What the ‘right wing’ of DSA and the broader socialist movement gets more or less right is that we have to forge connections with the working class as it presently exists; what the left wing gets right is that the working class is more heterogeneous than one might suspect.

The right mistakenly presumes that existing institutions of the working class are adequate, that ‘working class culture’ is something distinct and fixed, rather than fragmented, episodic and composite, while working class institutions have become integrated with existing power.

The left recognizes that working class culture is precisely as episodic and fragmented as it is and that it’s been heavily integrated into the existing order to the exclusion of marginalized people, but underestimates the actual difficulty of building entirely new institutions.

In the friction between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’—between the infinite demand for actual transformation, and those who call for moderation that conforms to the existing order of things, a tremendous vacuum has opened up, where mistrust and frustration dominate everything.

We can’t build a bloc based on intellectuals alone, removed from the actual class structure of society; we have to work towards trust—among people who have every reason to be suspicious—by listening and working with the actual materials of common sense and popular ideology.

That doesn’t have to mean conforming to it though—it’s a process of transformation, not conformity or outright negation. People by and large can be won over—there is an intuitive rationality to genuinely left wing positions, which is short circuited by popular ideologies.

We actually don’t have to push very hard—we just have to push in the right way, at the right points; there is an archimedean point, the work is to find it, or create it, out of the relations of forces that actually exist.

We need to create a ‘true idea’ of the actual forces at play and what motivates them; we need to forge unity through struggle by understanding what holds this unstable and inchoate multiplicity together across real differences and real contradictions.

Faith and friendship are hard to win—how many people do you genuinely trust to have the best for you in mind? Even in the midst of conflict? Friendship, ‘fraternité’, trust, deep and permanent trust—such things are not freely given and require proof to take hold.

The number of people I genuinely trust I can probably count on one hand, and I’m pretty free in lending my confidence to others. If you think of your own experiences, you’d probably say the same—this is the real hurdle that we have to leap, because liars and traitors abound.

We have to seriously ask ourselves what can be forged in actual freedom, how far are we willing to be a true friend of all humankind, what stops us, and what does such friendship require of us?