Marxists Say Whoa

I just noticed this response to my note in Socialist Forum, a house organ of Democratic Socialists of America, so I'm going to respond. The author is one Patrick McQueeney, associated with the Cosmonaut website and the "Marxist Unity Group" caucus of DSA. We have never met.

I was promoting a resolution for the DSA national convention, which ended a few days ago. It was decisively voted down, which does not augur well for the future of DSA. The issue raised by the resolution remains. The U.S. Left can progress without DSA, if fascism can be held at bay.

This remark at the beginning of PQ's note captures the gist of his response: "The resolution correctly identifies the existential threat that the “ultra-right” represents to the working class, oppressed people, and the habitability of the planet itself. But is forming a broad front aimed at a majority against Trump and his ilk the best way to fight the right? Marxists say no."

Well there are Marxists and Marxists, as most any Marxist would agree. PQ’s political analysis comes down to this: “Socialists understood that when Bernie Sanders lost the primary in 2016, the alternative was a return to the conditions that created Trump in the first place.”

I find this odd. The implication is that it was appropriate to contest in a primary of the Democratic Party in 2016, which if successful would have entailed the broad front PQ disdains today, but no longer. PQ asserts that Democrats were complicit in creating the conditions that create Trump. OK, but that was true before 2016 too. The new premise is that abstaining from the 2024 election gets at the root of conditions that create Trump. By helping him win?

The nagging problem is PQ’s fear that participating in a coalition requires suspending any criticism of whatever we disapprove of coming from Democrats. I would say the record of Sanders and the Squad demonstrates how to do both. Moreover, losing to Trump means the suspension of all such criticism indefinitely, among other atrocities.

PQ’s extended trip down memory land, recounting the struggles of Bolsheviks a hundred years ago in Russia, suggest a different head-space from one grappling with contemporary problems of the working class. Cosmonaut needs to return to Earth.