That wasn't the message that I go from this. The author's prose is a little dense ,and hard to follow, but seems to be making some of the same points I have about the DSA.
*The DSA needs to decide whether it is to be a revolutionary organization or a reformist one. They cannot be both. The movement behind Bernie Sanders may have brought a dramatic inrease in membership to the DSA ,but I believe many of these new members joined as a result of Sanders' flawed definition of socialism. Sanders' definition of :"democratic socialism" is a nebulous one, and is more like Social Democracy, something Marxists have been warning us against at least as long ago as Lenin. Part of the problem may be the DSA has too liberal ,for lack of a better word, of a recruiting process. I don't know too much about it, but do they have anything like the lengthy candidacy process of the PSL ,that involves months of study, with classes, and readings, about Marxist-Leninist theory, and history, before a candidate becomes a full member? Do they have the biweekly study groups that the PSL does? If the DSA ever does decide to become a dedicated Marxist organization, based on class conciousness ,and the abolition of capitalism and imperialism, the organization may have to prune itself of much of its membership ,and the revenue said members provide. *Black Lives Matter ,as a whole, has yet to learn ,or become organized around, an important lesson of the 1960s. That being ,systemic racism is only a part of the even more systemic problem of capitalism. Capitalism being the root cause of imperialism, slavery ,etc that led to 150 years of racism ,post-slavery. Black capitalists are basically Uncle Toms ,and sellouts. The Panthers, Malcom X, MLK, WEB De Bois, Marcus Garvey, and any other black leader you care to name from the last century knew this. As the article states,with race relations ,as with any other societal problem ,you cannot be both radical and reformist. If BLM is to accomplish any real goals it must ,like the DSA, reject all elements of reformism. I would go the author of this article one better. If anybody from the bougeois classes is truly devoted to a movement with revolutionary changes ,they ought to be willing to make great financial sacrifices ,including handing over large chunks of their assets to finance said movement. Remember Engels and Fidel Castro both came from fairly well to do families. The left in a America has another problem ,one that did not seem to exist for much of the 20th Century. We are too fractured ,and too sectarian. I wish I knew how we got into such a mess ,and what we could do to undo it. I've seen some theories that suggest that it began in the mid-1970s ,with a combination of both COINTELPRO ,and the disbanding of the antiwar movement. A goodly chunk of former revolutionaries from the 1960s sold out and became capitalists. Who knows what we could accomplish if the left coalesed into one large movement ,one too big for the state to break up. This fragmentation may be at the root of another problem this article alludes to, that we have yet to come up with a working model of what socialism in america would look like in the 21st Century. This is why many look backwards, to Lenin, Mao, Castro, or whomever. I may be breaking with the author here ,but I do believe such a model should incorporate practices that worked for others in the past ,one thing that the PSL believes in.If you read the writings of those who came after Lenin ,they did not advocate a complete rejection of Marx and Lenin, and starting over completely from scratch. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3510): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3510 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78228466/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
