Critical support for the DSA’s Uncommitted Movement
As this paper has recently covered, the Democratic Party — one of two fascist settler-parties that govern the U.S. empire — is dismissive of inner-party democracy. They have rejected the concept that anyone other than the Genocidaire-in-Chief Biden could claim the Democratic nomination. Plans are already in place for a coronation of either the current president of the U.S. Empire or his second-in-command, Kamala Harris.
This sham of democracy is always a problem for the parties in a bourgeois republic where voting has been extended to working people. Of course, the desires of the working class are discounted by the governing class — when was the last time you can remember voting for a plumber, a construction worker, or a coffee-house barista in the general election? — but the political form of the U.S. republic requires a pretense of democracy. It’s one of the ways the U.S. government has been able to suppress capitalism’s inherent class contradictions and prevent class struggle from sharpening domestically over the last century. If you believe you have a say, you’re less likely to reject the whole sordid affair.
The zionist aggression unleashed by the heroic resistance attacks of October 7, 2023, threatens to undermine the already-feeble appearance of democracy in the U.S. Voter participation in U.S. elections has historically waxed at a mere 66% of eligible voters and more regularly tops out at 50% of the electorate. Around 15% of the electorate votes in local elections for mayors and community leaders. Compare that with the 83.6% voter participation in Cuba, a worker-lead socialist country; the working class of the U.S. empire is already skeptical of the political machine that runs things.
Enter the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Uncommitted Movement.
The DSA is a “big-tent” organization which contains both truly revolutionary and counter-revolutionary streams. DSA Marxists tend to gravitate toward one of the Marxist caucuses within the party: the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), Red Star, and the former Trotskyites of Reform & Revolution. MUG alone, to our knowledge, has forwarded a plan that would see the transformation of the DSA into a vanguard party. While the Pressworker’s Organization at USU does not agree with the potential of the DSA to emerge as the vanguard, we believe organizing within it can be useful to the working class movement and, at this stage, is necessary to reach the masses and increase class-consciousness.
The Uncommitted Movement is a required step in that process. The reformist wings of the DSA, which cause it to tail Democrats and engage in wasteful electoral politics that produce controlled-opposition office holders (Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush in the U.S. House of Representatives, alongside a welter of state officials), has made noise in opposition to the Uncommitted Movement. There are also those Marxists who express their disagreement with the movement and desire to focus DSA resources on bread-and-butter worker organizing.
What Is the Uncommitted Movement?
The movement represents the expenditure of organizing power, time, and money to cause Democratic voters to vote “uncommitted” in Democratic primaries. The mainstream reasoning behind the movement (and the reason some Democrats have signed on) is to “send a signal” to the Democratic National Committee and party leadership that Biden cannot win a general election and that his administration’s continued support and logistical management of the zionist genocide of Palestine must end.
This is futile. That’s not why the Uncommitted Movement is important.
This is the moment to disillusion the working classes with Democratic party politics. The Democratic Party has captured working-class movements and throttled class struggle by using paid labor aristocrats and bought-off union leadership for a century. As we recently published in The Democrats Have Nothing Left to Offer,
In the face of this [early 20th century] labor agitation came the Great Depression. The threat of the final and total overthrow of the capitalist order loomed large as the world capitalist economy melted down and threw twelve million people out of work. The capitalists scrambled to craft a policy reply to the crisis. It finally came in the form of European style social democracy. Thus was born the New Deal. In the words of conservative think-tank the Hoover Institute, the revolution never came because the “man in the White House co-opted the left.”
But there is no more flex in the old unholy alliance of high-level labor leaders, opportunists within the Communist Party of the USA, the working class, the petit-bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois Democratic party politicians. The Democrats literally have nothing left to offer as a bribe for the working class. The only thing either party has left is the stick.
The Uncommitted Movement is important because it will expose the Democratic party in the eyes of the working people. The DNC won’t respond — it is constitutionally incapable of taking the feedback of angry voters, as we saw with the internal coup against the very mild left-wing social imperialist Bernie Sanders in 2016. The most the DNC will do is gear up its talking heads to chastise voters, call them stupid, or childish, or short-sighted, or self-destructive. That will drive people away from bourgeois politics.
There Is a Movement, but No Party
This is a necessary precursor for breaking up the ice that has paralyzed the working class movement for so long. We have a situation currently prevailing where there is a working class movement but there is not a working class party.
While the Marxists struggle for unity to give the working class a party through which it can voice its grievances and with which it can wield the weapons of revolution, the DSA is preparing the ground for the movement itself to swell and grow ever-riper. We must disillusion the people from electoral politics. We must break the reliance of the working class movement on their captured labor-aristocrat leaders. We must think, and cause our class-siblings to think with us, about non-electoral alternatives.
Therefore, although USU and the Red Clarion are primarily engaged in the project of uniting the advanced elements of the working class and the lower ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie, we endorse the Uncommitted Movement. We urge it to spread. At this time, full commitment to the movement, full commitment to mass-disillusionment with bourgeois politics, is the most revolutionary act that the DSA is capable of taking. Show the Democrats for what they are, and spit in the eye of their heir-apparent, the murderous Biden and his “top-cop” crony. Defy the coronation, for the good of the working classes.
