On Sat, Nov 22, 2025 at 02:22 PM, Charles wrote: > > The spirit of Edouard Bernstein is alive and well in DSA. > >
Hardly a revelation. No one on this list believes the DSA to be a revolutionary Marxist organization. Mamdani keeps harkening back to FDR's New Deal and NYC Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia as his models. The organization seeks to elect progressive Democrats to reform rather than overthrow capitalism. Within the DSA, there are avowedly revolutionary Marxist tendencies who see participation within the DP as a tactic, much as various marginalized Trotskyist groups have sporadically practiced "entryism" in union-based left-centre parties since their banishment from the Comintern a century ago. The Canadian LSA used to justify its activity in the reformist NDP by characterizing it as being both "in the way and on the way" to winning the working class to revolutionary socialism. Simillarly, the fault line on this list and more generally on the US Marxist left is not over whether the DSA is more in the tradition of Bernstein than Lenin but over what is the appropriate political strategy at the present moment - the DSA's efforts to recruit from within and around the Democratic Party or to instead call directly upon the DP rank-and-file to leave the party in favour of the Greens or even Charles' fanciful "communist ranks". These are all faint reflections of the political debate which broke out in the fledgling British CP in a political climate much more favourable than our own, when a powerful workers' and socialist movement was on the rise and European capitalism was tottering in the wake of the Russian Revolution. As has been pointed out many times previously on the list, despite that much more promising conjuncture, Lenin famously sided with those who believed the relatively weak CPGB had first to gather its forces in and around the Labour Party before it could hope to replace it as the party of the British proletariat. Today we can no longer even point to a small mass Communist Party in the US as an alternative to the New Deal Democrats as there was in the 1930's. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39436): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39436 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116415357/21656 -=-=- 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. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
