DSA Adrift? Did we reach a conclusion in the debate? A short sighted analysis.
This Post was originally published to my Substack, all my Stories go there first. Its the best place to keep up with me. I publish here for the people who don’t want to switch platforms.
Who, What, When, Where and Why?
What am I talking about? If you don’t know that’s ok. If you do not know who the DSA is that is ok too. For those of you who know this go ahead and skip ahead to the next section. For everyone else stick around and I will lay out the platform for you.
The Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, is the largest Socialist Organization in America. The likes of “The Squad” and other American Left Progressives and Socialists. A lot of times this means Social Democrats as well. They operate at the local level and are capable of amazing things but a lot in the party think they have gone adrift and lost their way. Most believe they are becoming just a pressure party for the democrats.
Well the DSA has Caucuses and a few of them got together to discuss the DSA and it’s relation to electoral politics and the Democratic Party.
This is the big debate within DSA and the Caucus I am apart of, (or am in the process of joining, so I do not represent them and these opinions are my own) “Reform & Revolution” and most of those present represented the side who wants a dirty break but the question is how, and to some still, if we should break, what that looks like.
The Debate
So the debate happened. How was it for you? For me it was pretty awesome. Not only was ot **much** more lively than I thought it would be, the conversation was a much more principled conversation than I was expecting. To be honest, it gave me hope.
There are good people in this organization. Their talents and ideas are wasted and floundered by a more capitalist friendly leadership.
I think the way forward is clear. We need a dirty break and stop spending time and money on national elections, just to be ignored and ghosted after, and focus on small local elections (with a purpose to increase our presence and platform, not to win necessarily), grassroots organizing, community relief projects, Labor Organizing, and mass class agitation, Class solidarity and morass movement.
In short, we need to improve the material conditions of the working class and show them the class struggle taking place as we do. Show them out compassion and platform has merit and can help people when used correctly.
This cannot be achieved without grassroots and local efforts to relieve the working class of their hardships the best we can. This includes, as much as we may not like it at times, the right wing working class.
With my time during the debate I spent about half of it discussing the need to reach across to the working class right in our country and find a pipeline to agitate their class Consciousness more and to get them to see the struggle is to be won from a socialist platform and not a far right fascist one.
So where do we go from here?
I think the first thing we do is form a new organization that is a mass coalition of Marxist, Socialist and AntiCapitalist organizations and parties. We get party members and even individual members to join so that everyone can operate within their own organizations with independence but have a coalition to unite for mass struggle and movements.
We should have a set of principles that must be met for any organization to gain entry and we try and get them all. Even the ones we may not agree with. As long as they are not capitalists, fascists, racists, etc then we should join in arms. The terms need to be decide democratically.
During the discussion around a dozen of us decided to do just that. We formed (to be renamed later Democratically) The United Federation of Marxists and Leftists. For now it exists in a discord only but I am working on a website and a few other things for organizing. We have a sister Subreddit r/SocialismAndCommunism and you can find a ton of resources there. It’s also to be ran democratically as well as our knowledge resource on GitHub.
I sincerely hope you will join us. I promise I will have a much deeper and a much better material analysis of the debate and the questions being asked soon. Probably an accompanying video as well.
Please look forward to that. Check me out in twitter @DrEagleTalon and I am on Mastodon DrEagleTalon@Mastodon.Social and basically every single platform with the same handle. Reach out and ask questions. I am always open to debate and discussion and am here to help always.
