By Frankie Seymour
So long as one remains a monk, one goes on tolling the bell.
Mao Zedong
Philly Socialists formed after the Occupy Movement of 2011 had more or less succumbed to what Sophia Burns calls “expressive hobbyists,” those who “attend the same demonstrations as protest militants, but for [whom] the point isn’t exciting ‘revolutionary’ confrontation,” but rather to “‘raise consciousness.’” The alternative to this type of activist show-boating was to focus on the work, to build the proletarian base that will someday bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. The tactic that emerged to dominate the post-Occupy organizing world was base-building: a slow, deliberate process of building power through relationships among workers.
Base-building was an attempt at new life for an ailing U.S. left, which had spent the 80s digging out from the snuffed coals of a fire stomped by Reaganomics and the 90s reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union—all while global neoliberalism tightened its grip on the workers of the world.
Base-building proposed that party lines and the most prominent tendencies of the 20th century, while useful for study and selective application, wouldn’t cut it in a 21st century landscape. Philly Socialists’ non-sectarian base-building approach was dictated by the thought that the left needed an organization that functioned as a tent big enough to meet workers where they were in their political awareness, recruit a bright pool of eager organizers, adapt to the needs of the movement-at-large, and set aside theoretical squabbles to focus on the work.
Flash forward thirteen years—past the collapse of Marxist Center, the scattering of PS leadership, and the emergence of a new guard taking up the flag of what was once the largest left-wing base-building organization in the country, and here we stand.
The question digging at me, then, is what are we doing? And how well are we doing it?
In 2022, Philly Socialists had been stripped to the floorboards. At a sparsely attended General Assembly, a proposal was put forth to dissolve the organization, transfer our bank account contents to the Young Communist League (the youth party of the CPUSA) and be done with it. There were a few dissenting votes, the proposal failed, and Philly Socialists began the rebuilding process. At the time, active PS membership could be counted on one hand—all these members being relatively green to base-building and organizing in general. All they had was some cash in the bank, the PS constitution, and a dream.
Four years later, Philly Socialists is hovering around 150 dues-paying members, with the fullest Central Committee in as many years, and a Cadre of about 15 comrades. The current leadership is more-or-less in agreement on “the point” of PS: Philly Socialists is a left-wing organization that uses its capacity to create dual power, establishing alternative systems to those of the capitalists, and build trust among a wide swath of workers while doing so. PS builds dual power through project work, with the intent that in the next moment of uprising, the organization will be in a position to effectively seize the moment and make headway against the capitalists.
Of our two goals, build dual power and build trust among workers, how are we faring? In the remainder of this piece, I will assess our progress through the lens of one project, Philly Survival Collective. I will then propose solutions to some difficulties of the project and the challenges of socialist mutual aid more generally.
Philly Survival Collective (PSC) began as part of the same project as Community Action Relief Project (CARP). The project as a whole sought to provide harm reduction on the streets of Kensington and deliver groceries to a number of community members. CARP, which is no longer a Philly Socialists project, continues to provide harm reduction. PSC remains on the Philly Socialists roster and primarily facilitates grocery distribution and delivery, with the more recent addition of weekly tabling and distro at a set location in West Philadelphia.
In a five-year retrospective of PSC, one long-time member articulated a major tension of mutual aid work in a socialist organization: “We obviously have relationships with these families we’ve been delivering to for a long time, but we’ve struggled with how to make it more of a community thing. We also have at times made efforts to encourage some of the people we deliver to to see if they want to get more involved with PSC, and that hasn’t really panned out much either.”
My interpretation of “community thing,” is that the work of PSC has not spurred deeper investment in the project of socialism. It is difficult to agitate around food distribution. Why? One answer might be that socialists aren’t the only people delivering groceries.
Personally, I would much rather a leftist of any stripe deliver my food for the week than a liberal, but the fact is that the same type of work is done by people of various political backgrounds. When people think of food distribution, they are probably more likely to think of church pantries or government food banks than they are to think of the Black Panther Party or Food Not Bombs.
The universality of food distribution efforts across varied political orientations means that the contradiction around the right to food isn’t one that readily agitates a base against the state. At least, not on its own. If that were the case, the working poor of this country would have made a revolution sixty years ago when kids in Appalachia and New Orleans stood on their front stoops with bloated bellies.
It does not diminish the essential work of food justice to analyze its errors. After all, people have to eat to have any fighting chance at being revolutionaries. Think of the Black Panthers, who conceived of their Free Breakfast Program as “survival pending revolution” (Newton 104). In the same piece, Huey Newton goes on to say that “the survival programs are not answers or solutions, but they will help us to organize the community around a true analysis and understanding of their situation.”
Newton indirectly identifies a second potential failure point of mutual aid. When we organize around the urgency of a much-needed service (people need to eat!), it is easy for the work to stay the work. Mutual aid requires significant labor and time. It requires slinging peppers when it is 10 degrees outside, even when you’re tired and pissed off.
When there is never a day when the work ceases, when organizer capacity is always pushed snug against the work, there is never a good time to bridge the gap between survival and “true analysis and understanding.” We don’t have the time to ask What’s going on? or What have I learned?, much less to answer these questions.
Without bringing analysis into our work, no every-David will divine how, where, and when to hit Goliath where it will kill him. David might not even know that Goliath has a club, or that he is swinging it.
Said another way, the relationships we form as workers make socialism possible. Through relationships, we gain practice, make mistakes, and make successes. This experience gives us the necessary knowledge to hit power where it hurts. Interrogation of our community relationships informs our strategy and our tactics. In Philly Socialists, many of these relationships form through our mutual aid projects. We do not magically discover how to fight the power on our own. We have to work for it.
If Philly Socialists has a line, it is simply that: “Serve the People, Fight the Power.” Rightly said, it should read Serve the People, intertwine your fate with the people, learn from the people, determine where power is weak, and Fight the Power. I posit that the purpose of mutual aid in socialist organizing is finding the hot iron. Where are workers upset? Where might we strike into their upset and move the masses to action?
Philly Socialists’ multi-tendency, non-sectarian nature means organizers must constantly analyze—and attempt to meet—the moment’s demands. How to do this! How not to succumb to liberalism or burnout?! How not to give up? How to avoid what Jean RD Allen and Teresa Kalisz call the “apolitical trend in base-building,” which “threatens to make what socialists and communists are building a base for left progressives rather than a revolutionary working class movement”?
Without analysis, we get stuck in the rut of the work. If mutual aid is to remain an element of socialist organizing, we must remember that to “work perfunctorily and muddle along” inhibits our ability to organize effectively. As Mao puts it, As long as one is a monk, one goes on tolling the bell.
And of Philly Socialists’ projects, PSC is not the only place where we find ourselves asking Okay, but how do we make socialism from this?
BOOTS, in its gardening work, encounters a similar inertia of the day-to-day. When we don’t have a campaign, how do we galvanize the community?
And when we do have a campaign, like No Sister to Genocide, our effort to uncouple the sister city relationship between Philly and Tel-Aviv, we encounter the problem of much Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions work: it is hard to connect the material realities of workers in Palestine to workers in Philadelphia, no matter how obvious the ties may seem to some.
This problem follows us structurally, too. The dual structure of project work and work of PS at-large often means that members of Cadre (myself included) are so pressed for capacity that we aren’t thinking of relationships as a key structural component to the work we do. If relationships only get attended to while we’re occupied with other things, we aren’t taking the proper time to inform newer members about how things work around here, impart socialist theory as we see it, or agitate around what comes next.
The work never stops at the work or the analysis of the work. It doesn’t stop even once we act upon our analysis. The work follows an energy that ebbs and flows. There are times of quiet and times of agitation. As comrades, we must take proper measures to sustain ourselves as we play this long game. We do the work in shifts, but the work of the movement only stops when we win. And after we win? The work starts anew.
So how does a multi-tendency, serve-the-people-oriented Philly Socialists do good analysis without a party line to measure our work against? How do we stay sharp both within ourselves and with each other? Below are some practical ideas for where to start.
Points of Unity
Every project should know not only the work it does but also why it does this particular work. As the PS constitution dictates that each project is autonomous, every project’s leadership and membership must hold a meeting or series of meetings to determine the project’s Points of Unity. Appropriate texts and theory should be read and studied together beforehand. We cannot unify on vibes.
To determine where the group is aligned, project leadership will write eight to ten scenarios. The point of these scenarios is to highlight situations that could very well happen over the course of the project.
The introduction of scenarios is a tool of a dialogical teaching style. These scenarios function as “codes.” In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire explains that codes allow participants to move “from the abstract to the concrete” and require “that the Subject recognize [themself] in the object (the coded concrete existential situation) and recognize the object as a situation in which he finds himself, together with other Subjects.” In other words, codes bridge the gap between theory and praxis.
Members of the project will go through each scenario and synthesize:
- What they see
- What is actually happening
- Why the problem is happening
- What it says about the work the project is doing / should do
- Where do we agree on what should be done? Where do we disagree?
These questions are especially useful for
- New projects that have yet to determine where they stand
- Old projects that have turned over leadership and/or been in the work so long that they lack clarity of purpose
An experienced facilitator will synthesize what she hears in the room and repeat it back to the group for confirmation. Make sure to take detailed notes. A Points of Unity Committee will then distill the discussion into ten (or whatever seems the appropriate number) points. The final Points of Unity will then be discussed and voted on by the whole of the project for approval. These points should remain a living document, subject to change, and referenced frequently over the course of the work.
Once a Points of Unity is approved, it will be read at the top of each meeting.
Summations, or, How We Use the Partisan
Once unity has been established, projects can more clearly articulate their goals. These campaigns and goals will make themselves known through the course of the work.
Once goals are established, it is essential to habitually write summations of the work.
How are we doing? What are we learning? Attentive summations (which don’t sacrifice trust or operational security) keep us sharp by encouraging us to self-criticize, criticize comrades, and criticize the work we do together.
Making these summations widely available through the Partisan keeps projects and leadership honest to general membership and to the wider community This article is my attempt at an at-large PS summation. God-willing someone responds to tell me I’m wrong, and what about.
The practice of summations is nascent in Philly Socialists, with a great early example being the 9-month report from the No Sister to Genocide campaign.
In the absence of a robust team of journalists at the Partisan, written project analysis should be the primary concern of the journal in the current era of Philly Socialists. (Note: In the first PS era, the Partisan also included analysis of the movement. See: Tim Horras’ 2017 analysis of base-building). With a Partisan budget allotted each year, we could even pay members a stipend to write summations.
Summations with sensitive information will remain internal. However, limited circulation of more sensitive documents can occur in our political education program. Political education should start with reading basic texts of Marxism and the wider Left and end with reading ourselves.
The best way to implement summations is for leadership to delegate and support greener members in projects through the process of analyzing the work.
Good & Welfare
While At-Large PS Meetings (Planning Meeting, Central Committee Meeting, Cadre Meetings) in the post-2022 Philly Socialists have historically been vibes-based with loose agendas, these meetings have tightened up in the past year as attendance has increased. In the spirit of organizational unity and struggle, I recommend Good & Welfare be consistently and rigorously added to the end of every meeting agenda for both At-Large PS and in-project meetings. The purpose of Good & Welfare—to critique the chair, the meeting itself, other attendees, and oneself—will be introduced in each meeting for the benefit of new and seasoned members alike. Here’s an example script:
As we come to the end of the meeting, it’s time for Good & Welfare. Good & Welfare is a time when members of the meeting critique how the meeting went and critique the Chair of the meeting. It is also a time to check-in with each other about how you’re doing in your life outside of the organization. This section will conclude when at least one constructive critique has been offered for both the meeting and the Chair.
Return to this article to copy/paste the above script into your agendas.
It may be helpful for an experienced comrade at the meeting to offer a bit of criticism to get things going. Often, greener organizers, entrenched in liberalism as many of us are, can be reluctant to offer criticism publicly.
Coupled with the Points of Unity read at the beginning of each meeting, a robust Good & Welfare gives PS members a clear view of both why we do the work and how we might improve. Alongside a culture of summation, these two elements will push Philly Socialists towards a cycle of unity, struggle, unity and away from a cycle of yeah I agree, yeah totally.
Conclusion
Mutual aid is crucial work and a vital tool of social investigation. It is a first step to fighting the power. It’s time for Philly Socialists to move into a new era in which fight-the-power campaigns emerge from serving the people, and Philly Socialists has a good track record when it comes to fighting the power.
We must be attuned to the past of both the organization and the broader Left so that we can learn from failures and produce successes to the best of our ability. We must also understand our present moment and the unique challenges and contradictions it presents. I write this article on the eve of the launch of a new mutual aid project in Philly Socialists, the Trans United Front, and on the eve of the vanguard of the neo-PS era stepping back from leadership, with new leaders taking the helm. In this moment, we must determine what will best serve us as we step into the future.
Political unity, deepened comradery, and sharp analysis are the tools required to strike the hottest iron and make the blade that will cut.
The Philadelphia Partisan 