A Socialist Horizon: Crisis, Hegemony, and the Promise of a New Party

Of the many epochal changes sweeping American politics, one of the most poignant if least reported was the dissolution of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) this past year.  The ISO was never a large organization - at its peak it had perhaps 1200 members, and it averaged around half to two-thirds that number.  But its activists like to say they "punched above their weight," and it's true: there were few strikes or social movements in which one would not see either their banner or their paper, sold by members as much a sign of their loyalty to the organization as any practical notion of political efficacy.  And ISO activists have been instrumental to U.S. social movements, from the Chicago Teachers' Union strike in 2012, to the Palestine solidarity movement, to anti-death penalty campaigning in the 1990s.  I was never a member of the ISO but attended their yearly conference in Chicago and experienced it as an almost ritual performance of the Marxist left's collective memory:  from singing The International, to staging continued debates about the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, to keeping books by Rosa Luxembourg, Leon Trotsky, and V.I. Lenin in print.  One got the sense that the ISO was not just an organization, but a living archive of the Marxian left, not so much a fossil as a porous tribe, bent on continuing their vital traditions "in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness," to borrow a phrase from W.E.B Du Bois. 

            It is often said that the ISO formed just as the New Left was collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions while the resurgent right rose in the late 1970s.  But that is not entirely accurate.  While some debate the origin myth and exact lineage of ISO, its roots are both in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and later in the International Socialists (IS).  These Trotskyist groups saw themselves as the true inheritors of the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin's vanguard party, a revolution and a movement they felt to have been sold out, crushed by a Stalinist counter-revolution.  The SWP's crowning moment in the United States was the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike they helped to organize, a militant labor battle that shut down the entire city for days.  The strike not only saw workers effectively control large parts of the city, it also helped to build a new labor movement against both a bureaucratic leadership they saw as pre-figuratively Stalinist and also an increasingly concentrated monopoly capitalism:  it seemed the birth pangs of what could be a new workers' movement, if not a new revolutionary moment.  This vision of a Leninist party was briefly revived in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the "New Communist Movement," but its social base and concentration in urban working-class self-organization was absent.  Despite thousands of dedicated cadre members across various Trotskyist and Maoist organizations, this party model seemed, by the 1980s, to have played itself out. ISO's collapse could be seen as the final closing of the 20th century, the last chapter of the Bolshevik Revolution that had, comet-like, illuminated both the hopes and fears of human liberation for the better part of a tumultuous century. 

            And yet it's hard to also miss the fact that the ISO's collapse— triggered if not constituted by an alleged sexual assault cover up— coincided with the rise the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), now the largest socialist organization in the U.S. since World War II.  While some in DSA have gloated over the collapse of ISO as proof of their own non-Leninist organizational structure and history, to me, that is a far too glib expression of what historical transitions we are now witnessing.  Afterall, DSA has done little to recruit these new members into its ranks, and for much of DSA's history it, like ISO, was a small organization on the margins of the left. I would go so far as to say that DSA is not the same organization it was five years ago. Nearly all local and national leadership has been replaced by new members, and many of the new resolutions adopted at local and national conventions have also radically changed both its direction and its structure, pushing it to the left, embracing the boycott against Israel and the creation of an Afro-Socialist Caucus, while moving it away from its long-held "realignment" strategy inside the Democratic Party.  Rather, I would suggest, the collapse of the ISO and the radical transformation and explosive growth of DSA are both contradictory signs of a new historical conjuncture.

            What strikes me more than the differences between ISO and the resurgent DSA are not their differences (which are many) but their singular similarity as socialist parties. While the DSA is not formally a third party in the sense that the Labor Party or Green Party is (it is technically a non-profit) it is far more party-like than any of the social movements of the last few decades.  Even a glance at its last national convention would suggest the DSA is a far-cry from the horizontalist social movements of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as Occupy Wall Street and the Global Justice Movement, with their consensus decision making, affinity groups, and lack of formal leadership structure.  Unlike the social movements of the last decades that have focused on creating decentralized networks, unencumbered by unifying demands or an articulated base, the DSA is a class-focused organization that is intent on both engaging state power through elections as well as placing concrete demands on the state for large social policy transformations through grassroots campaigns, such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. As a writer and activist who came of age during the affinity groups and consensus-decision making of the Global Justice Movement, this realignment not only toward socialism but to a socialist organization is perhaps the most dramatic historical rupture I've witnessed in my time.  If one had wandered into the 2017 DSA Chicago national convention, one might be forgiven if they felt they were witnessing a ritual from a previous century:  mostly clean-cut young people electing new national leadership, forwarding motions from various formal factions, voting by card and by proxy, deploying the Anglo-Saxon strictures of Roberts Rules of Order.  There were T-shirts, buttons, candidates, and dues. Despite the end of the Leninist party, it all looked all very much like a party to me.

The Party Fordism Built

            So what to make of this end of the end of history?  The collapse and rebirth within a year of a socialist party?  Perhaps the best place to look would be the last time there was a mass-based socialist party in the U.S.— the "red decade" of the 1930s.  Much like the rise of the DSA, the rise of the Communist Party in the United States (CPUSA) did not seem initially very promising.  Small and marginal, the CPUSA was located among isolated enclaves of Russian and Jewish immigrants and a tight cadre of African American and bohemian intellectuals clustered in New York City and Chicago.  How then did it go from a tiny party of a few hundred members to an average membership of 100,000 throughout much of the 1930s and 1940s?  Not only did the CPUSA grow exponentially, its influence extended well beyond its membership base.  At its peak, party members were elected to leadership of over a dozen major labor unions, organized the largest nationwide student strike the country has seen, counted nearly all major African American intellectuals in its orbit, as well as numerous writers, directors, actors, and artists, and organized the only socialist army to fight overseas, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.  While the support, and yes, even prestige, of the Soviet Union was not at times insignificant, Soviet support cannot alone explain the rise of the CPUSA nor its broad influence.  Indeed, focus on the Soviet or Bolshevik nature of the CPUSA hides far more than it reveals about its stunning growth and brief, hegemonic sway over the cultural life of the U.S. life.   

            Counterintuitively perhaps, Michael Denning's 1997 The Cultural Front is the most helpful text to understand the rise of the CPUSA, precisely because he locates the party in the larger cultural and political transformations of the "Popular Front era."  It's not that he thinks the CPUSA was insignificant, indeed, he suggests "it was the most influential left organization of the period." Rather Denning argues, to understand the CPUSA's growth and influence in the era between the late 1920s to the Cold War, one must look beyond its membership rolls to the "condensation" of social forces that cohered to allow it to flourish.[i]  Taking a Gramscian approach, Denning looks at the "long Popular Front" as the emergence of an "historical bloc," a new constellation of social forces that for a time were hegemonic.[ii] Calling it at times the "Age of the CIO" and at other times the New Deal coalition, Denning conceives of power as less something one party or class holds (or does not hold), but rather an alliance of social forces— parties, unions, social movements, cultural actors. Such blocs do not seize the forces of production so much as gain consent and influence through multiple forms of representation, whether they be political, cultural, or economic.  What is significant in this approach is that it avoids nearly all of the tedious pitfalls in most histories of the Communist Party that focus on party line and schisms, the Comintern and the Soviet Union, to understand how it wielded such unprecedented influence in the United States. 

            It is doubtful that without the Great Depression the Communist Party would have risen to a stature of influence.  It may seem to go without saying that the Depression was a crisis for capitalism.  Yet for Denning, it was not simply that the crisis laid bare suffering under the free market and that people awoke to its ills to become Communists; it was a crisis of representation, in all its forms.  A crisis, as Gramsci notes, occurs when political parties and the people they represent are "detached" from one another, when "the men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognized by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression."[iii]  The schism between representatives and represented for Gramsci leaves "the field open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces."  It must be remembered that Gramsci was arguing with the so-called "orthodox" Marxists who understood the state to merely be the "central committee of the bourgeoisie."  He was also arguing with Marxists who felt workers would respond spontaneously when their objective conditions were revealed to them.  Rather, for Gramsci, political parties, and the cultural field as a whole, are complex acts of "articulation," not simply a one-to-one correspondence.  It was not an objective increase in the level of suffering, but rather a sense "the ruling class has failed" and a "'crisis of authority' is spoken of" that ignited a new political class formation.  In the 1930s, this meant that the entire idea of the "working class" was up for grabs, realigned, in motion, no longer content to be represented by the Democratic Party, the AFL, or Hollywood. The Depression was a crisis of hegemony, a cultural and political crisis, because the elite was not able to comprehend, much less address, the economic crisis of its own making.

            Jodi Dean argues that the CPUSA grew in the 1930s because it was able to bind people's affective needs, organizing their desires within a coherent program and a cadre of comrades and fellow-travelers.[iv]  While that was true for individual or even collective members, it does not explain how and why the CPUSA became the vehicle for a larger social imaginary.  One of Denning's more profound insights about the movements of the 1930s was to note that the nature of the working class was in a profound state of change.  Not only were working people realigning their political allegiances across racial and regional lines, the working class itself was in process of radical transformation. As Gramsci was one of the first to note, Fordism was not just a new means of production, it was a cultural system as well.  It produced "a new type of worker," and new types of social, cultural, and sexual relations.[v]  For the first time, second generation immigrant workers and African Americans in urban and industrial centers shared a common condition of labor, a common language, and a common mass culture, from factory work to radio plays to swing music to gangster films.  Working-class urban heroes such as James Cagney, Duke Ellington, and Barbara Stanwyck were as much a part of a shared mass culture as boxing and jazz. One organizer recounted white and Black members listening to a Joe Louis fight on the radio before going to recruit members for its integrated locals, and Richard Wright famously wrote of the Louis-Baer match as leading to a jubilant, spontaneous uprising among working-class African Americans on Chicago's South Side.[vi] The Popular Front, Denning argues, was not just a movement about the realignment of a political left, but a counter-culture of Fordism, a way to reimagine the modernity of the machine-age.  Taking over factories and stopping the machines during massive sit-down strikes could be seen as not just a labor tactic but a metaphor for the movement:  not to leave modernity, but subject it to a working-class, democratic will.

            Within the mid-century cultural and material matrix of Fordism, the Communist Party, unlike the Democrats or Republicans, built an entire way of life, vertically and horizontally integrated, with softball leagues, newspapers, dances and activity groups like the Friends of the Earth (camping) and the John Reed Clubs (writing) that not only provided for the political needs of its members, but its social, even romantic needs as well.  "You could live an entire life within that world," one former Communist related in Vivian Gornick's oral history of the movement.[vii] The Communist Party, like the centralized and Taylorized mass culture of the period, was constituted by a sense of totality and organization that marked both work and leisure. The Communist Party was not just a political organization, but a cultural one as well, one that demanded of its members not just activism but also a new cultural sensibility.  Mike Gold wrote for the New Masses that party members should attend Harlem jazz clubs; interracial dating was not only sanctioned but officially encouraged.  The CPUSA emerged as the radical organization of the Great Depression precisely because it so much resembled the culture of it operated within. As capitalism's "other," Communism organized much like Fordist corporations it opposed.  In other words, it is not that the CPUSA hit upon a correct strategy by design so much as it was the organization that formed a structural homology to its cultural and political moment.

            The CPUSA's power was not primarily discursive or based on its ever-shifting proclamations.  The CPUSA's rhetoric and strategy changed dramatically through the 1930s and 1940s, from its revolutionary "Third Period" in which it formed independent radical unions and denounced the New Deal as "social fascism" to the Popular Front period in which it made an alliance with liberals and other leftists against the far-right at home and fascists abroad. Nothing exemplifies the shift better than Kenneth Burke's speech before the 1935 Writers' Congress, in which he suggested that the Party abandon its alien sounding language of the "worker" to a more populist and familiar democratic language of the "people." Burke was denounced by none other than Mike Gold for being a "nationalist," and his speech was panned.  Yet as Denning notes, Burke spoke for "the vast majority of the Depression left," and his language of popular democracy was officially adopted by the Party later that year.[viii]  While the Party and much of the organizing of the Depression left may have been class-based and internationalist, much of the rhetoric and imagery was on the terrain of the conjunctural:  redefining a popular subject of sovereignty.  

"Democratize Everything": The Populist After-Party

            Flash forward a half century and, in many ways, we traverse similar cultural and political ground.  The organizations that represented the working class (i.e., large bureaucratic unions of the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party) are either in decline or in crisis; the working classes themselves have "detached," in Gramsci's words, from their membership and their leadership.  In addition, inequality is at the highest rate since before the Great Depression; racial segregation is at an all-time high; our planet is in a state of fundamental rupture with its ability to sustain human life; the far-right is again on the march.  The 30-year consensus around neoliberalism would seem to have crumbled; this is a crisis of hegemony in much the same way the Great Depression threw all ruling-class institutions into disarray.  People are again in the streets. In the U.S., there has been a long twenty year chain of spontaneous and horizontalist uprisings against the harsh classed, raced, and gendered contours of neoliberalism: The Global Justice Movement, the direct actions against the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the mass-marches of the immigrant rights movement, Occupy Wall Street, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Women's March.  It is unclear that the ruling classes have the legitimacy or the self-confidence to restore order, much less to solve the multiple crises facing them - primarily a crisis of legitimacy.  It is not surprising that "socialism," in such a conjuncture, has reemerged. 

            And yet, the landscape of both capitalism and the left have radically changed. As Chilean activist and writer Marta Harnecker notes, the rise of globalization, neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War has also led to what she refers to as the "social disorientation" of both the working class and the left.[ix] The organization of workers into giant Fordist factories in urban centers, the growth of social and cultural institutions, such as massive schools and state colleges, also did the work of organizing the people into shared sites of social production and reproduction.  Globalization and neoliberalism have not only widened the gap between the rich and the poor within and between nations, they have dramatically reorganized the economy away from large-scale urban manufacturing to decentralized and increasingly mobile just-in-time production. While this shattered what was left of the large AFL-CIO unions and sent union membership into a free-fall, it also disrupted the material basis for social, even socialist organizing. White flight, suburban sprawl, strip malls, the spread of automobile culture and online micro-communities have not only changed the way social life is organized, they have also disrupted the forms of organization on which the "old left" was built. If the counter-culture of modernism was based on the chance encounter on the city street and collective anonymity of the factory and rail car, suburban sprawl and the post-modern cubicle entered a new form of fragmented alienation, one that is as isolated as it is often subcultural. 

             While "socialism" and "the party" may have reemerged, they have reemerged on radically different terrain than the last time capitalism faced such a crisis.  As Ernesto Laclau, perhaps the foremost writer on Gramsci for the current age, writes in On Populist Reason, "we can no longer understand capitalism as purely an economic reality, but as a complex in which economic, political, military, technological, and other determinations....enter into the determination of the movement of the whole."[x]  While one could argue whether or not capitalism was ever "purely an economic reality" governed by the "contradictions of the commodity form," his description of "globalized capitalism" describes if not the experience of exploitation, the affective terrain of its contemporary subjectivity.  Despite a common experience of working for wages, the end of the 20th century has witnessed a critique of capitalism along multiple, intersecting fronts:  the biosphere, the racialized state, the national border, the predatory logic of financialized capitalism, and sexual violence.  Rather than attempt to unify the multiple points of exploitation at the point of production, Laclau suggests the term "populism" should condense the shifting antagonisms that shatter the "harmonious continuity of the social" into a series of constitutive demands.  Unlike Hardt and Negri's concept of the "multitude" in which they imagine a "nomadic, rhizomatic" unity without demand or claim to hegemony, Laclau's formation is decidedly political:  demands on the state are what unify the new class logic of the "99%."  In other words, DSA has reemerged as an organization to engage with the state, precisely because the working class has been historically disorganized by three decades of neoliberal assault. 

            The often-criticized "vagueness" of socialism since the rise of DSA is not a weakness of the movement, but rather a constitutive element of its populist nature.  As Laclau writes of populist movements, they are not the stereotype of a "people" against an "elite" but a democratic "social demand" that produces itself discursively to define an irreparable social antagonism.  Populists redefine democracy from a cohesive consensus to constitutive state of conflict.  Society functions, as many liberals like to argue, through debate, discussion, compromise, and mediation; populists redefine the social totality as riven by irreparable "frontiers" of contestation.  Laclau includes in his idea of populism not just popular democratic movements such as The Levelers or Hugo Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution," but the Bolshevik's slogan "All Power to the Soviets" and Mao's construction of "the people."  For Laclau, populist's "vagueness and indeterminacy are not shortcomings of a discourse about social reality, but in some circumstances, inscribed in social reality as such."[xi]  In diverse, uneven movements, such as the Bolivarian Revolution or the Popular Front, "populism" articulates a rupture in the ruling hegemony that can bring together a new political subject around demands for the state.  While the DSA may be for the working class, it is not necessarily of it, at least in the same way the same second-generation industrial working class of the Communist Party could easily define its class roots.[xii]  Most of DSA's membership is not organized around a shared identity or form of exploitation, but rather around a shared set of demands that unify a heterogeneous subjectivity under capitalism.  DSA's major campaigns— for rent control, socialized medicine, and a Green New Deal— are class demands, but they are also demands that bring together, by their nature, broad constituencies that are determined by many points of structural violence and exploitation by capitalism.  Such campaigns are not attempts to seize the means of production, but rather to seize hegemony and usher in a new consensus about democracy. 

            That such campaigns address their grievances to the state as a radical series of reforms should not be understood as DSA's liberalism against a more radical Communist Party, as some charge. Rather such demands and such modes of organization are a sign of the current DSA membership's materialism, a sign that they intuitively or strategically understand the historical conjuncture.  As Gramsci wrote after the defeat of the Bolshevik Revolution to bring Communism to Europe, our "situation is 'democratic', because the broad working classes are disorganized, dispersed and fragmented into the broad undifferentiated people."[xiii]  In a fragmented and heterogeneous working class that as often aligns their own subjectivity along multiple intersecting identity formations— gender, race, religion, class— the DSA offers an anti-capitalist populism, a political articulatory process by which a new kind of movement can cohere.  Such a political formation is expressed "discursively" as Laclau suggests, not "empirically," in so far as it recognizes itself not by region or workplace, but what program it puts forth.  The campaigns DSA engages in are not simply ways to achieve victories for a broader working-class struggle, but rather they are ways to articulate a constituency, to challenge the hegemony of neoliberal governance. It's crucial to point out that such demands for a Green New Deal or socialized medicine are bids not only to save the planet but also expose the gap between the Democratic Party's claim to representation and their ability to represent the needs of their constituency.   Hegemony as Laclau states, is not a "re-ordering of things," it is rather "a partiality that can become the name of an impossible totality."[xiv]   Socialism is the expression of a new political subject that can say it represents the whole, by challenging the state to change its class orientation. When Maria Svart, the national director of the DSA, said she wanted to "democratize everything," it is a revolutionary demand to include the economy and the military implicitly, subjects off-limits to democratic control and redefine "democracy" as a source of class conflict, not harmony.[xv] 

            The vagueness of socialism does not run counter to Jodi Dean's claim that what's needed is a new party.  As Dean suggests in her manifesto, The Communist Horizon, radicals have never taken the claims of horizontal democracy as seriously as they proclaim. All movements, she argues, are vanguard acts; they make claims of representation. We are the 99%. The Movement for Black Lives. They claim to represent "the people," however they are defined against an elite or a class or an institution. Yet the question Dean poses is not so much whether we will commit acts of representation, but rather whether we will build organizations that can contain difference and the multiple gaps, omissions and divisions within capitalism.[xvi] DSA by that logic is a party, yet it is a very different kind of party than the one organized by the CPUSA.  While the DSA has elected officials and votes on resolutions governing the organization, the chapters and branches are all almost entirely autonomous -- there is very little the centralized structure of the National Political Committee (NPC) can do to direct what chapters work on.  That said, there is enough structure and unanimity so that the DSA has coalesced around a few central campaigns and principles, such as mentioned above: the Green New Deal, socialized medicine, electoralism, and rent control.  This form of flexibility, cohered by a discursive unity of key demands, marks DSA as the party-form for a post-Fordist, "globalized," mode of capital accumulation

            That is not to say there are no contradictions.  Just as the "democratic centralism" of the CPUSA allowed it to both resemble and challenge the centralized corporations it organized against, so too did its centralism make it vulnerable to sclerotic sloganeering, top-down decision making, and state repression when its leaders were eventually imprisoned under the Smith Act.  While DSA may at some point come under assault by the state, that is not its main challenge at the moment.  Like the CPUSA, the contradictions faced by the DSA are embedded within the cultural contradictions of the current conjuncture.  As a hybrid democratic party, the DSA constitutes itself discursively and symbolically through demands made on the state.  It has no empirical base, as did the CPUSA, in the giant factories and ghettos, large industrial unions, and immigrant neighborhoods of the modern period.  This is not a critique but rather an observation of how the terrain of the working class has changed.  Yet these articulatory acts naturally lend themselves to replication:  who is to say who represents the "true" DSA?  Since the DSA is not governed by a centralized NPC, this by its nature allows for a proliferation of discursive mobilizations. 

            Concretely, numerous ideological caucuses have sprung up, each with a narrow interpretation of what they think "socialism" should mean.  These are distinct from "identity caucuses," such as the queer caucus, or Afro-Socialists, which form to address historical exclusions and hierarchies that continue even in a socialist organization.  The ideological caucuses are discursive platforms and represent programmatic definitions of socialism.  While there are real debates on either end of the spectrum that represent for the most part latent and perhaps receding strains within DSA's history, such as the "horizontalists" or libertarian socialists or the social democrats, the vast majority of DSA's tens of thousands of members agree on the broad outlines of DSA's programmatic goals, organizing tactics, and they are unified around the central demands mentioned in previous paragraphs.  In the same way the rapidly changing party lines of the CPUSA revealed the political limitations of democratic centralism, so too the proliferation of ideological caucuses (there are roughly a dozen now and counting) represent the political limitations of discursively constituted forms of populist organizing.  Already whole chapters have split over what amount to relatively minor ideological differences when it would seem abundantly clear that DSA's entire purpose is to find broad common ground among working people.  In a party organized nodally, much like the web, the temptation for further fragmentation and subcultural differentiation may prove too great. 

            Still, the prospects for the moment seem hopeful.  Unlike countries with large far-right movements among the young, such as India, Italy, Brazil and Hungary, young people in the United States seem like they are moving to the left in what looks to be a generational realignment.  The Sanders campaign and the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib have moved the ballast of the Democratic Party far enough to the left so that Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Elizabeth Warren have had to respond to whether or not they are "socialists"; six socialists were recently elected to city council in Chicago; the New York Times recently endorsed a socialist candidate for Queens District Attorney; and New York state just passed the first progressive rent-control law in over a half-century, a campaign in which the New York DSA played a large part.  It would seem that the DSA, like the Communist Party, is not the entire story of America's current move to the left, at least at the grassroots, but it has emerged as an ideological and organizational center for this moment of transformation.  Of course, it's impossible to know where the current crisis of hegemony will take us.  Trump is also a sign of shifting alignments and a crumbling political order, no longer capable of summoning the self-confidence or mass support necessary to effectively rule.  And it seems that the Democratic Party, along with its superstructure of media outlets, non-profits, think-tanks, and affiliated union leadership, has actually been more capable than the GOP in maintaining a grip on power, even as its base falls away.  Indeed, it may very well be the effectiveness of the Democratic Party and its aligned superstructural support that provides an opening for the far-right, if it is successful in containing movements to its left.  Much remains to be seen.  But the return to the party and thus the return to the state in this moment of crisis may be what saves us from the combined nightmares of fascism, as well as economic and ecological collapse. 

Notes:

[i] Louis Althusser in "Contradiction and Overdetermination," suggests that the multiple and even contradictory social antagonisms in Russian society were "condensed" into a single demand for "bread, peace, and land" For Marx (New York:  Penguin, 1969), 49-86.

[ii] Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York:  Verso, 1997), 6.

[iii] Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, edited by David Forgacs (New York:  NYU Press, 2000), 217-220.

[iv] Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (New York: Verso, 2018), 218. 

[v] Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 289-91.

[vi] Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2, 333; "Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite." Richard Wright Reader ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre (New York:  Harper and Row, 1978), 31-5

[vii] Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (New York:  Basic Books, 1977), 36.

[viii] Denning, The Cultural Front, 102-3.

[ix] Marta Harnecker, Rebuilding the Left (London: Zed Books, 2017), 7-27.

[x] Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York:  Verso, 2005), 230.  See also, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York:  Verso, 1985).

[xi] Ibid., 67.

[xii] As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin point out, the Sanders campaign and much of the new "socialist" left is "class focused" rather than "class rooted", The Socialist Challenge Today:  Syriza, Sanders, Corbyn (London:  Merlin Press, 2018), 43.

[xiii] Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 140.

[xiv] Laclau, On Populist Reason, 226.

[xv] Maria Svart, 'We want to democratize everything': Inside DSA's rise with its leader, https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/17/politics/democratic-socialists-of-america-interview-maria-svart/index.html, accessed June 19, 2019.

[xvi] Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (New York:  Verso, 2012), 217-20.