al­ist author­i­tar­i­ans run­ning the gov­ern­ment today. Some mix of direct-action activism and base-build­ing and elec­toral cam­paigns is going to come out. The para­me­ters can be a lit­tle wider or nar­row­er based on the sit­u­a­tion, but you have to have some para­me­ters that the orga­ni­za­tion is oper­at­ing within.

Then there’s the mat­ter of dif­fer­ent ten­den­cies or indi­vid­u­als that may not agree with those deci­sions. A healthy orga­ni­za­tion has to have bound­aries with­in which peo­ple can raise their dif­fer­ences. If peo­ple with­in the group are mov­ing in a way that’s under­min­ing and pre­vent­ing the orga­ni­za­tion from being able to estab­lish its polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty and make an impact, then you have to do some­thing to pre­vent that from happening.

You’re not going to have every­one unit­ed. The Left won’t ever reach a point where every­one agrees on all the major points and all joins the same orga­ni­za­tion. The world is too com­plex for that. So you have to have cer­tain bound­aries. You have to have major­i­ty rule that can allow the orga­ni­za­tion to move. There’s no for­mu­la for fig­ur­ing out what exact­ly that looks like. Once a group sets up a healthy orga­ni­za­tion­al cul­ture, you can sort those things out.

DSA is in a for­ma­tive peri­od. It’s a new orga­ni­za­tion. It has trans­formed. While it has a cer­tain insti­tu­tion­al con­ti­nu­ity, there’s so many new things about the orga­ni­za­tion — most obvi­ous­ly that over 85 per­cent of the orga­ni­za­tion wasn’t in it two years ago. So it’s estab­lish­ing its new polit­i­cal cul­ture. As far as I can tell, there have been some mis­steps, but there have also been some real­ly pos­i­tive things.

Fig­ur­ing out how to build this orga­ni­za­tion and what to work on and how to oper­ate is extreme­ly chal­leng­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the cur­rent polit­i­cal moment. But DSA mem­bers also have to real­ize that what they are doing now is part of build­ing a move­ment for the long haul. Every­one has to approach that with the most matu­ri­ty and gen­eros­i­ty of spir­it possible.

Mic­ah: In the book, you quote Vladimir Lenin: ​“Pol­i­tics begin where the mass­es are, not where there are thou­sands, but where there are mil­lions.” Then you write that rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies must not ​“accept mar­gin­al sta­tus as a per­ma­nent fact of life — much less a mind­set that glo­ri­fies mar­gin­al­i­ty as a sign of true rev­o­lu­tion­ary faith. … Plant­i­ng the ban­ners and wait­ing in a left-wing strong­hold for peo­ple to come to us will not cut it.”

When I read that, I think of the cri­tiques of mass cam­paigns like Medicare for All or for politi­cians like Bernie Sanders and Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez, which have shown that they can bring the idea of social­ism to mass num­bers of peo­ple who have nev­er heard this term before. Some of those cri­tiques are valid, like the wor­ry that engag­ing too heav­i­ly in elec­toral pol­i­tics will water down DSA’s rad­i­cal pol­i­tics to the point that the orga­ni­za­tion ceas­es to advance a bold social­ist vision. But most of them seem more root­ed in peo­ple cling­ing to that ​“pure” mar­gin­al­i­ty — at a moment when social­ism has an oppor­tu­ni­ty to become a tru­ly mass move­ment. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to reach the ​“mil­lions” that Lenin ref­er­ences is here, but ori­ent­ing a left­ist orga­ni­za­tion in that direc­tion involves ditch­ing some of the habits of glo­ri­fy­ing mar­gin­al­i­ty .

Max: I think the Bernie cam­paign, the insur­gent cam­paigns, the way peo­ple are learn­ing to speak to large num­bers who are envi­sion­ing mov­ing the coun­try as a whole — all of that is extreme­ly pos­i­tive. Pol­i­tics is a mat­ter of look­ing at the bal­ance of forces and where the mass­es are at and inter­ven­ing in a way that moves the nee­dle. We have to speak to the major­i­ty and build a majori­tar­i­an movement.

We’re obvi­ous­ly a long way from a major­i­ty of the Unit­ed States not just sup­port­ing fun­da­men­tal change and an alter­na­tive to cap­i­tal­ism, but tak­ing steps and risks to make that hap­pen. That’s not going to come about by offer­ing only a max­i­mal­ist pro­gram and try­ing to move in one leap from where we are now to that max­i­mal­ist program.

It’s cer­tain­ly legit­i­mate and nec­es­sary to real­ize there’s uneven devel­op­ment in soci­ety — you’re going to have an advanced guard, what Lenin called the ​“con­scious ele­ment.” That’s the point of hav­ing a social­ist orga­ni­za­tion where peo­ple are unit­ed on the long-range goal. But it works in dif­fer­ent lay­ers. It has its imme­di­ate base and its periph­ery, and it works in coali­tion with out­side forces.

So I think that the purist ten­den­cies, the ones that are crit­i­cal of any­thing that is less than their total vision of what a rev­o­lu­tion­ary social­ist pro­gram would be, are self-defeat­ing. Because you nev­er break out of the margins.

The idea that you just plant the flag and every­one will come to you if you have the cor­rect line has nev­er worked. That’s not how pol­i­tics works. Pol­i­tics is addi­tion — you need to get more peo­ple on your team.

The Left has been mar­gin­al for a long time in the Unit­ed States. For some peo­ple, that’s their com­fort zone. When you mix it up in broad mass pol­i­tics, there’s always a dan­ger that you com­pro­mise some key prin­ci­ple and fall down a slip­pery slope. Those are real dan­gers. But every suc­cess­ful move­ment for rad­i­cal reform or rev­o­lu­tion has to engage in those broad mass pol­i­tics. There’s no oth­er way to build a majori­tar­i­an move­ment from where we are now to a majori­tar­i­an move­ment for socialism.

Mic­ah: Through­out the book, you crit­i­cize the ​“vol­un­tarism” of the NCM, espe­cial­ly in Maoist groups. What is vol­un­tarism, how did it play out in these groups, and why it was such a problem?

Max: Vol­un­tarism was the notion that if you worked hard enough and had the cor­rect line and the willpow­er, you could pret­ty much make any­thing hap­pen. That kind of think­ing was strong in the NCM for a few rea­sons. The young rad­i­cals of the 1960s had seen changes hap­pen real­ly fast; we didn’t appre­ci­ate all the struc­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal rea­sons why that explo­sive peri­od came to be. We start­ed to attribute those changes to our own actions more than the con­flu­ence of the con­di­tions and what the broad mass­es were doing.

Some of that ide­ol­o­gy was rein­forced by the rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments of the time, in par­tic­u­lar the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty. Mao had a slo­gan: ​“When the Party’s line is cor­rect, then every­thing will come its way.” Which fos­tered the notion, of course, that if you were cor­rect and worked real­ly hard, every­thing would come your way.

When you’re think­ing that way and are in the midst of a mass flow, it does make you push your­self and can have some ben­e­fi­cial effects. It moved things for­ward in many impor­tant strug­gles. But as a long-term method of doing pol­i­tics, it plays out in neg­a­tive ways.

When you’re in an ebb peri­od rather than a flow peri­od, it leads to a num­ber of things. You tend to find scape­goats for why things aren’t work­ing as well. Because you’re sup­posed to have a cor­rect line, yet things aren’t work­ing out like you want them to. So the mass­es must be back­wards or the cadre aren’t work­ing hard enough. If you get locked in that men­tal­i­ty, you can’t have a bal­anced assess­ment. It ends up under­min­ing your abil­i­ty to lis­ten to peo­ple and to build a healthy demo­c­ra­t­ic organization.

Mic­ah: Chap­ter six of your book is called ​“Elab­o­rate Doc­trine, Weak Class Anchor.” Can you explain this basic problem?

Max: If you don’t have a class anchor and a mass base of sub­stan­tial size, you’re not account­able, you’re not ground­ed, and you’re not in a posi­tion to sense the chang­ing moods among the key con­stituen­cies in soci­ety. And it’s also a recipe for splits and sec­tar­i­an­ism: You are just float­ing. When you have a real­ly large mass base, there’s con­se­quences if orga­ni­za­tions divide or have stu­pid fights. Because there are tens or hun­dreds of thou­sands or mil­lions of peo­ple who are affect­ed. And if you’re their polit­i­cal arm, you get checked.

You need that con­nec­tion to the base. Hav­ing a large, mass anchor is cru­cial. You can’t make social change with­out it. They’ve got the mon­ey, they’ve got the guns; we’ve got the major­i­ty. So build­ing that major­i­ty, from the mas­sive rebel­lion of work­ers, is crucial.

But get­ting a crash course in Marx­ism is a lot faster. That’s not real­ly easy, either, but you can cob­ble togeth­er a fair­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed idea of what social­ism is fair­ly quick­ly if you’re read­ing and debat­ing socialism.

The NCM did have some roots in the work­ing class, but it was weak rel­a­tive to the inten­si­ty of the study. Every­body read. You’d have six-month cours­es on Marx­ism-Lenin­ism, peo­ple would stay up till late at night debat­ing ideas. This was good, but it was dis­pro­por­tion­ate in com­par­i­son with build­ing the work­ing-class base.

Mic­ah: You say in your book that for all the NCM did wrong, it is impor­tant to devel­op cadre. I think when a lot of peo­ple hear that term, ​“cadre,” they think of unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic orga­ni­za­tions with­out a mass base, and they don’t want any­thing to do with this. Why is cadre devel­op­ment important?

Max: Because the NCM and oth­er com­mu­nist par­ties built orga­ni­za­tions that were termed ​“cadre orga­ni­za­tions” and were ide­o­log­i­cal mono­liths and had anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic prac­tices, the term ​“cadre” has been asso­ci­at­ed with top-down, mono­lith­ic orga­ni­za­tions where the mem­bers, the cadre, are cogs in a big machine. The rejec­tion of that kind of orga­ni­za­tion is a good thing. A sect mod­el will not real­ize our potential.

But that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly what cadre is. Every polit­i­cal project has cadre. Repub­li­cans, unions, white nation­al­ists, social­ists — every­body has cadre. The term just refers to peo­ple for whom mov­ing the polit­i­cal project for­ward is a cen­tral fea­ture of their life. They learn the skills and art of doing just that. They don’t devote them­selves exclu­sive­ly to polit­i­cal work — they have bal­anced lives, hope­ful­ly — but they learn the spe­cial skills of pol­i­tics and how to use them.

You can’t move a polit­i­cal project with­out peo­ple who are pre­pared to take it up that way. Some of them will be paid by the move­ment; oth­ers, the major­i­ty, are peo­ple who go to work and earn a liv­ing, but play cru­cial roles in advanc­ing the project. When you build a mass-base orga­ni­za­tion, it’s a mix. You have some peo­ple who have tak­en a cadre role, oth­ers who don’t. This is flu­id. Peo­ple might go back and forth between play­ing a cadre role or not. And then there are oth­er peo­ple on the periph­ery, who are sym­pa­thiz­ers or sup­port­ers from afar. With­out devel­op­ing a lay­er of peo­ple who are in the move­ment for the long haul, no rad­i­cal project can succeed.

Of course, the idea that they then make all the deci­sions in the orga­ni­za­tion and aren’t account­able — absolute­ly not. But you need cadre to move the project. I get the sense that many of the peo­ple who are flock­ing into DSA are think­ing that way.

Mic­ah: For a num­ber of rea­sons includ­ing sec­tar­i­an­ism and the right­ward drift of the coun­try, the NCM even­tu­al­ly fad­ed away. But it didn’t have to end up that way. What was the best-case sce­nario for the NCM? What’s the most they could’ve hoped for?

Max: If the NCM, as well as a num­ber of oth­er trends on the Left, could have real­ized dur­ing the seri­ous 1974 reces­sion and stir­rings of the so-called ​“New Right” that a counter-attack was com­ing from the Right, and been more aware that cap­i­tal­ism wasn’t going to fade away and we weren’t head­ed for the final con­flict any time soon, it would have been pos­si­ble to unite five, 10, 15 thou­sand peo­ple in an orga­ni­za­tion that had a rad­i­cal pro­gram inte­grat­ing racial and gen­der jus­tice, envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice, keep­ing labor as strong as pos­si­ble, and build insti­tu­tions that would keep social­ism in the pub­lic conversation.

That could have helped sus­tain a Rain­bow Coali­tion-type form that could have spear­head­ed an insur­gency both inside and out­side the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. If that kind of orga­ni­za­tion had man­aged to stay togeth­er, the grow­ing pains of an orga­ni­za­tion like DSA might be less today.

Mic­ah: The his­to­ry of the NCM is some­what bleak, giv­en how the move­ment end­ed up. But things do seem on the upswing now. Do you feel hope­ful today?

Max: Yes, I’m hope­ful. I’ve been on the Left for a long time. A lot of hor­ri­ble things in the world have been done over my life­time, and things are reach­ing a whole oth­er lev­el of dam­age under Trump. It will take a long time to undo that damage.

That said, the scope of pop­u­lar resis­tance to Trump in the Unit­ed States, the ener­gy in the pro­gres­sive wing, and the num­ber of peo­ple — espe­cial­ly young peo­ple — inter­est­ed in social­ism is extreme­ly encour­ag­ing. If we can beat the white nation­al­ists who are run­ning this coun­try right now in 2018 and 2020, and we can sus­tain the kind of mass action in the streets that’s we’ve seen through the teach­ers strikes and Black Lives Mat­ter and all the oth­er non­elec­toral protests, the pro­gres­sive move­ment (with­in which the social­ist move­ment will play a key role) can gain some real power.