Too often, DSA is dismissed as a purely social democratic organization, and outsiders discount the communist organizing within it. As a Marxist-Leninist DSA caucus, we reject this narrative. DSA is our political home! We in Red Star are communists who believe that DSA is the most effective place to ...
While I think the members of Red Star mean well and their faction generally has good positions, I've gotta push back on the idea that they've significantly pushed DSA's international work broadly or their anti-zionist work specifically in a better direction. The recent gutting of the anti-zionist resolution by the NPC and the retraction of the statements on the Venezuelan election and the Israeli assassination in Iran show that at the highest level DSA is firmly in control of chauvinist social democrats on these issues (I had to scoff when I heard of the "left" NPC getting elected last year, as if Bread and Roses are left lol)
Furthermore, DSA's position on the presidential election has always been firmly invested in working within the Democratic party as seen by their focus on the "uncommitted" movement and their recent statement about Harris picking Walz as her VP. They still hide in their dirty break/party surrogate position which functionally ends up the same as the CP's line.
There are a lot of good people in DSA and I learned a lot when I was a member but the organization is fundamentally repelled by any sort of discipline and the social fascists on it's right wing maintain their power through that disorder and have demonstated that they do not care if their opportunism harms the organization or anyone else for that matter. Changing it into something viable would take an immense amount of work that would be sabotaged by SMC/Groundwork/B&R every step of the way, or you could just join an actual Leninist org.
It's interesting how you only draw comparisons with CPUSA. You claim that it has "the most potential to be the groundwork for a future party." I would contend, however, that the is a current party that people can organize with today.
You're Marxist Leninists, yet you do not organize under the principles of democratic centralism. Why not? Do you intend to somehow transform the DSA into a democratic centralist organization? Do you really believe that the liberals, social democrats, and democratic socialists that comprise most of the DSA would just go along with that? You can't expect to just take the existing membership of the DSA and magically convert them into a committed Marxist Leninist cadre.
As it stands, the DSA are not principled anti-imperialists, as evidenced by their failure to take a principled stance in support of Palestinian resistance in the wake of Al-Aqsa Flood, or their anti-communist stances on Cuba and AES. This isn't a "past" issue, it's ongoing. How do you address that? Why is it the "correct" strategy to attempt entryism into the DSA instead of joining a real, existing Marxist Leninist party?
Wasn't that one of Stalin's rare L's though? Social democrats can move in either direction, some of them shot rosa, some of them fought nazis and joined in the post ww2 socialist coalition governments and were integrated with the communists. (Czechoslovakia comes to mind) How many hexbears started out as social democrats during Bernie 2016?
You're looking at it as though it's Calvinism. Stalin's statement is about where the ideology of social democracy fits into the framework of class struggle, not about how everyone who at any point identifies as socdem has the soul of a fascist and has never and will never do anything worthwhile. The point of his statement is that the purpose social democracy serves is the maintenance of capitalism and therefore that people working towards social-democratic ends are working on maintaining capitalism (which is also the job of fascism and fascists, though they accomplish it differently and under different circumstances).
That individual socdems radicalized or fought in self-defense or whatever has no bearing on the statement. What matters for it is that the socdem organization of the SPD, on the eve of revolution, chose to protect capitalism (even though many of its own members objected), demonstrating how even those smol bean well-meaning SPD members who just didn't appreciate Rosa's message until her corpse was dumped in the river nonetheless had been working towards the benefit and promotion of just the organization responsible for it.
Stalin joining the allies also has no bearing on this. It fails to comprehend the difference between ideological conflict and political conflict. What Stalin was drawing were the lines of ideological conflict, which is vindicated a thousand times over by the US, Britain, etc. materially supporting Nazi Germany up until the latter's expansionism put it and the various liberal states into political conflict. Because of this political conflict, it made sense to ally in the war with these liberal states, but that by no means made them somehow fellow-travelers, as demonstrated by how the US didn't even wait until the end of the war to start making barbaric plays in the interest of checking the power of the Soviet Union.
There's a huge difference between personal politics and organizational politics. There's massive inertia and the fact that it's by definition a democratic socialist organization.
There's value in joining if there's no other org you can be a part of, or maybe to poach people, but you'll never drive them significantly left.
And if you are still a social democrat after the 2020 election cycle, you either weren't paying attention, and shouldn't be trusted, or you are hopelessly naive, and shouldn't be trusted.
Stalin himself would go on to ally with governments to the right of social democracies in order to fight actual fascists. It's absolutely an L that he lumped them all in together as basically the same. It's also absurd to be so dogmatic about a comment made 100 years ago in a wildly different political and material context.
How many hexbears started out as social democrats during Bernie 2016?
At the end of the day, these are people who've taken a concrete step left of the Democratic Party. We should be convincing them to take more steps, not calling them fascists.
Nope, although some caucuses have published stuff like this: https://redstarcaucus.org/cuban-links/ and the international committee is establishing guidelines for future trips to prevent the same nonsense from happening. We should apologize but Cuba also understands that DSA is a big tent org with some shitty folks in it.
Y'all dismissing the DSA better be in a different org, otherwise it's just internet posturing. Having a radical caucus within a moderate org is a much better place to be than no organization at all. It's also a good first step towards finding like minds and branching off.
If you have a PSL or whatever in your area then great, otherwise join the DSA and meet people. The perfect communist party isn't gonna just pop into existence.
Okay, so I read the article. But I have to say I've really enjoyed the back-and-forth between you and others supporting the PSL. Besides being fun , it is genuinely enlightening so I want to thank you for participating in the discussion.
I have to admit I also have an anti-DSA bias because of bad experiences with DSA I've had myself, but I also know good people that were heavily involved in DSA and eventually got burned. So I appreciate the work of trying to push it further to the Left and to accept a more Communist guideline. I can especially appreciate since sometimes it's the only Leftist game in town for some areas, so it isn't totally meaningless to push, in my opinion. And I don't really know as much about PSL but I do have a tendency to think that if Communists can that they should join a Marxist-Leninist Party.
Whether that should necessarily be PSL or another Party, I don't know. And your critique about the Central Committee choosing 40% of the delegates is a good one, I can also see how a desire to maintain the direction and ideology of a relatively new Communist organization requires some suspension of democracy. But undoing the liberal concept of "democracy" is something I've mentioned recently before is something I've been working on myself, I think sometimes a Communist Party doesn't need to be fully democratic if it's defending or implementing proper Communist ideology. On the other hand, I also don't know if I would personally want to join some Party where my position and contribution is less important and meaningful in the face of bureaucratism. Maybe that's my own ego I also need to work on, and I wouldn't want to be Party Leader or anything, but I do see value in seeing and feeling your work going into something that wasn't already decided for you.
Anyway, interesting post so thanks for posting and discussing!
I think democracy is important for non-ego reasons- scientific socialism works better within an internal democracy, democratic consultation and deliberation create institutional knowledge in a way bureaucracies don't.
I don't see any reasonable benefit to PSL not being democratic at this stage of the struggle- if they don't have the educational capacity to onboard new members they should create probation membership status (less ideal but those membership dues though) or stagger cohorts.
You're not wrong. I do think provisional membership or something would be better than just allowing as many people in as possible and not letting it actually be democratic, but I also think there may be conditions where what PSL is doing would be right.
Doing things besides canvassing for democrats? Lots of chapters aren't interested in being a dog for the democratic party, and the national vibes are growing more skeptical as evidence mounts against the viability of change through democrats.