This article was written by a member of Metro DC DSA and should be read as part of a larger conversation with prior articles published in the Washington Socialist. Opinions expressed here do not reflect the views or opinion of the chapter.
WASHINGTON SOCIALIST'S FALL 2024 ISSUE included two articles of importance to trade unionists and socialists in the DMV, Sam Dee’s “How a Hot Shop Burns” and Sam G’s “The Professional Problem.” The first recounted some recent history of the campaign to unionize graduate workers at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), the flagship campus of Maryland’s public university system, and critiqued the organizing practices of the UAW-affiliated Graduate Labor Union (GLU). The second criticized the fact that MDC DSA’s membership is largely drawn from the District’s salaried professional stratum and addressed the organization’s continued failure to engage the city’s large population of service workers. I have lived in the DMV for just under five years, during which I have pursued a PhD at UMD while working in DC’s service sector to support my studies. These articles spoke to my experience as a committed trade unionist and socialist in the DMV. Much of what each Sam has to say on their respective subjects, those being GLU and MDC DSA, is correct.
I joined the predecessor organization of GLU, Fearless Student Employees (FSE), in the months prior to its transition to its current state and was actively engaged in the card campaign recounted by Sam Dee. I concur that, one year on, the campaign has stalled. GLU’s fall general body meeting felt more like an attempt to regain momentum through mobilization of new faces than the consolidation of a membership. Its recent “march-on-the-boss” rally mobilized around five percent of the graduate workforce, meaning the organic active support for the campaign, however dense, on campus has not grown significantly since its launch in 2023. I have also been an active member of MDC DSA since 2020, when I first moved to the DMV. Sam G’s contention that the chapter is largely dominated by salaried professionals, and that this undermines our work as a socialist organization, has been borne out by my own experience. However, although I agree on these points, I believe that in the case of each Sam there is a failure to account for how the circumstances they correctly describe have come about. As a result, neither charts an effective path toward rectifying these situations.
Both pieces discuss two issues. The first is internal, organizational infrastructure, and the role its design can play in producing and resolving issues of organizational dysfunction. In Sam Dee’s piece, one of the primary causes of GLU’s stalled campaign was its failure to formalize organizational structure through constitutional norms, bylaws, and elected officers. Similarly in Sam G’s piece, MDC DSA’s “class separation” issue (i.e. its orientation towards District salaried professionals) results from the organization’s failure to make simple structural and policy adjustments, such as implementing demographic surveys of our membership, establishing bilingual communications policies, and marketing our events to non-professional sectors of the District’s working class. Of course, both GLU and MDC DSA would benefit immensely from these proposals. But neither of the two Sams explicitly answers the crucial questions raised: Why has GLU resisted the implementation of structures that would make it more organizationally effective, and why does MDC DSA lack infrastructure and policy that would be beneficial to its political project?
Although it is never posed as an answer per se, the other primary issue discussed in both pieces comes to implicitly serve that explanatory role. This is both Sams’ preoccupation with class demographics. For Sam Dee, the intra-stratum distinction between graduate workers in the sciences and the humanities was key to GLU’s dysfunction. The UAW lead staff member’s background in neuroscience, combined with an uneven representation of the science disciplines within the organizing committee, serves as a primary explanation for the card campaign’s stalling, as well as the failure of GLU to develop structural norms of accountability and action. Of course, the very premise of Sam G’s piece is that over-representation of the District’s salaried professionals in MDC DSA is a primary impediment to its political effectiveness as a socialist organization.
The principal problem I have with their discussion of these issues (i.e. infrastructure and demographics) is not that the Sams are incorrect in their assessment of the current role they play in GLU and MDC DSA. Rather, it is that these issues, in themselves, do not constitute a convincing historical point of origin for the overall state of each organization. Dysfunctional infrastructure and uneven demographics are tactical problems that develop downstream from flawed strategy. They are tactical symptoms of a broader strategic condition. Tinkering with them will not solve the dysfunction in GLU or MDC DSA because they themselves are not the cause. Tactical changes are not a viable path forward, because the strategic condition of both GLU and MDC DSA, the illness behind the symptom, precludes the possibility of addressing either organization’s issues tactically. This condition is a broader issue affecting both organizations that I call organizational underdevelopment.
In Walter Rodney’s classic work of Marxist political economic history, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he describes how the African continent was “underdeveloped” by its subordinate relationship to the Euro-American Atlantic world. The internal, politico-economic structure of the continent was defined externally by the politico-economic goals of the Euro-American elite. Indeed, the primary characteristic of underdevelopment is that a social body’s political, economic, and cultural goals are defined from the outside.
While underdevelopment is experienced as dysfunction by those within the underdeveloped social body, it is, in fact, highly functional from the perspective of the external social body, since underdevelopment is itself the product of the developed imposing its own goals on another. Rodney provides the simple example of African agriculture: While Euro-American agriculture was and is given dynamism through the its integration with other industrial sectors, African agriculture has historically been economically isolated at the instruction of Euro-American agricultural interests.1 This leads to a dysfunctional economic gap between African industrial sectors. Of course, from the perspective of Euro-American agricultural capital, which has no interest in seeing its exports face domestic competition in the African market, this is a very functional state of affairs. Over time, the language of “dysfunction” becomes a weapon in the rhetorical arsenal of the developed. “Dysfunction” is then treated as the problem of the underdeveloped. Readers are likely well-aware of how mainstream media describes the nations of the African continent as perennially dysfunctional, pointing to any number of nonsensical, supposedly inherited internal social factors as explanation.
What this is meant to demonstrate, however, is that the concepts of development and underdevelopment only make sense insofar that they describe relationships between social bodies. An economy cannot be underdeveloped in the abstract, only vis-à-vis its subordinate relation to another economy. A relationship of development and underdevelopment emerges when one social body begins to define the direction and goals of another. While the terms development and underdevelopment are a part of a theoretical discourse traditionally used to describe geopolitical relationships, they also apply to relations between political organizations. I use the term organizational underdevelopment to describe organizations that are incapable of defining their own political goals due to their subordinate relationship to other political organizations. The infrastructural and demographic issues experienced by both GLU and MDC DSA are the direct, historical result of their organizational underdevelopment relative to other organizations.
I’ll begin with the more straightforward case of GLU. One point of contention I have with Dee’s account of UMD is its description as a “hot shop.” Traditionally, this term is used by trade unionists to describe a non-unionized workforce already engaged in collective action, but in an undisciplined way lacking strategic coherence. Workers already on the move are good but can also be dangerous from the perspective of an organizer, who often does not know the level of collective organizing experience in a given workforce.
While there was an enormous amount of organic resentment for university administration among graduate workers at UMD in the lead-up to GLU’s card campaign, there was very little collective action being taken. FSE by no means represented such action, either, having existed for years as a tiny activist group oriented exclusively around legislative work.
The transformation of FSE into GLU and its turn towards on-campus organizing was intimately bound up with the organization’s affiliation with UAW. In fact, the reestablishment of FSE as GLU, the organization’s turn towards on-campus action, and its affiliation with UAW happened more or less concurrently. These developments were not the result of an increase in collective action on the part of UMD graduate workers, but of a political crisis in FSE.
By 2023, FSE had failed seven times to pass legislation granting Maryland public university graduate workers collective bargaining rights, found itself isolated from its own constituency, and was racked by the resulting interpersonal conflict.2 This crisis opened a power vacuum within FSE that allowed FSE’s organizing committee, until then a lower body in the organization, to turn the organization’s strategic orientation away from legislative work and towards the campus.3 Dee correctly points out this shift. He, however, does not make clear that FSE’s organizing committee was only able to successfully execute this political maneuver because of its developing relationship with UAW. The chance of formalizing a relationship with a major US union, rather than the merits of a campus-focused strategy, was the crucial element in convincing a critical mass of FSE activists to abandon their exclusive focus on legislative work. Indeed, FSE’s transformation into GLU and its reorientation towards on-campus organizing was premised on its immediate subordination to UAW.
The problem at UMD was not that UAW was entering a workplace in which workers were already on the move, taking action and defining goals, like a “hot shop.” Rather, UMD graduate workers had yet to take any action or develop any means, however ill-conceived, for defining and pursuing workplace demands on their own. GLU’s affiliation with UAW made this condition permanent. GLU found itself underdeveloped, incapable of charting its own path and with its purpose defined from the outside, by UAW. The subsequent internal dysfunction of the campaign was a direct result of this relationship.
Dee points out a further phenomenon that explains why this condition persisted: A number of GLU members were hired as UAW staff. This is a common feature of UAW graduate worker campaigns. In the case of GLU, it created a leadership stratum of graduate workers who saw the organization and the campaign from the UAW’s perspective. This stratum resisted the implementation of structural norms but they were not the cause of GLU’s dysfunction. They saw UAW’s and GLU’s interests as identical, indirectly contributing to GLU’s organizational underdevelopment.
I believe that, from the perspective of UAW staff, any democratic structural norms would have been dangerous to UAW’s interests. The representatives of UAW Region 8 (the region that covers the DMV), though they had appealed to the campus-oriented focus of FSE’s organizing committee, followed what they may not have realized was a proven failed strategy: utilizing on-campus activism as a means to convince the Maryland legislature to grant public university graduate workers collective bargaining rights. In other words, UAW planned to do what all previous UMD graduate worker unionization campaigns, including FSE, had done in the past: rallies, petitions, and proclamations in the fall, followed by lobbying in the spring.4 UAW’s strategy was not, in fact, built around the immediate goal of addressing workplace issues or even unionization (though these were seen as distant objectives), but around passing legislation.
From the perspective of UAW staff, structures that could have created accountability and facilitated effective workplace action were perceived as deeply threatening. Those structures were not immediately useful to, and could even possibly disrupt, a strategy oriented around legislative work. All UAW needed were the activism structures of biannual mobilization necessary for lobbying efforts, which could be maintained by the small, paid leadership stratum pulled from the ranks of GLU. This did not preclude on-campus activity entirely, but meant that it had to be restricted to specific forms amenable to a legislative pressure campaign.
The card campaign, rather than being a means to building a functional mass organization of graduate workers on campus—in effect a proto-union—was, for UAW, merely an activist means of mobilization towards what they believed would be successful legislative action. The dysfunctional lack of democratic structural norms experienced by Dee and others was, in fact, functional from the perspective of UAW staff. What Dee and others believed would solve what they perceived to be dysfunction for taking workplace action was seen as disruptive of effective functioning by UAW staff pursuing legislative work. UAW’s interests, of course, won out, and continue to define GLU’s goals, structure, and identity.
Dee is correct that this was a strategic mistake on the part of UAW staff. The bill to which GLU, and FSE before it, gave so much time and energy failed to even leave committee in 2024. This strategy has failed at UMD even when there have been sympathetic legislatures in Annapolis, and the only successful unionization campaign in UMD’s history, that of campus staff’s AFSCME Local 1072, pursued a very different strategic path under identical legal circumstances. But Dee is wrong that the origin of GLU’s dysfunction was a combination of infrastructural and demographic issues. In fact, what was occurring was not even concretely “dysfunction.” Rather, what Dee and others experienced was GLU’s organizational underdevelopment in relation to the UAW, the issues above being symptoms of that underlying cause. GLU likely would have been more developed, more capable of defining its own strategy, and more effective as an on-campus organization if UMD actually had been a “hot shop.”
The case of MDC DSA is a far more complex example of the same phenomenon. Sam G is correct that there is an over-representation of salaried professionals within the organization's membership. He, however, fails to distinguish from salaried professionals generally and the particular stratum which predominates within MDC DSA’s leadership: employees of other explicitly political organizations. The past four iterations of the organization’s Steering Committee (SC), and likely those that came before, have been made up largely of progressive Democratic Party operatives, trade union staffers, and, especially, the personnel of issue-based nonprofits. Between 2021 and 2024, at least 60 percent of SC members have, at the time of serving, been employed by political organizations.5
That our leadership is dominated by the paid employees of other political organizations does not represent an internal demographic problem as much as a relational problem between MDC DSA and the many organizations which make up the “progressive” political milieu that revolves around the federal government. Whether wittingly or not, our historical leadership blocs have acted as representatives of outside organizations within MDC DSA, subjecting us to permanent underdevelopment before the competing interests of political candidates, unions, and nonprofits.
The internal structure of MDC DSA is a direct result of this underdevelopment. For instance, MDC DSA’s priority campaign structure is a laughably ridiculous, highly dysfunctional way for a nominally socialist organization to make key strategic decisions. But from the perspective of progressive Democratic Party operatives, trade union staffers, and nonprofit employees, who, whether they mean to or not, largely see MDC DSA as an activist structure useful for mobilizing volunteers into projects related to their particular areas of interest, the priority campaign structure functions quite well.
However, it must be made clear that MDC DSA has not experienced a form of entryism by professional activists, which again would imply an internal demographic origin for the organization's “dysfunction.” Our historical leadership blocs are not the result of a concerted effort by other political organizations, but the cumulative effect of a leadership dominated by individuals who likely assume their professional lives and their socialist organizing are more or less politically aligned.6
Rather than being a result of entryism, a relation of underdevelopment has emerged organically as a result of the particular political economy of the District, which, along with Boston and the Bay Area, has one of the highest per capita concentrations of issue-based nonprofits in the US, and is the obvious national gravitational center for Democratic Party operatives and union lobbying efforts. The underdevelopment this produces is something most DSA chapters, as well as national, deal with. But MDC DSA is particularly prone to an extreme form because the milieu of “progressive” organizations is especially politically developed in the DMV.
In other words, MDC DSA’s structures and priorities are defined from the outside. We are underdeveloped vis-á-vis the District’s massive ecosystem of “progressive” organizations. Sam G’s proposals would be positive if implemented, but they will not solve the problem of organizational underdevelopment. In fact, their successful implementation is predicated on overcoming that underdevelopment.
Strategy can be described as a series of tactical steps arrived at by working backwards from a political goal. Infrastructure, from this perspective, is a tactical problem. Whether an infrastructure is effective or not is relative to the political goal in question. Demography, too, is a tactical issue. Classic Marxist literature argues that the working class should be the political subject of the socialist movement not because it is special in the abstract, but because it is tactically the subject around which it makes sense to build a political project that has as its key programmatic aim the socialization of privately-held means of production.7
A political organization’s ability to articulate strategy is premised on its capacity for independent, collective self-expression and self-determination. In the Marxist anti-colonial literature on which I have drawn for my explanation of development and underdevelopment, this is better known as “sovereignty.” Like the burgeoning nation-states on which that literature focused, political organizations must also be sovereign if they seek to meaningfully articulate strategy. Sam Dee and Sam G have good proposals, but the strategic conditions for their effective realization are not extant in either organization. Neither GLU nor MDC DSA are sovereign organizations, capable of defining their own political goals. They are underdeveloped in relation to other organizations that define their goals from the outside.
The means by which organizational sovereignty is produced and political strategy is articulated are one in the same. To accomplish both, an organization must identify political goals. These goals must be specific and binding. That is to say, an organization must have a political program. Explicitly identifying political goals, if done successfully, produces a number of effects:
It is the third point which is most relevant to my initial critique of the tactical proposals of Sam Dee and Sam G. GLU will never seriously pursue workplace demands as a primary objective, nor will it build the robust infrastructure needed to do so, until its membership has clearly articulated the meeting of those workplace demands as constituting their definition of political “success.” Until a critical mass of the organization agrees on this definition of “success” and feels accountable to it, Dee’s proposals will not be implemented. Similarly, G’s proposals for demographic targeting will not be meaningfully pursued until terms have been set in which MDC DSA’s leadership recognizes that not doing so would mean political “failure” in the eyes of the membership. However, this is predicated on the organization having a shared definition of what “failure” means, something only the articulation of specific political goals can provide. In other words, the strategic condition of organizational sovereignty must be extant for the Sams’ proposals to be taken seriously and pursued meaningfully.
Although it is unclear what GLU’s direction will be this coming spring, the organization’s actions on campus this fall, which were limited to pursuing more card signatures in what is effectively a pro-union petition and mass turnout-oriented events, match the pattern of past years.8 It is likely that UAW staff will again return to lobbying after five weeks of demobilization during the winter break. Those interested in overcoming the organization’s endemic underdevelopment must take this time to internally organize graduate workers to contest GLU’s continuing legislative preoccupation. This opposition must identify said preoccupation, point out its long history of failure, and articulate the pursuit of a transparent, accessible set of specific workplace demands as the way forward for GLU. In other words, they must contest for a program. Although trade unionists do not typically use this term to describe organizing objectives, a binding program of workplace demands is what GLU needs. Indeed, GLU’s brief flirtation with non-legislative-oriented on-campus organizing was so easily directed back towards lobbying in Annapolis because pursuing workplace demands was never explicitly identified as the purpose of that organizing.
The history of trade unionism at UMD makes clear that in the absence of collective bargaining rights, a union campaign must be ready for a prolonged, uphill battle necessitating organizational infrastructure. Basic union infrastructure and norms, such as a constitution, bylaws, and elected officers, as well as dynamic internal media and social events, cannot wait until after collective bargaining rights and recognition. Building these now is contingent upon GLU members forcing the organization to establish clear terms of organizing success and failure based on pursuing a program of workplace demands. Without the accountability of a document outlining the pursuit of workplace demands as GLU’s primary objective, the organization will continue to flounder in its attempts to organize campus and will likely annually return to the comfort of the legislative cycle as a result. All the energy that is annually spent on legislative work must be entirely redirected towards the construction of what will, in effect, be a proto-union. As shown by the example of AFSCME 1072, collective bargaining rights and union recognition are contingent upon successful collective action on campus carried out by already-existing, durable union infrastructure; a proto-union.
Resistance within GLU to such activity will likely claim that attempts to articulate clear workplace demands as GLU’s immediate objective will create a false binary between legislative and workplace organizing options that should be pursued simultaneously. While many may genuinely believe this, such arguments are almost always an attempt, subconscious or not, to avoid the difficult debate that accompanies making key strategic decisions regarding the primacy and contingency of different political objectives. Unfortunately, trade unionists almost always work with extremely limited capacity. To claim that an organizing committee should pursue every seemingly important strategic goal simultaneously is almost never a reasonable or legitimate suggestion. Rather, it is, at best, the result of naivete, or, at worst, a method of diffusing dissent.
The passage of “Chapter Resolution 5: For a Chapter Program” (CR5) at MDC DSA’s recent convention is an incredibly positive step towards overcoming the organization’s underdevelopment.9 The production of a political program is a chance to define MDC DSA politically and distinguish it from the District’s progressive milieu as a distinctly socialist organization. However, the mere passage of the resolution does not guarantee that the document drafted by the planned Program Development Committee (PDC) will produce organizational sovereignty. There is the chance that the prospective program fails to identify goals specific enough to demarcate MDC DSA from the progressive milieu. Indeed, there is a significant possibility that, without intervention, the final program will merely commit us to “socialism,” vaguely defined. The PDC must take seriously the task of identifying the specific programmatic demands of the District’s diverse working classes, as well as how to effectively articulate these in conjunction with the ultimate goal of socialism in the DMV.10
Of more importance, however, is that CR5 does not subsume the priority campaign structure to the prospective program. If the prospective program does not functionally displace the priority campaign structure, then it will likely become a powerless, inert document. The prospective program must have constitutionally binding force within MDC DSA if it is to produce a developed political organization. This force will be deployed in terms of resources. Currently, resources are distributed to working groups and committees based on priority campaign decisions. If CR5 is to have a positive effect on MDC DSA, the PDC must take seriously the task of making resource distribution within the organization dependent upon the ability of working groups and committees to demonstrate that their organizing directly supports the pursuit of the political objectives of the program.
One of the cruxes of the 2024 convention, though largely implicit, was the desire on the part of many MDC DSA comrades for more internal discipline. For instance, the language of failed “Bylaw Amendment 3: For the Mass Orientation of Working Groups” (BA3) was clearly meant to establish more stringent disciplinary powers over working groups. The problem with BA3, however, was not the establishment of disciplinary power in the abstract, but that it did so in the service of preventing an ill-defined factionalism from growing within the organization, a phenomenon for which there is little concrete evidence. Make no mistake, MDC DSA does need more internal discipline, but not to prevent pseudo-problems like factionalism. MDC DSA needs more discipline vis-á-vis specific political goals enshrined in a programmatic document. The means of achieving this is not by punishing comrades who organize around their political interests in working groups, but by enforcing a multi-year distribution of chapter resources based on these specific political goals rather than vaguely defined “priorities.”
Resistance to a political program with this kind of constitutional force will emerge around a discourse which claims that MDC DSA does not need to identify binding political objectives of such specificity. Rebuttals will probably come in two forms. Like in GLU, many will assert that all seemingly important goals should be pursued simultaneously. Again, this claim is often genuinely believed to be a practical possibility by the naive, but will also be used deceitfully to undermine threats to the status quo. However, a more complex rebuttal will also likely emerge that claims any binding political program will rob the organization of the year-to-year “flexibility” provided by the priority campaign structure. Here, it is important to remember that while the term “flexibility” has a contemporary connotation of positivity derived from corporate pop managerial science, it does not have positive value in the abstract. Yes, the priority campaign structure gives MDC DSA a form of flexibility, but this is largely negative. MDC DSA is flexible insofar that the organization lacks a unique political identity and has no clear terms of political success and failure. In other words, what exactly MDC DSA is and what it is trying to accomplish is flexible. But this form of “flexibility” is clearly debilitating to effective political work. Finally, CR5 does clearly establish that the program is not eternal, but subject to change after a period of two years, meaning that some “flexibility” is still present, just not at the expense of organizational sovereignty.
Unfortunately, MDC DSA’s endemic underdevelopment has produced an infrastructure that generates isolated committees and working groups. This has led to a situation in which the membership core is simultaneously active and atomized, which is highly amenable to the activist mobilization role MDC DSA plays in relation to the District’s “progressive” milieu. The disjointed nature of the organization gives rise to an active membership that is itself invested in maintaining an organizational form that allows them to work on uncoordinated projects based on individual interest, without reference to any goals outside a vaguely defined notion of “socialism.” Any attempt to articulate political goals more precise than “socialism” and the vague areas of interest represented by the priority campaign structure will alarm the most active stratum of the membership, who will correctly interpret this as a threat to the almost total working autonomy that many committees and working groups currently enjoy.11 Indeed, these members will correctly understand that their current work may be deemed tactically insufficient in the context of an organization with clearer political objectives.
MDC DSA comrades sympathetic to this article’s point of view must overcome the organic resistance that active members will likely have to a binding political program by convincing them that their skills and interests will not become irrelevant in the new context. Rather, they will be sharpened and focused by a more distinct, effective, and developed political project, though this will likely come at the expense of some, though importantly not all, autonomy.
Although I have sometimes seemed quite harsh here with my interlocutors, I would like to emphasize my respect for both Sam Dee and Sam G. Their pieces are significant contributions to socialism and trade unionism in the DMV and without the spark provided by their insights, this article would not exist. I thank you for your incredible writing and the editorial board of the WS.
1 - Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Verso Books, 2018), 22.
2 - FSE was founded in 2017. See: Carrie Snurr, “UMD student coalition teams up with Maryland delegate to push collective bargaining rights,” The Diamondback, February 13 2017.
3 - For the history of FSE’s legislative activity, see: Angela Roberts, “Grad student employees in Maryland won’t get collective bargaining rights this year,” The Diamondback, April 13 2018; Angela Roberts, “UMD grad students surprised by sudden failure of collective bargaining bill,” The Diamondback, April 5 2019; Clara Longo de Freitas, “UMD grads were hopeful about this year’s collective bargaining bill. Then, COVID-19 hit,” The Diamondback, May 3 2020; Khushboo Rathor, “At Maryland hearing, USM grad students once again fight for collective bargaining rights,” The Diamondback, February 19 2021; Trisha Ahmed, “UMD grad students, faculty testify for collective bargaining rights across USM,” The Diamondback, February 16 2022; and Taneen Momeni, “UMD Fearless Student Employees rallies for collective bargaining rights in Annapolis,” The Diamondback, February 10 2023.
4 - It is important to note here that without collective bargaining rights, GLU’s card campaign is effectively a pro-graduate worker union petition, something which has been carried out at UMD a number of times with no effect on subsequent lobbying efforts. See: Trisha Ahmed, “Grad students’ collective bargaining bill divides UMD,” The Diamondback, January 30 2022; and Angela Roberts, “UMD doctoral students say they lack the tools to navigate conflicts with their advisers,” The Diamondback, February 3 2020.
5 - This is based on research into the professional backgrounds of SC members during these years. In order to protect the privacy of former and current SC members, the author has chosen to refrain from providing specific sourcing for this figure.
6 - This point cannot be made strongly enough. MDC DSA’s underdevelopment is not the result of an intentional, concerted effort on the part of the organization’s leadership. However, this does not mean that attempts to change this state of affairs will not meet with resistance on the part of leadership, which will be addressed subsequently.
7 - For example, see: Karl Kautsky, “V: The Merging of the Workers’ Movement and Socialism,” in The Historic Accomplishment of Karl Marx (Cosmonaut, 2020), 29-44.
8 - The Maryland General Assembly’s legislative session largely occurs in the Spring. The upcoming year’s session will be from January 8 to April 7 2025.
9 - Comrade Hayden L should be cited here as having outlined and argued for a more modest version of what CR5 proposes last spring. See: Hayden L, “How to Win in D.C.: Where’s the Strategy?,” Washington Socialist (Spring 2024)
10 - The body of literature on “workers’ inquiry” contains an immense amount of material on how socialists can carry out effective, political strategy-oriented research on working class people. For a decent starting point in this literature, see: Clark McAllister, Karl Marx’s Workers’ Inquiry: International History, Reception, and Responses (Notes From Below, 2022).
11 - However, it should be pointed out that this autonomy is total only insofar that working groups and committees are not required to regularly report to a central body regarding the utility of their activity. This autonomy is not unlimited, however, as there have been a number of instances of the SC disciplining these groups for one reason or another.
