In a recent Jacobin article, Noah Suárez-Sikes, “an organizer with the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America,” criticized mainstream news outlets for gleefully outing DSA leaders who hail from backgrounds that range from upper-middle class to upper class.
Dubbed “Class traitors are welcome in the socialist movement,” a construction perfectly tuned to immediately alienate right wingers and left wingers alike, the piece was framed around a feeding frenzy by the NYC and national conservative press against one Gustavo Gordillo, who Suárez-Sikes first described as “the democratically elected cochair of the New York City chapter of DSA, a thirty-eight-year-old former union electrician.”
A couple of lines later we discover that Gordillo’s dad bought him a house in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Suárez-Sikes was a bit circumspect on matters like the value of the house (requiring readers to do math to figure it out), Gordillo’s background, and what his father does for a living.
Fox News was rather more blunt on the details, however, “The co-chair of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America has railed against the wealthy and championed the working class — while living in a roughly $1.4 million Brooklyn home purchased and renovated by his parents.
“Property records show that a family LLC purchased the Bed-Stuy home in 2019. Gordillo’s father, a Peruvian immigrant and successful businessman, told the New York Post that he renovated the property and allows his two sons, including the DSA co-chair, to live there.”
The Fox story then mentioned that Gordillo is “a Yale graduate with an art degree” and quoted New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino (R – 19th District) saying “Not only did DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo’s parents buy him this rowhouse, they converted it from a two family and renovated it into a luxury single-family home for him.”
For the remainder of his dispatch, Suárez-Sikes went to some lengths to explain that the more fair, democratic, and equitable society that DSA is fighting for will include people from tonier backgrounds; so it’s only natural that rich people and people from the professional-managerial class will not only join socialist groups like DSA but ascend to their leadership. Basically concluding that having well-off people like Gordillo in the top ranks of an anti-capitalist organization like DSA is an unalloyed good.
I beg to differ with that sentiment.
As a longtime socialist, do I agree that people from elite backgrounds will be part of the better society that I’d like to help build? Absolutely. I would go further and say that I want the broad socialist movement to be scrupulously nonviolent and genuinely democratic in our pursuit of that goal. So while I support a future justice process that will see powerful people that have ruined (or even ended) the lives of fellow humans in their pursuit of riches sent to jail for their crimes, I am completely against calling for punishing anyone simply because of their class position.
And what do I mean by “elite?” I mean wealthy people who “own the means of production,” millionaires and billionaires, of course. But I also mean people from any background who manage to attend schools from pre-K to PhD-level that cater to the wealthy, get the best possible education, and plug directly into the personal networks of the rich and powerful. People that are groomed for stewardship of the current capitalist society as meritocratic picks. People meant to be able upper-middle class servants of our American oligarchy at the very least … and who may manage to become ruling class themselves, if they’re ruthless and mercenary enough.
People in elite networks can do anything that comes to their minds—from political campaigns to journalism to my point—far more easily than people who aren’t in those networks.
Therein lies the rub. I’m hardly going out on a limb by stating that a goodly percentage of both top DSA leadership and Jacobin staff and writers fit that definition of elite. But as someone who spent decades as a left-wing activist and decades as a journalist covering left-wing groups, mainly in Boston where I was born but also on the national and international stage at times, I will add that much of the leadership of many left or left-leaning organizations, institutions, third parties, and publications that I’ve worked with or encountered over many years definitely fits that description.
And I think that elite leadership in left-wing organizations is one important reason why socialism has failed to become a dominant force in American politics. As people with money, connections, and power distort American politics in general; so, too, do they distort politics on the left.
So we end up with a situation where most significant left-wing or left-leaning nonprofits, foundations, labor unions, and publications are controlled by interlocking elite networks.
Even organizations that appear to be super grassroots often have elite left-wingers running the show … or at least bankrolling them and having an outsized influence on their agenda behind the scenes.
A situation that’s doubtless in play in NYC, still the heart of American capitalism and not at all coincidentally DSA’s main power base.
These left-wing elite networks develop their own agendas based on what they believe the mass of people outside those networks want and need. Not on the lived experiences of those wants and needs. Because most of their number have not lived such experiences with real skin in the game, even if they’ve “salted” a workplace as a labor activist (or have been a union electrician). Like the aliens in the book version of “2001: A Space Odyssey” who try to stock a fridge in the hotel room they created as a zoo for their human subject, having only seen packages of human food in TV shows they had recorded. So every package in the fridge is filled with some moist blue stuff with a flavor “so elusive as to be almost indescribable” and there is only tap water to drink.
This results in those networks making mistakes. Some of which are disastrous for the American left. And one of which is the simple fact that regular people are good at telling when political movements are led by elites. Which explains why so many working class and middle class people, wage laborers all, have been swayed by the populist right. Whose leaders, many from similar elite networks, are like “Stick with us and we’ll give you jobs and freedom, go with these commie elites and they’ll give you poverty and gulags. They don’t understand you the way we do.”
Sure the right elites are lying, but they’re not entirely wrong about the left elites. History shows that if either kind of elite gets too much power, very bad things happen. Explaining why I have an anarchist streak a mile wide and call myself a libertarian socialist. I’m not interested in the left seizing power, I’m interested in a left that draws down and distributes power in every part of society.
What’s the solution? Democratize the left, particularly the socialist left, as best we can. Left organizations of all kinds need to think as carefully about getting people from working families into genuine leadership as they tend to about, say, the racial makeup of their leadership. And they need to be more vigilant about preventing people with money and connections from affecting their strategy, tactics, and decision-making systems. Something I’ve noticed coming up in internal DSA debates when they become external on social media.
We do that thoroughly enough and I may live to see the day when elite left publications like Jacobin run more headlines like “Working people are welcome in socialist leadership.”
Which will be a fine day indeed.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. If you want to see more reporting like this, sign up for BINJ’s free weekly newsletter at binj.news/signup.
