by The Spontaneous Emergence of a Democratic Socialist International
No conference has been called. No delegates have been credentialed. No formal process is underway. But nonetheless, we are witnessing a growing commonality and alignment between leftwing formations in multiple countries, as well as a degree of integration between and among these forces. A Democratic Socialist International is in formation.
Consider the following new or revitalized left formations: the Democratic Socialists of America, Your Party in the United Kingdom, Die Linke in Germany, Le France Insoumise (LFI) in France, People Before Profit (PBP) in Ireland, the Red-Green Alliance (RGA aka Enhedslisten – De Rød-Grønne) in Denmark, and Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL) in Brazil. And we could name several others.
Isn’t there something increasingly common about them?
All have marked themselves through their distinct adoptions of a democratic socialist politics, raising their banners somewhere between the failures of the neoliberalized social democratic parties, and the self-isolation of the sectarian Leninist left cadre parties.
And these formations’ similarities don’t end at the limits of their explicitly political fields. In fact, they all inhabit landscapes constituted by largely the same forces: weakened but reviving labor movements, the academic left, tenant unions, student activism, and the environmental and Palestine solidarity movements, to name a few.
These formations are mostly based in progressive urban cores or near universities, with their membership more likely to be drawn from young, college educated layers than from the old left’s traditional blue-collar membership, though they are making good strides in this direction. Canvassing in Dublin or Boston, I heard almost exactly the same issues – residents concerned about the rising cost of living, activists motivated by the genocide in Palestine, and communities bitterly divided over… bike lanes. From Chicago to Copenhagen, left organizers are facing similar challenges and adopting similar solutions.
These various formations are hardly identical. However, when we consider them in the aggregate, individual or national differences fade into the background, and the similarities among them assert themselves as patterns beyond mere coincidence. They are largely driven by the mass-participation of their members at the local level, and – with the exception of some bodies, like the LFI – are highly democratic. Politically, the formations tend towards pluralism housed within an eclectic, often ill-defined overarching politics of democratic socialism, which embraces each formation’s more social democratic and revolutionary-socialist wings.
When we consider them as a whole, we can see the development of an international commonality, which emerges as each formation takes relatively similar orientations towards their relatively similar national conditions.
This commonality in approaches across borders has developed mostly spontaneously;its development emerges not necessarily out of a conscious desire for international coordination, but more as an unintentional consequence of different actors making the same on-the-ground decisions within their unique national contexts.
It is not exactly breaking news to note that a new left has arisen around the world. This process has been steadily unfolding since at least the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the subsequent anti-austerity movements including Occupy Wall Street, the movement of the squares, and the anti-water charges movement. Still, it is worth noting that, after more than a decade of unfolding of a nationally uneven and politically immature process, these nascent left forces have matured and secured for themselves approximately the same positions as sizable but minority far-left opposition forces.
Importantly, we observe in these formations a crucial step forward, one that goes a step beyond the new left movements that emerged immediately out of the Great Financial Crisis. In many countries, these earlier iterations were more progressive/social democratic than they were social-democratic/socialist; they often operated under the overwhelming influence of one national leader and lacked formal democratic structures for deciding the direction of the movement. Momentum in the UK was organized as a private corporation, while in the US the movement was split between Bernie’s personal leadership, Our Revolution, and DSA of 2016, vastly different from today where DSA is almost a unilateral representative of the left.
In the United States, by 2016 a new generational gathering of socialists was underway, occurring largely within a resurgent DSA. This process kicked off a transformation of that organization, which is still in the process of unfolding.
In the United Kingdom, in contrast, the movement rallied within the UK Labour Party through the Corbyn/Momentum years, conquering power in that party only to lose it just as quickly; now after a few years adrift, it has fully broken from Starmer’s Labour Party and the Socialist International.
In some sense, the UK Labour Party’s Corbyn-dominated years were the clearest expression of this earlier dynamic in both its politics and its structure, in that the 2019 UK General Election pitted Corbyn against Boris Johnson for the leadership of the country. The disastrous result for Labour helped toss that country’s left into years of disarray: the Labour Party’s left traded its leading role for that of a laggard.
And yet the UK’s left has rebounded, serving as an excellent example of the broader tendency outlined above. Though an imperfect and messy process, the UK’s new Your Party has survived its founding conference, and it has quickly found itself among several international peers, including those in DSA. And the discourse surrounding the conference controversies was in equal parts impacted by and accessible to the Twitter-Heads of the North American left as it was to those in the UK.
In Ireland, the process was not of moving from the Socialist International towards democratic socialism; rather, the trajectory of People Before Profit has been the transformation of a Trotskyist-founded front group into a genuine mass member socialist organization. Recently PBP played a key role in backing Catherine Connolly’s campaign for president.
The transformation of the ‘political opening’ for a new left which arose during the Austerity Crisis years did not transform into a concrete and self-conscious movement overnight. Rather, in each country efforts to stand up a political operation in this zone have developed in fits and starts. We can understand this unfolding process by way of the ‘theory of uneven and combined development:’ rather than an identical process unfolding in all countries, the emergence of this democratic socialist left has not only taken different paths in different countries, but also each national process has been at least partially informed and inspired by advancements in other countries.
In this light, it is worth noting that this developmental process towards an international commonality in strategy and orientation is not, and could never be fully spontaneous. Indeed, it is crucial to the process that these groups, or at least their members, have been in constant communication and have actively tried to learn from one another. Even without the intention of establishing formal international unity, leftists’ cross-engagement at the international level has sped-up the coming together of their movements. These interactions have taken myriad forms: delegates attend each other’s conferences, activists participate in the same international discourses through left presses or on social media, and many identify twith the same international movements.
Even if these consciously organized international connections have yet to lead to the formal tying together of these various groups, such a situation need not be permanent. These early steps do not at all preclude the continuing development of a real international alignment between these groups, an alignment based on their common orientations to common conditions.
Reform & Revolution, with our sister-group RISE which is active in People Before Profit, as well as our comradely connections through the Fourth International and other formations with comrades active in RS21/Your Party in the UK, Die Linke, PSOL, and others has been proud to play a minor role in helping to spur along this international exchange. The comrades in Marxist Unity Group are also building an impressive network, with collaborators in the United Kingdom and sympathizers in Ireland, on the Continent, and beyond.
The International We Need And Deserve
Those keeping score at home would be right to point out that DSA is already part of an international, and not just one arising from an informal, semi-spontaneous international orientation. In fact, DSA is a constituent member of a very real, formal organization, one with a website, structure, and leadership: the Progressive International.
DSA was totally correct to leave the neoliberal Socialist International in 2017, and – in throwing off not only that international but also DSA’s own old politics – to join the Progressive International at its 2023 convention.
The Progressive International is an admirable project, one which connects left groups, non-profits, and labor organizations across both the developed and developing worlds. It facilitates meaningful connections between movement leaders and has a strong communications operation which is able to promote worthy causes through social media. Crucially, its politics are – most of the time – much stronger than its ‘Progressive’ name would imply.
But ultimately the Progressive International operates more as a communications network of aligned progressives and socialists, rather than a true international center of the democratic socialist movement. Critics would not be totally off-base to point out that it is largely under the control of a handful of celebrity-left leaders, namely Varoufakis from the European DIEM25 movement as well as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and the people around them. In this way, its politics are clearly the international expression of that earlier stage of left movements led overwhelmingly by national leaders. In other words, the Progressive International is the international of that earlier stage of the re-birth of the left which we are now moving beyond.
Whether we focus more on acknowledging the valuable contributions of the Progressive International, or on pointing out its shortcomings, the fact remains that it is simply not structured as a true socialist international. For example, the members of its advisory council from the United States include Jodi Dean and Tom Morello, two comrades worthy of our respect. But neither of these comrades are acting as representatives of DSA on that body, and Jodi Dean is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which isn’t even a member of the Progressive International. “I’m sorry, Mr. Reed. You have no credentials here.”
Additionally, the Progressive International cannot fulfill the role of a democratic socialist international for the simple reason that it is not a democratic socialist formation. While its communiques are generally in line with DSA’s, the formation includes non-socialist and even non-political formations, like trade unions. Put at its most simple:, even if the Progressive International embraces a ‘post-capitalist’ approach, it nevertheless does not explicitly embrace democratic socialism.
There’s no need to aggressively condemn the Progressive International. But it is necessary that democratic socialists recognize the organization for what it is, a solidarity network or think-tank, and not a real international. What we need is an international whose intention is uniting the democratic socialist forces around the world into one unified movement.
Our democratic socialist movement must be international, because capitalism is international. For us to take on the global capitalist system, it is necessary that we bring our forces together across national borders into one unified whole. It is our duty to share skills, resources, and perspectives with comrades in other countries, and to learn from their experiences as well. And every national movement is strengthened when its national shortcomings are challenged and corrected by the feedback and support from its international peers. The affairs of socialist movements abroad are not something for us to relate to in a removed and diplomatic way, as if we don’t have stakes in the game. The development of socialism anywhere affects its development everywhere.
From Spontaneous Alignment To Conscious Unity
Organizationally, the need for unity can be met in basically the same way that it has been met for more than 100 years, through the formation of a proper international, as first set down by Marx and his comrades in the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International). Simply put, national organizations send delegates to a conference, adopt resolutions, and form an international secretariat to administer international affairs in between conferences.
Regardless of anyone’s intentions, a democratic socialist international is already in formation. Around the world, the forces of democratic socialism are growing and strengthening, are adopting similar approaches to solve similar problems, are fostering discourse among one another, and are more and more coming to resemble one another in a semi-spontaneous way.
Now, it is time to transform spontaneous alignment into conscious unity.
The first step is simply to recognize and acknowledge the growing similarities across the world’s various democratic socialist forces and to affirm the utility of them coming together in a new democratic socialist international formation. If this process unfolded in all of these various parties, that would go a long way to making such a unity possible.
The second step is for those who do support increased international unity to get organized. In each formation, there are internationalists who understand the political importance and utility of increased formal engagement; there also exist the reverse, those reluctant to shed or challenge national peculiarities or a localist outlook. Coordinating bodies or campaigns of internationalists in each national formation, as well as the planning of international events to discuss the prospects of a new international formation and unite internationalists across borders, would provide a conscious and material expression of the desire for a more united democratic socialist movement. Even international panels on other subjects – eco-socialism, Palestine, elections, and tenant and labor unions – would help the cause of international unity by further underlining the existence of an international commonality, as well as by fostering further pollination between the various national movements.
Such exploratory and preparatory endeavors will lay the foundation for more formal efforts to draw these national formations into one united international. And it is not impossible that such efforts could develop quickly, especially if forces outside of DSA like PBP or Your Party take initiative in pushing them forward.
Finally, we should note that it would be naive to think that the formation of such an international would be neutral in regards to the internal divides between moderates and revolutionists which exist within each of these formations. While the history of socialist reformism is not without internationals, most notably the Second International, it is not accidental that these formations have largely played a background role as supportive networks, rather than central organizing hubs. A strong international inevitably challenges social democratic accommodation to national interests or national participation in imperialism. By showing that internal divisions are not accidental anomalies but structurally-produced contradictions, our democratic socialist international would clarify political questions that social democrats would prefer to leave ambiguous. And tying together the discourses of several organizations at varying stages of growth and struggle would more rapidly and concretely bring to a head questions of reform or revolution.
So, while a new international should give international expression to our current stage of the left revival, with its co-habitation of social democratic and socialist tendencies under the banner of ‘democratic socialism,’ it will be to the benefit of the socialist forces. And so the socialist left within DSA and its sister formations must take the lead in raising the old slogan once again: “workers of the world, unite!”
Henry De Groot
Henry De Groot, he/him, is involved with the Boston DSA Labor Working Group, an editor of Working Mass, and author of the book Student Radicals and the Rise of Russian Marxism.
