[Credit: Hannah Wiley / Los Angeles Times]
Editorial Note: This piece is written by individual Marxist Unity members and may not reflect the views of the caucus as a whole.
Ahead of the upcoming NYC-DSA convention, the Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) has released its slate of proposals for the delegation’s consideration. I’d like to focus on one of the proposals they are submitting titled “NYC-DSA Stands Against Fascism” since it encapsulates some essential features of their political approach and theory of political change.
The bulk of the resolution is pretty standard fare, and, frankly, wouldn’t be out of place in a typical liberal discussion of the 2024 presidential election: the danger of Donald Trump and a Republican “trifecta” of controlling the House, Senate, and Supreme Court looms large in the preamble. The proposal also acknowledges that the Democratic Party risks losing the election to Trump and the Republicans because of their unrelenting support for Israel and their ongoing genocide against the Palestinians, which has now expanded to the slaughter of the people of Lebanon. It goes on to say that, compared to a Democratic Party victory, the election of Trump and the “fascist” Republicans would represent the bigger blow to the international working class, in the form of increased repression of the Left domestically and a hostile NLRB, and internationally by the Republicans by escalating Israel’s genocidal drive towards regional war.
Having acknowledged those dangers, the authors and supporters of the document offer a set of practical proposals, all but one of which represent either tasks that NYC-DSA is already pursuing or positions that we have already taken: e.g., reaffirming our total opposition to Donald Trump and declaring our intention to phonebank for down-ballot DSA races. So then what exactly is the purpose of a document that simply repeats what we are already doing and saying? The answer lies with the last practical proposal that the document suggests: NYC-DSA should encourage tactical voting to block Trump and other “fascists” from winning elections in swing states.
As a political document, this proposal has a confused character. It begins by chastising Democrats, saying their support for Israel’s genocide is going to cost them the election to the Republicans, and finishes by proposing that we use our resources to urge people to vote for those same genocide-supporting Democrats. And this is not the only argument made that is unconvincing as political analysis and even discredited by a superficial engagement with reality.
For instance, the document states that
a second Trump victory would be catastrophic for the international working class by risking escalated US support for the genocide in Palestine to make good on Trump’s call to ‘finish the job,’ an even more aggressive economic and military posture towards China and Cuba, a breakdown of relations with mass working class parties in Latin America, renewed support for the global far-right, and more.
This might have been plausible eight months ago, when the idea that the Biden administration was working “tirelessly for a ceasefire” was relatively new. But it becomes delusional when we consider that after more than a year of slaughter, there have been no concrete steps taken toward a ceasefire (merely lip service), and Kamala Harris has repeatedly expressed that her policy on Israel would be identical to Biden’s. It is hard to imagine what an “escalation” to the genocide would look like when Israel has almost entirely flattened Gaza, has expanded its terror campaign to the West Bank, and is preparing to invade Lebanon, all under the same Biden administration that was working “tirelessly for a ceasefire,” all while cash, arms, and munitions continue to flow to Israel unabated. The truth is that both Biden/Harris’ and Trump’s administrations will back Israel to the end.
The point about Trump backing a more aggressive economic and military posture is hard to believe when we consider that both capitalist parties share the same set of foreign policy objectives: the maintenance of American imperialist hegemony. Harris recently declared that her goal would be to make sure the United States military would be the most “lethal fighting force” on the planet, and it’s not very difficult to imagine what this proposed lethality would be used to accomplish. Moreso, Harris has publicly declared her intention to include Republicans in her council of advisors for policy decisions in a gesture of “bipartisanship” by a campaign that has made a big show of including Republican war criminals such as Dick Cheney and George Bush in their list of supporters. It would seem that the danger of fascist threat is coming from inside the house: or in this case, from inside the state apparatus. So it’s simply hard to believe that we can avert the danger of the so-called fascist takeover by advocating for a tactical vote with the same political forces allying with parts of the Republican Party that are supposed to be enabling the “fascists.”
The truth is that socialists have much more to lose than we have to gain by tying our project with the task of trying to save the Democratic Party from the consequences of their own actions. We risk discrediting ourselves with the growing mass of people who have rejected support for an ongoing genocide, and we risk smothering an emergent oppositional class consciousness in its crib. To address these masses and foster that culture of political opposition, DSA ought to build on the de facto mass abstentionism that will be taking place in the 2024 presidential elections by offering the working class point of view: No Votes for Genocide. However, the moment in which DSA might have been able to present that as a national political campaign has passed, and, unfortunately, our inaction will only serve to increase confusion about what this election means.
The choice between the lesser and greater evil is an objective dynamic of the capitalist two-party system. Comrades less inclined to historical amnesia may recall that we faced the same choice in 2020 between Biden and Trump. Even then some comrades urged support for the lesser evil who is currently writing Israel blank checks, with little to show for our movement. We faced it in 2016 between Clinton and Trump, but even going back to further living memory we faced it in 2000 and 2004 against the architects of the Afghan and Iraq Wars. Every single step we pave for the lesser evil builds a road to our own impotence. We cannot hope to influence anything in the world by perpetuating sub-popular front delusions about an imagined coalition with genocidaires and foreign policy ghouls. We will face the same choice in 2028 and every four years after like clockwork until the doomsday clock rings midnight, unless we begin the hard work of building an oppositional political force that can serve as an alternative.
DSA has a program that we can use to connect with the mass of people’s growing frustration with America’s two-party Tweedledee-Tweedledum dynamic. If we declare that “workers deserve more” we should behave emphatically like that is the case. That means putting our politics forward, clearly and in opposition to the political duopoly that holds the working class hostage. By advocating for a tactical vote for Harris we undermine a key plank of our program: building a working class alternative to the Democratic Party. We will not convince working people to join DSA and take a step towards that goal by talking from both sides of our mouths, advocating for an alternative to the Democrats while urging people to indefinitely support their political leadership. We will convince them by demonstrating in practice how we are different from capitalist politicians.
To that end, I urge delegates to the NYC-DSA convention to accept the amendment to “NYC-DSA Stands Against Fascism” that strikes the language about tactical voting. Without the tactical voting clause, the proposal is still entirely redundant as a political document. DSA’s program does a much better job of communicating our general position. Time at the convention would be much better spent debating proposals that would consider practical tasks of intervening in the current political moment, for instance, Eric Adams and the corruption scandal that will likely lead to its collapse. NYC-DSA should consider intervening in the conjuncture by discussing a campaign to Stop Cop City in Queens which is widely seen as a symbol of the nexus between the despised NYPD, the brazenly corrupt Adams administration, and the capitalist interests that they serve.
I also urge delegates to consider voting for the Bread & Roses amendment to “A Mass Action Electoral Strategy for NYC-DSA,” which further clarifies that DSA uses electoral campaigns to build more space for independent politics. It adds language to limit our coalition with progressive Democratic Party forces and prevent our liquidation into them, and correctly identifies the goal of building our own organizational infrastructure.
As the world and this city lurches between successive social crises, what the working class desperately needs is political leadership. Remaining timid and afraid of our own shadow will result in us shirking responsibility in the face of the class. The SMC comrades correctly stated that socialism beats fascism, but without asking “how?” they risk reproducing the same duopoly that keeps workers paralyzed and incapable of realizing their own power. Socialism beats fascism, but only by workers standing on their own two feet, and coming together, like fingers in a hand, forming a fist to smash it.