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.

The people say no.

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.

To be clear, my certainty was not based on any notion that the Democratic Party would choose a candidate for whom I could, in good conscience, vote. Any belief I may have once had in either the Democratic Party or in “lesser evil” politics vanished long ago. On the contrary, my decision to wait out the 2024 election cycle came from a growing sense that the Left, such as it is in the U.S., was incapable of a presidential campaign that would be worth an ounce of my energy. The 2020 Howie Hawkins Green Party campaign left a bitter taste, and confirmed my belief that an awful lot of otherwise good people who advocate for an independent Left political party are thoroughly out of touch with working and poor people — so much so that the presidential election has become for them a sort of escape valve, a place to promote their ideas, with no responsibility to organize locally around them.

Naturally, the announcement of an independent presidential run by one of this country’s foremost Black intellectuals grabbed my attention and captured my imagination. Several of Dr. West’s subsequent interviews did more: made me believe that he understands something critically important about where we stand in history.

Anyone who sees and listens to the world around them should be able to see and hear the level of discontent and desperation that so many people feel, as well as the deep cynicism and disgust they feel toward the existing political parties and the entire realm of public affairs in this country.

The moment of hope and sense of at least temporary relief many experienced with the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 only made the reality of this administration so much more horrible. If you were encouraged by a presidential candidate who invoked the memory of George Floyd, a Black man publicly lynched by police, how could you not feel nauseous when, once in office, that same president spent billions putting thousands more police on the street? If you felt relieved that the Democrats had at last come to understand the urgency of rapid climate change in November 2020, in the few years since you have certainly shaken with rage as Biden ushers in new drillings and pipelines and giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. If you had deplored Trump’s militarism and believed that at least “our” government was reorienting to diplomacy, how could you not be sickened by the Democrats allocating billions of dollars to fund a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, while promoting and gearing up for a new cold war against China?

The sudden entry of a widely respected voice like Dr. West’s into the cacophony of what has come to pass for political discourse in this country naturally compels attention. No matter the how or the why or the how well, it is certain that Dr. West’s run, his contribution to political discourse, stands to bring clarity on a wide range of political issues to millions of working-poor people, and might very well spark a consciousness-raising that in turn inspires a genuine working-class movement for a better world.

Dr. West is criticized by some people on the Left because he has supported and even campaigned for Democrats in the past, from Jesse Jackson to Bill Bradley to Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders. So it is important to hear him now when he declares that there are two major parties and political forces in the U.S. One is the neo-fascist Republican Party. The other is what Dr. West refers to as the “milquetoast neoliberal” Democratic Party. And a significant part of Dr. West’s motivation for running for president in 2024 is simply this: neoliberalism cannot forestall the triumph of fascism. If the Democrats refuse to articulate a compelling working and poor people’s agenda, millions in the U.S. will turn or acquiesce to a fascist government — no matter which party dominates it.

There is much, much more to say about the Democratic Party — including that its owners, the ruling capitalist class, keep it on a short leash, using it precisely to restrain the emergence of an independent working-class movement that combines organized labor with campaigns against oppression and imperialism. Some of it Dr. West says and some of it he does not say, or does not say clearly. But that is another discussion.

Dr. West is successfully articulating that only a broad, multi-racial, working-class movement can stave off the rise of fascism — as well as combat existential issues like rapid climate change and the U.S. war machine. Dr. West grasps this essential fact, and has the unique ability to explain it to millions of people who feel this reality in their bones, but do not yet have the words to express it.

2024 could be a turning point in U.S. history. It could be the year that millions of people rally around a political campaign that prioritizes radical demands for social equality, that recognizes and validates the experiences of oppressed people who want control over their own bodies, their own communities, and their own destinies. It could be the year that millions rally around a political agenda that reflects the interests of working-poor people — socialized housing, healthcare, and education; the right to organize in unions; world peace; a habitable future for our planet — and unconditionally puts those interests front and center.

Dr. Cornel West is not a messiah. He does not have all the answers. He will not — certainly not by himself — embody every change we need. In many respects, he is only a very eloquent figurehead. But he has appeared on the scene at a time, and in a manner, and with a message that could light a spark. And that spark, fanned by social movements into a flame, might grow into a fire that even fascism cannot extinguish.

Republished with revisions from the author’s blog, Tell No Lies. Claim No Easy Victories… We thank the author for his kind open-ended offer of republication.