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Workers Vanguard No. 1139
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7 September 2018
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DSA and Ocasio-Cortez: No Kind of Socialists
Democrats, Republicans: Class Enemies of Workers and Oppressed
We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!
With her surprise victory over incumbent Joseph Crowley
in the June Democratic Congressional primary, the Bronx’s 28-year-old
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA), became an overnight media sensation. She has since been a
regular feature of late-night talk shows and the liberal press, which
view her and her cothinkers as a shot in the arm of the so-called
resistance to Trump. The aim of Ocasio-Cortez and other DSA-backed
candidates is to refurbish the Democrats’ image so as to better rope
disaffected youth and workers back into the party, which, no less than
the Republicans, represents the capitalist system of exploitation,
racial oppression and imperialist war.
Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory is the centerpiece thus far
of the various “progressive” challenges to the Democratic Party
leadership following Trump’s election. Pennsylvania DSA members Summer
Lee and Sara Innamorato won their primaries for seats in the state
assembly, while Julia Salazar is challenging a 16-year incumbent for the
New York State Senate. Also in New York, Democratic governor Andrew
Cuomo is fending off a challenge from Sex and the City star and recently self-identified “democratic socialist” Cynthia Nixon.
The bulk of the Democratic leadership has responded to
these challengers with barely concealed contempt, with House leader
Nancy Pelosi admonishing people to not get “carried away” by
Ocasio-Cortez’s victory: “They made a choice in one district.” For their
part, Trump’s friends on Fox News have labeled Ocasio-Cortez “a
communist” and “downright scary.” In a Fox News interview, Florida
Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis launched into a racist
diatribe against Andrew Gillum, the black Democratic candidate supported
by Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, warning voters not to “monkey this
up” by electing Gillum.
Ocasio-Cortez, Nixon, et al. represent disgruntled
elements in the Democratic Party who believe that victories in the
midterm and the 2020 presidential elections require more than invented
“Russiagate” scandals and the generic sales pitch of being less openly
racist, anti-union and reactionary than Trump. The label “democratic
socialist” has increasingly come to define liberal Democrats who still
rally behind the party, but don’t fancy its establishment leadership.
The DSA-allied candidates have as much to do with
socialism as biology courses at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University have
to do with evolution. It is an indication of the extreme rightward shift
in the Democratic Party and society more broadly that a group like the
DSA, which has always been committed to the Democratic Party and to
upholding imperialism, can be seen as socialist. A London Economist
(1 September) article, “Shivering the Chains,” aptly remarked: “Perhaps
the surest sign that American socialists are not revolutionaries is
their willingness to work within the two-party system.” As with Bernie
Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, the recent ascendance of these
“democratic socialists” only serves to reinforce illusions in Democratic
lesser-evilism and is an obstacle to the necessary struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party.
Making clear her allegiance to U.S. imperialism,
Ocasio-Cortez eulogized the recently deceased Republican Senator John
McCain, tweeting that his legacy represented “an unparalleled example of
human decency and American service.” While causing uproar among her
supporters, her gushing over a war criminal whose “service” included the
slaughter of numerous Vietnamese, who declared, “I hate the gooks,” and
who was fond of singing “bomb Iran” is not an aberration but consistent
with her bourgeois program. On her campaign website, Ocasio-Cortez
complains that U.S. intervention in the Near East and North Africa
“damages America’s legitimacy as a force for good.” She calls to “repair
our image”—i.e., to make U.S. imperialism more effective. Here, she is
merely echoing her mentor, Sanders, who also called McCain an “American
hero” and has a long history of supporting U.S. imperialism’s wars of
conquest (see “Bernie Sanders: Imperialist Running Dog,” WV No. 1083, 12 February 2016).
Latching on to the demands of youth and workers who crave
some relief from capitalist misery and austerity, Ocasio-Cortez calls
for Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public
colleges and trade school education and abolition of private prisons.
Her demand to “abolish ICE” amounts to resurrecting a version of its
predecessor, the INS. She was clear that “abolish ICE” does not mean
“abolish deportation.”
The reforms proposed by Ocasio-Cortez and her cothinkers
are little more than hot air. We support reforms that benefit the
working class and oppressed. But they are not won by electing
“progressive” bourgeois politicians nor are they gained by appealing to
some (imaginary) benevolent ruling class. Any significant gains—from
unionization to black and women’s rights—have been wrested through
hard-fought class and social struggle against the exploiters, their
political parties and their state. What remains of these gains today
continues to be ravaged in the bosses’ one-sided class war enabled by
the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, including DSA labor misleaders,
which has long abandoned the class-struggle means through which the
unions were built and channels labor discontent into voting for
Democrats. Facing little struggle, the bourgeoisie sees no reason to
enact a series of beneficial reforms.
Socialism: What It Is and How to Fight for It
Recent victories by DSA-supported politicians have
spawned numerous articles about what socialism is, mostly to express
relief that what Ocasio-Cortez and her cohorts represent has nothing to
do with the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks
were genuine socialists who fought for and achieved a revolutionary
transformation of society. As Karl Marx put it in his 1850 “Address of
the Central Committee to the Communist League,” the purpose of
socialists “cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish
it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to
improve the existing society but to found a new one.”
Marxism is based on the understanding that society is
fundamentally divided between classes: the working class, whose labor
produces the wealth of society, and the tiny class of capitalist
exploiters who own the means of production and finance. The reformists
promote the lie that capitalism can be made to operate in the interest
of the working and oppressed masses. The capitalists are represented by
their parties—in the U.S., that means the Democrats, the Republicans and
small-time parties like the Greens. The capitalist state and its
machinery of repression, like the police, exist to preserve bourgeois
rule.
Democracy under capitalism is a facade used by the
bourgeoisie to obscure its class dictatorship. As Bolshevik leader V. I.
Lenin wrote in 1918: “Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical
advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under
capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and
hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the
exploited, for the poor.” We do not give political support to any
capitalist politician or party; to do so would subordinate the
interests of working people and the oppressed to the class enemy.
We champion the fight for union jobs at good wages; for
quality, fully government-funded health care for all; for free, quality
education for all at all levels; for full citizenship rights for all
immigrants. Our purpose is to link such demands to building a
multiracial revolutionary workers party committed to a socialist future
through workers revolution. International working-class rule will lay
the basis for rationally planned economies based on production for need,
not profit, and for qualitative development of the productive forces,
opening the road to the elimination of scarcity and to the creation of
an egalitarian society.
Break with the Democrats!
Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist veneer is so thin as to be
see-through. As she herself explained, her views are rooted in
Democratic Party history, drawing on the policies of Franklin D.
Roosevelt (FDR) and Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ). “It’s time to own that our
party was the one of the Great Society, of the New Deal, of the Civil
Rights Act. That’s our party. That’s who we are.” This sentiment was
echoed by prominent DSA spokesman and Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara who published an article in the Guardian (1
September) titled, “What’s Your Solution to Fighting Sexism and Racism?
Mine Is: Unions.” In it, he yearns for the Democratic Party to go back
to “its promises of shared prosperity and equality” under FDR, which he
argues laid the basis for the growth of the unions.
FDR was forced to grant New Deal
concessions because of the tumultuous class battles of the early 1930s,
with key strikes led by reds (see Spartacist pamphlet Then and Now).
His aim was to put a lid on class struggle, stabilize U.S. capitalism
in the face of the Great Depression and lull workers into believing that
the government would act on their behalf. Legislation like the 1935
Wagner Act was meant to bring mass union organizing drives under the
machinery of government control. Sunkara paints FDR’s New Deal as
“anti-racism.” In fact, it was a pact between Northern liberals and the
racist Dixiecrats, who imposed lynch-mob terror on the black masses in
the South.
Likewise, LBJ’s “Great Society” reforms came as a result
of the massive struggles of the civil rights movement. With plebeian
uprisings erupting in places like Harlem and Watts, the Johnson
administration enacted legislation, such as the Civil Rights and Voting
Rights Acts, which have since been whittled away, in order to co-opt
civil rights leaders and quell the upheavals. While legal segregation
was done away with, the socioeconomic conditions for the majority of
black people today are comparable to those prior to the civil rights
movement. During the civil rights movement, Michael Harrington, an
anti-communist who would go on to found the DSA, worked overtime to keep
protest within the confines of the Democratic Party. He was a member of
the LBJ administration’s bogus “War on Poverty” task force while the
government escalated the dirty, losing war in Vietnam and crushed black
militants through FBI COINTELPRO operations.
In his Guardian article mentioned above, Sunkara
notes: “Unlike other countries, the United States didn’t have its own
labor party.” The U.S. is indeed the only advanced capitalist country
that has never had a mass workers party that represents even a deformed
expression of working-class political independence. The fundamental
reason for that is black oppression, which is the bedrock of American
capitalism. The capitalist masters have used racism to pit workers
against one another in order to divide and rule their wage slaves. At
the same time, the shell game through which the Democratic Party is
promoted as the “friend” of blacks and labor has been essential to
preserving racist American capitalism.
As for the DSA, it has more than a little responsibility
for the sorry state of the labor movement today. The DSA was involved in
one of labor’s biggest defeats during the 1981 PATCO air traffic
controllers strike. When President Reagan fired the workforce of 12,000,
we called on the unions to shut down the airports, which there was
sentiment among the workers to do. But William “Wimpy” Winpisinger, a
DSA leader and the president of the IAM machinists union, which included
airline mechanics, refused to call for solidarity labor action, selling
out the strikers.
The unions need a new leadership, one based on class
struggle not class collaboration. Such a task requires a political fight
against the labor bureaucracy and the likes of the DSA, who act as the
agents of the bosses inside the union movement. The struggle to
revitalize the unions must be integrally linked to forging a workers
party that acts as the tribune of the people. Such a party will fight to
mobilize the social power of the multiracial working class in defense
of all victims of capitalist oppression as part of the struggle for
proletarian revolution, which will lay the basis for the liberation of
black people and all the oppressed.
Beware Pro-Democratic Party Hustlers
Since its founding, the DSA has been an extension of the
Democrats’ voting machine. It has loyally supported every Democratic
Commander-in-Chief, including Bill Clinton, who escalated the racist
“war on drugs” and gutted welfare, and Barack Obama, who bailed out Wall
Street at the expense of working people, reveled in assassination by
drone and deported an unprecedented number of immigrants.
Over the past two years, the DSA has grown substantially,
now boasting more than 50,000 members. This has sparked an internal
debate on whether to “realign” (take over) the Democratic Party, exit
their host or leave things as they are. Looming behind this controversy
is the fact that the DSA’s membership growth is due to Sanders and
Ocasio-Cortez garnering attention precisely because they were running on
Democratic Party tickets.
While the DSA has long been openly riding the Democratic
bus, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Socialist
Alternative (SAlt) serve as its spare tires. Having spent months doing
donkey work for Sanders in 2016, SAlt now boasts of having “worked with
the Ocasio-Cortez campaign” (socialistalternative.org, 2 July). After
explicitly calling for a vote to Julia Salazar, SAlt incredulously
encourages “Salazar to more clearly warn her supporters that the
Democratic Party, as a whole, is a barrier to socialist change”
(socialistalternative.org, 21 August). This as they assiduously
reinforce that same “barrier.”
No less effusive, but a little more cagey, the ISO has
carried out its own debate on its website on whether to openly endorse
“progressive” Democrats (“dirty break”) or maintain a fig leaf of
“independence” (“clean break”). A piece on socialistworker.org (6
August) by one Eric Blanc enthuses that socialists “can, under certain
conditions, effectively use the Democratic Party ballot line,” which he
argues “isn’t a question of principle.”
In response, ISO honcho Alan Maass laid down the party line—sort of: “It is
a principle to not support Democratic Party candidates—or at least a
conclusion that is directly related to the principle of working class
independence” (socialistworker.org, 8 August). Given that the ISO
celebrated the Ocasio-Cortez victory as “a testament to the appeal of a
left political alternative,” Blanc and others are simply taking such
excitement to its logical conclusion. Why buy the pompoms if you can’t
join the cheerleading squad? Underlining that the “clean break” vs.
“dirty break” debate is not based on any principle, the
ISO is once again supporting the New York gubernatorial campaign of
Howie Hawkins on the capitalist Green Party ticket in a safely
Democratic blue state.
For New October Revolutions!
Militant youth and workers who want a society free of
oppression and exploitation should look to the example of the 1917
Russian Revolution led by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, which expropriated
the capitalist class and landlords and established a workers state.
Anti-communist to their core, the “democratic socialists” are motivated
by hostility to the Russian Revolution. As we elaborated in “DSA:
Democratic Party ‘Socialists’” (WV No. 1113, 2 June 2017), the
newfound popularity of groups like the DSA comes in the context of the
counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union and East European
deformed workers states, a momentous defeat for working people and the
oppressed worldwide. Pummeled by the bourgeoisie’s “death of communism”
propaganda for nearly three decades, left-leaning activists largely
perceive Marxism to have been a failed experiment.
DSA founder Michael Harrington earned his stripes leading
radicalized youth away from Marxism during his time in the Socialist
Party, which acted as loyal servants of the U.S. government during the
Cold War against the Soviet Union. Later, as the U.S. waged war to crush
Vietnam’s insurgent workers and peasants, Harrington echoed the
counterrevolutionary drive of the imperialists, stating, “I am
anti-communist on principle—because I am pro-freedom.”
The line between social democracy and communism is drawn
in blood: In January 1919, amid the struggle to extend the Russian
Revolution to Germany, revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht were assassinated by reactionary military forces at the
behest of the Social Democratic government. Today, the DSA, ISO and
other progeny of those who drowned Luxemburg’s revolutionary struggle in
blood like to cite her as an authority. But she could have been writing
about them when she noted in her 1900 work Reform or Revolution that those who push “legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different
goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society
they take a stand for surface modification of the old society.”
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