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Ok, hot take time:
I do think there is this misleading tendency to correlate "independent ballot line = independent worker's party" and the typical comparisons to the Greens being irrelevant are correct.
HOWEVER
I do think there is this misleading tendency to correlate "independent ballot line = independent worker's party" and the typical comparisons to the Greens being irrelevant are correct.
HOWEVER
I don't think a lot of the other alternatives of how DSA relates to the Democratic Party, whether those alternatives are entryism or the notion of a dirty break from the Democrats "eventually" are really thought out strategies, let alone viable ones.
Like, let's ignore the question of whether these methods would work for a second. *How are we supposed to get to point A to point B?* How is DSA supposed to take over the Dems or split from them? What are the steps and timetable to get there?
Obviously this is partially an organizational question, but I think far more fundamentally it's a question of *vision* - What does DSA want to be? What is it fighting for? How does it want to get there? Organizational and other issues are all rooted in that lack of a blueprint.
And I don't think any of the various caucuses or mags or whatever have a simple solution to this problem. There isn't one, and I'm not here to present one, nor am I even qualified to: I'm not a DSA member. I don't know what it's like on the ground. I'm just a fellow traveler.
Nor am I willing to offhandedly dismiss the DSA as a vehicle for working class emancipation like so many supposed "Marxists" on here are so quick to do without a second thought.
But I can't help but feel that DSA is in a very delicate intermediate stage here, a sort of limbo that it has to acknowledge and confront. There is potential for it to become a class-independent party - or a bourgeois reformist party - or die as a overgrown pressure group.
And I'm not saying the issues of like, how important are elections? How big is the tent? What do we do about racism and misogyny? Aren't important. But DSA can't start to effectively tackle these issues until it knows what it wants to be.
In the interest of full discretion, I obviously want DSA to be a class-independent party. I am not saying it needs to break from the Democrats *right now,* or within X number of years.
But if DSA wants to be more than the pressure group it was born as and still effectively *is* - even if it is destined to be ripped apart by it's contradictions a few years down the road (and I don't necessarily think it is), it has to *try* to have these conversations.
DSA is important because it is new, it is alive. It isn't just a zombie from the past like the CPUSA, or the IWW, or god knows how many Trot and ex-Trot splits. It has potential, potential that hasn't been realized in decades!
But if that potential is to become actualized, than we need to have these conversations first and foremost before we start attempting to transform the org according to that vision accordingly.
I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself, so I'm just gonna end the thread here
I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself, so I'm just gonna end the thread here
