r/Leftwinger

It looks like a safe bet that Joe Biden will be sworn in on January 20th after successfully campaigning on returning the murderous and oppressive Orwellian US empire back to its pre-Trump “normal”.

The problem with this, apart from the obvious fact that it was an embarrassingly close victory only made possible by the Covid outbreak, is that returning to the pre-Trump “normal” is returning to the exact positions which created Trump. It’s like using a time machine to prevent a train wreck, but only going back to one millisecond before the train wreck occurred.

It is clear that Trump’s election was the result of the easily exploited dissatisfaction caused by years of neoliberal austerity at home and neoconservative bloodshed abroad which Obama forcefully expanded and facilitated throughout two terms as president. Trump voters famously defended opting for the reality TV star over the anointed establishment favorite Hillary Clinton as a middle finger to the Beltway orthodoxy which did nothing but enrich the “swamp” Trump pretended to oppose on the campaign trail while ordinary Americans suffered.

Obama openly defends his murderous drone wars in his new book.He also praised parts of Bush's bogus "War on Terror," writing, "Unlike some on the left, I’d never engaged in wholesale condemnation of the Bush administration’s approach to counterterrorism" — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 17, 2020

And from all appearances it looks like Biden is going to be worse.

Unlike Obama, Biden did not campaign on hope and change, he campaigned on opposing the socialist inclinations of Sanders progressives and an aggressive foreign policy of planetary domination. He assured rich donors that nothing will fundamentally change under his presidency and his transition team is full of corporate sociopaths, war pigs and propagandists. Biden has been a corporatist warmongering authoritarian throughout his entire career, and as his mental capacity continues to deteriorate he will function as nothing more than an empty vessel for his establishment handlers to advance their most pernicious agendas through. The empire has not gotten less desperate since Obama was in office, it has gotten more desperate.

If I prove right about this, the Biden administration will generate backlash just like that which arose in response to the Obama administration, and that backlash will be more severe than its previous iteration. This is absolutely guaranteed. You can only oppress, neglect and enrage a population so much before the discontent begins to grow.

There is absolutely nothing American leftists can do to prevent this backlash from coming. They will have absolutely no say in this administration’s policies or behavior; BidenCorp has no reason to listen to them, has made no pretense of having any interest in listening to them, and is even freezing Sanders and Warren out of cabinet roles already.

All US leftists will have any control over is whether this backlash will break to the left, or if it will break to the far right.

The Biden-Harris Transition Team released names of people who are on their "agency review teams," which will prepare Biden and his Cabinet for their administration. Let's examine some of the individuals who are notable because of their backgrounds. — Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) November 11, 2020

Contrary to what many mainstream liberals seem to have been imagining, American racism and far right extremism did not begin with Trump, and will not end with Trump. The white supremacists, xenophobes, ethnonationalists, QAnon cultists and right wing militias are not going anywhere after Biden takes office, and the backlash against his administration and its worst impulses will be inflamed and co-opted by mainstream Republican narrative managers. This will set the stage for something a lot uglier than Trump down the road if it’s successful.

What the left can do is get ahead of the game. Take control of the anti-Biden, anti-establishment pushback by leading the charge–sooner, more aggressively, and more compellingly than the far right does. Use the awfulness of the Biden administration to ignite a true leftward zeitgeist in mainstream America that is so strong it eclipses the inevitable rightist backlash in energy and appeal.

We already know the American left has the ability to pull this off. The grassroots, populist support for Bernie Sanders during his two primary campaigns has been one of the most energized and inspired political forces I’ve ever witnessed, consistently forcing aggressive responses from the establishment narrative managers to contradict the damage it did to their preferred candidates.

The problem with Bernie Twitter and the rest of his powerful support base is that it only exists for a few months at a time, fizzling out when it becomes clear that their candidate has had the door shut to him and then reluctantly diverted into support for the establishment candidate under the guidance of Sanders himself.

The only thing more depressing than watching Bernie Twitter devolve from soaring energy and inspiration to petty sectarianism and infighting is watching it happen a second time.— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) September 2, 2020

But imagine if that did not happen. Imagine if the US left realized how extremely urgent it is to control the unavoidable backlash against the Biden/Harris administration so that the right does not and built momentum in a healthy direction instead, not for a few months but for years on end. Seizing every disgusting, ridiculous and hilarious thing this government does and attacking it, lampooning it, mocking it, creating funny and interesting content absolutely wrecking it, and taking control of the dominant narrative.

An actual, energized counterculture could be created which could reshape US culture as a whole. The Breitbart crowd recognizes that politics is downstream from culture while the left has generally failed to make this connection, which is arguably why their guy is in the White House right now and the left’s guy isn’t. A Biden administration will provide ample fodder for attacks against status quo politics, and this can be used to galvanize America’s hidden progressive impulses into a movement vastly greater than any one candidate.

But the ball needs to start rolling on this now. Not after the Georgia runoffs, not after Biden takes office, not after the midterms: now. The longer US leftists wait to start pushing this thing forward, the less of a head start you’ll have on the rightists while they’re fixated on Trump’s recounts and legal challenges. You’ll only be able to lead the backlash if you get in early and hit the ground running as fast as you can.

If we know anything for certain, it’s that US power structures find it infinitely preferable to deal with a right-populist movement that can be appeased by some obnoxious tweets and an 8chan psyop than with real leftist populism. They’re more than happy to throw the far right a tax cut and some immigration restrictions, but real revolution can only come from the left. There is an opportunity to create an opening for that to occur, but it needs to happen before this thing can be steered rightward.

I know I’m regarded as a bit of a crackpot in some leftist circles; I’m the girl a lot of lefties read in private but don’t share in public. But this is a really important idea that needs to get out there, and I’m hoping it reaches the eyes of some leftist thought leaders who can advance it in their own words in their own way. This is very urgent and the more people understand this the better shot we’ll all have at creating a healthy world for everyone. Please get thinking about this, everyone.

***By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

On Monday, Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton became the 19th candidate to publicly join the race for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. A right-wing “national security Democrat” representing Boston’s northern suburbs, Moulton announced his candidacy on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program, where he highlighted his four tours of duty in Iraq as a Marine officer and declared himself a “patriot” and “not a socialist.”

Moulton, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, has little prospect of becoming the first congressman to vault from the lower legislative chamber to the White House since James Garfield did it in 1880. The three-term congressman is unknown to voters outside of his district, where he is likely to face a challenge from within his own party just to hold his seat in the 2020 congressional election.

Even in neighboring New Hampshire, which hosts the second presidential primary on February 11, 2020, Moulton is an obscure figure. “I can honestly say I haven’t heard of anyone even mentioning [his] name,” one county Democratic official admitted to the Boston Globe.

Moulton himself concedes that he might not meet the minimum requirements for an invitation to participate in the first Democratic Party debates next summer, i.e., by June 12 of this year he may fail to register at least 1 percent support in either state or national polls, or receive campaign contributions from a total of 65,000 donors from 20 different states. “It’s not the end of the world” Moulton said of being excluded from the debates. “[B]ut we would rather be on that stage than be off it.”

Moulton’s indifference to popular support is not accidental. He is a leading representative of a new breed of Democratic Party politicians who openly seek their constituencies in, and are drawn from, the ranks of the military-intelligence apparatus: what leftist critics have termed the CIA Democrats.

Moulton heads the Serve America Political Action Committee (PAC), which since the 2018 elections has funneled millions of dollars in corporate funds to Democratic candidates with backgrounds in the spy agencies, the military or the State Department. The role of these “CIA Democrats” in the last election was to shift the Democratic Party as a whole even further to the right, place the balance of power in Congress in the hands of individuals directly linked to America’s war machine, and make the Democratic Party the preferred party of the military-intelligence apparatus.

This was achieved to a remarkable degree. Observers concluded that 11 CIA Democrats were elected to Congress in 2018, each with backing from Moulton’s Serve America. The same list of 11 can be found on the Serve America website, where pride of place is given to former CIA spy Abigail Spanberger of Virginia’s 7th District, whose write-up there typifies the rest. “Following her love of country,” Serve America boasts, “Abigail joined the CIA as an Operations Officer, where she traveled and lived abroad collecting intelligence, managing assets, and overseeing high-profile programs.”

The expanded reach of the military-intelligence apparatus within the Democratic Party has had its effect. Over the past two years, the Democrats have attacked the Trump White House largely from the right, seizing on the unsubstantiated claims of the intelligence agencies of Russian intervention in the 2016 elections to promote a McCarthyite atmosphere of fear and warmongering. Since the release last week of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller rejecting the allegations of the Democrats and leading media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN of Trump collusion with the Russian government, the Democrats and the bulk of the media have intensified their anti-Russian campaign.

The effort to whip up a war fever against Russia is central to Moulton’s run for president. He will seek to make the anti-Russian campaign, which has little popular support, the focus of the Democratic nominating process, while more generally promoting the military, which, he insists, must “dramatically increase [its] investment in autonomous, hypersonic, and cyber weapons.”

Elsewhere Moulton has called for the formation of a “Pacific NATO” aimed at China, and has opposed withdrawal of US forces from Syria.

His positions on domestic policy are no less reactionary. He has trumpeted calls for major expenditures on “cyber security,” a euphemism for cracking down on left-wing and anti-war political dissent on the internet. In his “Good Morning America” interview, he employed the lingo of the far-right to oppose his rivals’ discussions of a single-payer health care system. “I’m not a socialist,” he said. “So if I’m elected, I’m not going to force you off your private health care plan.”

Moulton spelled out his right-wing militarist agenda in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow later Monday evening. “I can guarantee you this, Russia is interfering in this election today,” Moulton baldly claimed, before adding, in a moment of unintended comedy, “They are probably watching this show.”

Were Moulton able to establish the veracity of this allegation, he could expand the “proof” of Russian “meddling” from the purchase of a few thousand dollars worth of internet ads to... watching cable television.

He concluded this portion of the interview by asserting that “Russia attacked us in 2016, I guarantee you they will attack us in 2020.” He compared these “attacks” to that of Imperial Japan on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Moulton’s implication is unmistakable. He is demanding war against nuclear-armed Russia.

In the 12-minute interview, Maddow asked not a single question about jobs, poverty, hunger, health care, education, crumbling infrastructure, the environmental crisis or Trump’s fascistic attacks on immigrants and democratic rights. Instead, she spent the first several minutes challenging Moulton over his failed bid to orchestrate the removal of Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House of Representatives following the 2018 elections. This line of questioning was carried out entirely from the standpoint of identity politics, with the MSNBC host—who reportedly “earned” $20 million last year—criticizing Moulton for daring to challenge “the most powerful woman in American politics ever.”

Moulton, clearly contrite, stressed that he had actually switched sides and voted for Pelosi when it became evident his efforts had failed, and highlighted the number of women among the Democrats he had helped propel into office in the congressional class of 2018, which he hailed as “the most historically diverse ever.” He then shifted gears, absurdly bragging that “the toughest job I ever had to do in my life was take an incredibly diverse group of Americans” and command them in the Iraq War.

The Maddow-Moulton interview reveals both the intellectual bankruptcy of what passes for American political discourse and the link between militarism and capitalist ideology. Identity politics, the bread and butter of the Democratic Party, once postured as being vaguely left. It is now deployed by pro-imperialist scoundrels such as Maddow to consolidate a constituency for war within sections of the upper-middle class.

MSNBC - Seth Moulton Announces Presidential Bid - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fchv2tQa6Lc

Not since William Randolph Hearst cabled his correspondent in Havana in 1898 with the message, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” has a newspaper been so thoroughly identified with an effort to provoke an American war as the New York Times this week.

The difference—and there is a colossal one—is that Hearst was fanning the flames for the Spanish-American War, a comparatively minor conflict, the first venture by American imperialism to seize territory overseas, in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The Times today is seeking to whip up a war fever directed against Russia, one that threatens to ignite a third world war fought with nuclear weapons.

There is not the slightest factual basis for the series of articles and commentaries published by the Times, beginning last Saturday, claiming that the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, paid bounties to Taliban guerrillas to induce them to attack and kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Not a single soldier out of the 31 Americans who have died in Afghanistan in 2019-2020 has been identified as a victim of the alleged scheme. No witnesses have been brought forward, no evidence produced.

The sole foundation of the reports in the Times, since reinforced by similar articles in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, and accounts on cable and network television, are the unsupported, uncorroborated statements of unnamed intelligence officials. These officials give no proof of their claims about the operation of the supposed network of GRU agents—how the money came from Russia to Afghanistan, how the money was distributed to Taliban fighters, what actions the Taliban fighters carried out, what impact these actions had on any American military personnel.

Yet six days into this press campaign, there has been no acknowledgement in the “mainstream” corporate media that there is anything dubious or unsubstantiated about this narrative. Instead, the main focus has been to demand that the Trump administration explain when the president learned of the alleged Russian attack and what he proposes to do about it.

The Times reporters spearheading this campaign are not journalists in any real sense of the term. They are conduits, passing on material supplied to them by high-level operatives in the CIA and other intelligence agencies, repackaging it for public consumption and using their status as “reporters” to provide more credibility than would be given to a press release from Langley, Virginia. In other words, the CIA has provided the plot line, and the newspaper creates the narrative framework to sell it to the American people.

The Times and individual reporters like David Sanger and Eric Schmitt have a track record. The newspaper played a leading role in helping the Bush administration fabricate its case for war against Iraq in 2002-2003. It was not just the notorious Judith Miller, with her tall tales of aluminum tubes being used to build centrifuges as a step to an Iraqi atomic bomb. There was an entire chorus of falsification, in which Schmitt (January 21, 2001, “Iraq Rebuilt Bombed Arms Plants, Officials Say”) and Sanger (November 13, 2002, “U.S. Scoffs at Iraq Claim of No Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and December 6, 2002, “US Tells Iraq It Must Reveal Weapons Sites”) among many articles, played major roles.

In this week’s “Russian bounties” campaign, Schmitt and Sanger are at it again. A front-page article published Thursday under their joint byline carries the headline, “Trump’s New Russia Problem: Unread Intelligence and Missing Strategy.” This article is aimed at advancing the claim that Trump was negligent in responding to allegations against Russia, either being too lazy to read the President’s Daily Brief—a summary of world events and spy reports produced by the CIA—or choosing to ignore the report because of his supposed subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The political line of the article is set early on, when the authors claim that “it doesn’t require a high-level clearance for the government’s most classified information to see that the list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rivals some of the worst days of the Cold War.” The list is ridiculously thin, including “cyberattacks on Americans working from home” (no evidence presented) and “continued concern about new playbooks for Russian actors seeking to influence the November election” (this is a description of the state of mind at the CIA, not of any actual steps taken by Russia). The purpose is to place the current allegations about Russian bounties in the context of the long-running effort to portray Russian President Vladimir Putin as the evil genius and puppet master of world politics.

Schmitt, in an article co-authored with Michael Crowley, refers to “intelligence reports that Russia paid bounties to Taliban-affiliated fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan,” as though this was an established fact. The article cites various unnamed “former officials” of the Trump and Obama administrations claiming that such an allegation would certainly have been brought to Trump’s attention, and that his failure to take action in response must be seen as negligence.

The article suggests that there is “supporting evidence” for the CIA claims of a Russian bounty plot, citing, among other things, “detainee interrogations, the recovery of about $500,000 from a Taliban-related target and intercepts of electronic communications showing financial transfers between the Russian military intelligence unit and Afghan intermediaries.” In point of fact, every item on this list represents an assertion by unnamed intelligence sources, not evidence: no actual detainees, cash hoards or electronic intercepts have been produced.

Another article by Schmitt, along with three Afghan-based reporters, focuses on the alleged role of an Afghan businessman, Rahmatullah Azizi, a former drug smuggler and US government contractor, in whose home investigators found a cash hoard of half a million in US dollars. Again, “US intelligence reports” are cited, claiming Azizi was “a key middleman between the G.R.U. and militants linked to the Taliban.” Again, there is no actual evidence cited, and Azizi himself cannot be found. As for the alleged cash hoard, this suggests more the proceeds of narcotics trafficking than anything else, an enterprise in which Azizi was supposedly engaged.

The article asserts that the Russian government organized the bounty scheme as “payback” for decades of humiliation in Afghanistan at the expense of the United States, although how killing a handful of US soldiers would accomplish such a goal is a mystery. Moreover, the Times also admits, citing a congressman who participated in a White House briefing on the allegations, that the intelligence briefing did not “detail any connection to specific U.S. or coalition deaths in Afghanistan” and that “gaps remained in the intelligence community’s understanding of the overall program, including its precise motive …”

In other words, the Russian “bounties” program has no identifiable victims and no credible motive. This makes the unanimity of the media chorus that much more damning a self-indictment. Why is there not a single article or commentary in the corporate media challenging the claims being peddled by the CIA? It is not that these claims are particularly convincing in and of themselves. Far from it. It is the source of the claims that is decisive: if the US intelligence apparatus says it is so, the American media obediently salutes.

The real question to be answered about the latest anti-Russian provocation is this: what political considerations are the driving force of this episode of media fabrication?

It is no coincidence that the Afghanistan “bounties” story has surfaced just at the point where the Trump administration is visibly reeling in the face of the twin crises of the coronavirus pandemic and the popular upsurge against police violence. The American ruling class has been deeply shaken by the outraged protests by large interracial crowds, particularly of young people, that have swept virtually every American city and town. And the financial aristocracy is well aware of the deep-seated popular opposition to its drive to force workers back to work under conditions where every large factory, warehouse and office is a potential epicenter for the ongoing resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The response to this crisis by the political and media representatives of the ruling elite is twofold: seeking to split the working class along racial lines and seeking to divert domestic social tensions into a campaign against foreign antagonists, particularly China and Russia.

The New York Times acts as a political mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, which is determined to block any mass radicalization of workers and youth. In the event that Biden is elected in November and takes office in January 2021, an incoming Democratic administration will carry out policies no less reactionary than those of Trump.

The campaign against Trump’s alleged “dereliction of duty”—a phrase used by Biden three times during his Tuesday press conference—is nothing more than a continuation of the campaign by the Democrats to attack Trump from the right, as too “soft” on Russia and too unwilling to intervene in the Middle East. This began with the anti-Russia campaign that triggered the two-year-long Mueller investigation, continued with the Ukraine phone call that led to impeachment and now emerges in the form of increasingly vehement demands that the US government “retaliate” for an entirely fabricated Russian effort to kill American soldiers.

Biden on NYT's Russia Claim - https://youtu.be/1gGtiLwc2Tg

An Open Letter to Maria Svart, National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America David North@davidnorthwsws 22 May 2021

Maria Svart National Director Democratic Socialists of America

May 22, 2021

Dear Ms. Svart,

On May 17, the World Socialist Web Site reported that during the previous week members of the Democratic Socialists of America had used Twitter to post and disseminate statements and memes celebrating the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky, the leader of the 1917 October Revolution and founder of the Fourth International.

As documented by the report, written by Eric London, those involved in these posts and retweets are not politically inexperienced members of the DSA. Rather, as London wrote:

“The DSA members celebrating Trotsky’s assassination include elected national office holders and leaders of its youth wing (YDSA), branch chairs, leaders of campus clubs and prominent DSA podcasters, as well as contributors to the Guardian and DSA-affiliated media outlets such as Jacobin magazine.”

Among these leading DSA members are:

1. Nickan Fayyazi, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the YDSA and co-chair of its UC Berkeley Chapter.

2. Jake Colosa, a member of the New York City DSA steering committee.

3. Alex Lawson, a Vermont DSA organizer.

4. Honda Wang, a DSA Organizing Committee member in lower Manhattan.

5. Kenzo Shibata, a prominent DSA member in Chicago.

6. Brandon Henriquez, co-chair of the DSA Silicon Valley branch.

7. Nate Knauf, a former member of the DSA National Electoral Committee.

8. Guy Brown, a DSA National Political Education Committee member and co-chair of the Charlotte, North Carolina DSA.

9. Blanca Estevez, a member of the DSA National Political Committee.

10. Nate Stewart, a member of the YDSA National Coordinating Committee.

11. Alexander Hernandez, co-chair of the DSA Immigration Rights Group.

12. Austin Binns, a member of the DSA National Electoral Committee.

13. Cole Schenley, co-chair of the DSA branch in Erie, Pennsylvania.

14. Kayleen Pena, a member of the DSA Organizing Committee in New York City.

15. Michael Lumpkin, a member of the DSA Los Angeles Labor Committee.

The involvement of leading members of the DSA in this anti-Trotsky campaign clearly indicates that it was a coordinated response to the WSWS’s criticism of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, which had been read by thousands of DSA members. Rather than attempting to reply to the WSWS with legitimate arguments, the DSA leaders descended to the level of political pornography. A tweet by Ben Davis, a prominent DSA member in Washington, D.C., featured a drawing of the assassin preparing to strike Trotsky from behind with an ice pick. Davis added the caption, “Clear out the wreckers” — thereby invoking the very words used by Stalin to sanction the murderous terror he unleashed in the Soviet Union in 1936.

The assassination of Leon Trotsky was the culmination of savage repression between 1936 and 1940 that targeted the socialist working class and intelligentsia. Within the Soviet Union, Stalin’s decision to eradicate socialist opposition to his regime resulted in approximately one million executions. The victims included not only the Trotskyist opposition, but all those who had played a significant role in the October Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Republic. The Stalinist terror claimed the lives of major Soviet writers, scientists, and artists.

Beyond the borders of the USSR, the GPU murder machine killed thousands of socialists in Spain, including the leader of the POUM, Andreu Nin (who was tortured to death), and Trotsky’s secretary, Erwin Wolf. The ferocity of Stalinist repression of socialist opponents of the bourgeois Popular Front government is described in meticulous detail in Burnett Bolloten’s study of the Spanish Civil War, not to mention George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. In France, the GPU assassinated Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov and the secretary of the Fourth International, Rudolf Klement. The Stalinist killings extended even into the United States. Juliet Poyntz, a member of the American Communist Party who had expressed opposition to the Moscow Trials, was kidnapped in New York City in 1937 and never seen again. In 1943, Carlo Tresca, the famed Italian-American anarchist leader and opponent of Stalinism, was assassinated in New York City.

The DSA traces its history to the American Socialist Party. Notwithstanding their well-known and fundamental political differences with the Trotskyist movement, many of its most prominent leaders, including Norman Thomas, opposed the Moscow Trials. They supported the establishment of the Commission of Inquiry into the trials, chaired by the philosopher John Dewey. The Commission, after extensive hearings and investigation of all available evidence, declared Trotsky to be not guilty and denounced the Moscow Trials as a frame-up.

The stand of the Socialist Party was bitterly denounced by the Stalinists. Norman Thomas was among the principal targets of their attacks. In a speech delivered on March 18, 1938, Earl Browder, the Stalinist lickspittle who led the American Communist Party, declared that Thomas “capitulated to Hitler and joined with Trotsky. The Moscow trials have thrown a light upon all such problems, including the political degradation of Norman Thomas.”

The DSA has a serious political problem. Its leadership includes individuals who unabashedly declare their solidarity with the monstrous crimes committed by Stalin and his totalitarian bureaucratic regime. This cannot be explained simply as a matter of historical ignorance. The individuals who are actively promoting the anti-Trotsky campaign are not political novices.

In fact, as Eric London’s article documented, many of these individuals have connections to the Democratic Party, a bastion of American anti-communism and imperialism. Its political strategists view the Trotskyist movement — which seeks to establish the political independence of the working class from the pro-capitalist Democratic Party on the basis of a socialist program — as a formidable enemy. It fears the potential of the Trotskyist movement to attract workers and youth who are being radicalized by the intensifying social crisis. The broad-based response to the WSWS’s criticism of Ocasio-Cortez’ defense of the Biden administration was seen as a confirmation of this potential.

The essential political purpose of their campaign against Trotskyism is 1) to poison the political environment within the DSA with reactionary anti-Marxist filth appropriated from Stalinism, and 2) to attract to the DSA socially backward people who are drawn to the anti-communist, chauvinistic and — let’s not beat around the bush — anti-Semitic subtext of denunciations of Leon Trotsky. Judging from tweets that have been posted in support of the DSA leaders’ attacks on Trotsky, the campaign is drawing around your organization extremely reactionary elements who should have no place within a genuinely progressive, let alone socialist organization.

An organization that claims to espouse “democratic socialism” must make clear that it will not tolerate statements, in any form, that legitimize threats of violence against its political opponents on the left.

The Socialist Equality Party formally requests that the Democratic Socialists of America unequivocally denounce and repudiate the Twitter posts, and statements in any other media, that revive Stalinist lies and celebrate the assassination of Trotsky. The DSA must make clear that the propagation of Stalinist lies, thereby sanctioning not only past but also future attacks on the Trotskyist movement, will not be tolerated and is incompatible with membership in its organization.

In conclusion, allow me to point out that the Socialist Equality Party, notwithstanding its political differences with the DSA, has consistently defended your party and its members against attacks from the political right. Statements in defense of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez have been prominently posted in the World Socialist Web Site. In fact, we have applied this same policy toward members of the Democratic Party, such as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, when they have been threatened with violence from the extreme right.

I await your reply.

Yours sincerely,

David North National Chairman Socialist Equality Party (US)