We are political beings, not for lack of trying to be otherwise.

There was a tenant meeting in Flatbush that I attended years ago. Afterward, as I stood outside with Pauline, an older Caribbean tenant unionist waiting for her Access-a-Ride, a DSA friend called my phone. I picked up— “What’s up, comrade?” I forget any of the details of that conversation, but I do remember clearly that after I hung up, Pauline looked at me with a big smile and said: “I used to hear everyone call each other comrade back in Trinidad. I haven’t heard it in so long.”

Last week, Communist Caucus (CC)’s Zach W. published “The Economic is Political.” In it, he lays out the caucus’ preference for “coercive class organization,” which they argue is more essential than political forms of struggle for “recomposing” the working class. Our comrades in Communist Caucus deride Marxist Unity Group for a fixation on “correct ideas” and high politics, and for focusing on the anachronism of a political party united around a socialist program in contrast to their own correct idea of economic class struggle. But to imagine our daily class struggle as separate from politics is to silo it off, and impose a particular parochialism onto workers that they never asked for.

We believe that the struggle for socialism and the day-to-day struggle for working class freedom and dignity are mutually reinforcing; they require one another. This is the “merger formula” which informs all of MUG’s political activity. That is, we must bring the grand struggle for socialism and democracy into each of our daily economic struggles, and bring the facts and weight, the roots and realities of immediate class struggles as they exist into our broad political horizon. This is how we combine the social democratic movement for the abolition of wage labor and democratic self-government with the most basic struggles of the working class to defend and advance its interests.

Our program worship, the Communist Caucus comrades argue, leads us to ignore the urgent work of proletarian organization and recomposition, and instead focus on internecine political debates in DSA. The truth of the matter is, rather, that the program is an irreplaceable tool for the recomposition of our class. We don’t overlook or spurn “coercive economic organization;” we merely recognize that these class struggle organizations, at root and at scale, must be brought into the all-sided struggle for human emancipation that is socialism.

What follows is first an elaboration of one example of the merger formula in motion within the New York City tenant movement, the organization of a Citywide Tenant Assembly. This brief anecdote is meant to respond to the criticism that “partyism” somehow entails leaving behind class struggle. Moreover, it demonstrates that the opposite is true–that we need an “organization of organizers,” with clear programmatic unity and direction, to recompose the working class and struggle towards class unity.

I then engage directly with Comrade Zach’s article. The main theses of my critique are 1) that thinking and doing are part of the same process; 2) that proletarians are political beings with political initiatives and ideas; 3) that the various terrains of struggle (the state, production, reproduction, culture) are part of the same interpenetrating and mutually-conditioning struggle; and finally 4) that our concept of socialism, from which our practical activity flows, is the development of all-sided working-class self-governance, or rank-and-file democratic participation and control in and over every sphere of political and economic life.

A Union of Unions

In May 2025, a few members of Marxist Unity Group helped organize New York City’s first Citywide Tenant Assembly. Participation in the assembly stretched across geographies and languages, independent tenant unions and housing nonprofits. Our efforts were informed by the idea of “rank-and-file tenant unionism,” a term derived from Kim Moody’s prescriptions for socialists in the labor movement. We wanted to work out a theory that corresponded to what was developing in front of our eyes: a space for rank-and-file tenants to cultivate the stuff of mass democratic organization, from the building block to the citywide level.

We organized another assembly in December 2025, growing both in size and number of organizations present. A third is planned for October. This work is consciously prefigurative. It is an ongoing attempt to build out the structure and relationships necessary for a citywide tenant union. A tenant union that is (to use the comrade Zach W.’s terms) independent, durable, and engaged in class struggle. It must also be consciously democratic, characterized by the ability to take majority action while preserving the initiative and local prerogative of tenant associations and unions on the ground. Lenin called this “proletarian centralism.”

The Citywide Tenant Assembly (CTA) is developing into a Union of Unions: a means to articulate a higher form of politics that emerges from the activity of militant tenants across the city fighting alongside their neighbors against the deprivations of landlordism. This entails cross-pollinating tactics and coordinating citywide campaigns. The CTA is a container for the deep well of knowledge that tenants necessarily accumulate through the process of crisis, but all too often drains into the ether without an organization that can preserve institutional memory. It is also a means for consolidating and protecting the gains won through our independent organizing. When we win big, like the Union of Pinnacle Tenants (UPT) did when they won a historic rent abatement, it is inevitably followed by attempts to co-opt and sanitize. It is up to us to keep those wins whole and in the hands of the class.

The CTA was recently granted up to $5,000 by the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys (ALAA), UAW 2325, to cover language interpretation at our October assembly. This money is not conditioned on political adherence or subordination to any external body, but a genuine expression of solidarity between independent class organizations. It should be remarked that ALAA, over the last three years, has been one of the most militant labor locals in the city. The idea for the resolution was first cooked up in a conversation between two friends–one on the CTA Coordinating Committee and one on ALAA’s Joint Council–who met years ago as members of the Crown Heights Tenant Union. As our organization grows, the opportunity for more exciting instances of cross-pollination will grow with it.

The first assembly was organized through NYC-DSA’s Tenant Organizing Working Group (TOWG), and originally conceived in response to the first inklings of Zohran’s mayoral run. Our early conversations with his proto-campaign team about his “housing platform” compelled us to think backward towards a form of organization that could produce a platform that represented the needs and wants of the tenant movement in the first place. Though participants at the first assembly voted to proceed as an independent formation, of the current Coordinating Committee (CC)’s ten members: two are on the TOWG organizing committee, four are in MUG, and six total are in NYC-DSA. That is to say, the assembly would not have been possible save for our party work, and the network of cadre developed in and around DSA.

These tenant assemblies are by no means a product of MUG alone and rely on a deep network of grassroots institutions built up by many people over many years. But the reason that we held a plurality on the planning committee and were willing to dedicate many sleepless nights to bringing the assembly about, is this: Even when one intuitively understands the limits of partial struggles in one building, one union, or one community, there are deep obstacles to building broader, more general forms of organization. To overcome these obstacles requires an organizational impulse that more often than not follows from deep ideological commitment. It is this ideological commitment to a single unified working-class struggle for power that led MUG comrades to take this approach to economic organization.

A Critique of Economism

In his article, Zach W. writes:

“In a time of profound proletarian disorganization… the most effective forms of political practice do not begin from a formal organization debating and arriving at the correct ideas. Instead, they begin from the day-to-day struggles of workers and tenants.

I want to focus on the distinction drawn by the comrade between day-to-day struggles and political organization. On one hand, we have actual, “real” class struggle, where proletarians take noble stands against our class enemies: bosses, landlords, and the like. On the other, ideologically self-selecting activists, gathered in a room quarantined off from the class struggle on shop floors and in apartment building lobbies, deliberate endlessly about ideas and slogans. These party activists tend to–this line of argument goes–prefer electoral, legislative, and ideological forms of struggle. This is perhaps due to these activists’ innate dislocation from the real proletariat. Given such options, a preference for the former is obvious. Fortunately, however, this distinction is a false one.

By presenting quotidian economic struggle and political struggle as distinct, the author artificially forecloses the possibility for the two to relate to one another, much less merge into a single force. In this just-so story, these activists (surely not working class themselves) cannot possibly seed or support independent working-class organization through their party work. Nor can the economically-minded, rooted-in-place proletarians, engaged in their home-field class struggles, ever have interest in joining a powerful independent socialist movement that is transforming the conditions under which the class struggle bears out.

Zach W. puts forward yet another glaring contrast. “[T]he primary emphasis,” he writes, “must be on the composition of the class rather than the consciousness of the class. At this moment, we must be more concerned with what actions our class can take than we are with what our class thinks.” Again, leaving aside my qualms with an argument for an idea that denigrates the notion of thinking, the author presents the set of options as if they are constitutionally opposed to one another. Comrades, he asks: should we think or should we do? Should the working class think or should it do? Again, the answer is prescribed by the options. The notion that the thinking and doing might be interwoven or at least connected is left unexamined.

Party Gospel or Programmatic Politics?

The worker’s movement must be actively merged with the socialist movement in order for either to reach their historical potential. See how Lenin writes in *What is To Be Done?–*his seminal text on the merger formula–on whether socialist partisans should bring the full complexity of their political program into the arena of economic struggle. The workers “are not children whom you can feed with the thin soup of ‘economist’ politics by itself; we want to know everything that everyone else knows, we want to become acquainted in detail with all sides of political life and actively participate in each and every political event.”

The simplest way of articulating the MUG thesis, in response to the critique from Communist Caucus, is this: We believe in full-bodied honesty in all of our socialist activity. Not through proselytizing, though this too in choice moments, but through the richness of the interpersonal relationships, the trust, camaraderie, and love that constitute the real thing of class-struggle organization. Because the thinking and the doing of class struggle are in fact intertwined, we are very clear that the ideas we bring to that struggle are rooted in a long historical tradition of socialism.

As history bears down upon us, the Communist Caucus comrades urge socialist organizers to leave the politics at home (or in group chats or caucus publications, maybe twitter too) when they enter the hidden abode of class struggle. But just as they urge us to do this, they preclude the possibility of setting a common democratically-decided direction within the party, around their ideas or anyone else’s. To do so requires far too much engagement with the irrelevant distraction of DSA business. Instead, get on with it and go organize. Any question of strategy and tactics, of where or how, is left for the individual organizer to figure out on their own.

The program is a particular sticking point for Zach W, which in his estimation compels a misplaced focus on “correct ideas” and “party gospel” over building genuine proletarian organization. This critique, aimed squarely at MUG, imagines that we, in MUG but also DSA members writ large, think the program is literally correct. But in my appraisal, the newest edition of our Workers Deserve More program is good but certainly not great. Many aspects of it fall far short. The housing section does what we tenant unionists hate: it centers housing rather than tenants. The section about the police is also lacking. I could go on.

But that’s the thing. The program isn’t about indexing infallible ideas, though I have faith subsequent programs will develop qualitatively. The program isn’t something we fully agree with; it is something we accept as the basis for common action. It is a means of cohering a collective political project and class unity of action in a fractured neoliberal world.

The program is not about ideas but about activity; an active experiment in mass democracy. We do not proclaim to have the absolute answers to every question that we can use to proselytize converts. Instead, we prefer the framing that we, as socialists, have a shared program of action; let’s talk about it. This is who we are, and this is what we aim for. If you disagree with it, like I do in part, join anyway and let’s figure out how we can change it and make it better.

In his polemic against the program, Zach W. concludes, in bold, that: “we must undertake organizing projects that unify and compose the class through action, bringing people together across socioeconomic differences: race, job title, gender, [and] nationality.” The party and its program constitute just such an organizing project, the attempt to cohere the working class into a united political actor. We cannot leave the herculean work of class unity to chance, we build it piece by piece through our collective, reflective, action.

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