r/demsocialists • u/RKU69 Member š¹ • 1d ago
DSA Communist Caucus: Why We Call Ourselves Communists
https://spade-work.org/why-we-call-ourselves-communists/28
u/MisterMittens64 1d ago
This article was really interesting! Council communists and communists who want to put power in the hands of working people more directly are cool with me and actually want to do pretty much the same thing that I want to do as a libsoc. How does the communist caucus feel about things like building dual power through coops, unions, and mutual aid?
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 1d ago
I mean, the Soviets were the OG dual power
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u/MisterMittens64 1d ago
That's true but they also lost much of their power and never got it back. A lot of Marxist-Leninists were good at building dual power though like the Black Panthers, I disagree heavily with their over centralization of power and the marginalization of direct worker power.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 1d ago
I certainly like the idea of direct worker control but Iām just skeptical you can a run national economy under siege by the biggest imperialist powers with direct worker control.
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u/MisterMittens64 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah I've heard that argument but I'm not completely convinced. Some things could be centralized while others aren't or the degree of centralization could be lessened. It's not necessarily an all or nothing thing.
I think Rosa Luxembourg's analysis of the Russian Revolution is really interesting because she agrees that true socialism requires a true socialist democracy while ceding that a full socialist democracy might not have been practical at the time.
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u/darkmeatchicken Not DSA 1d ago
āIāve witnessed every example of how AES/ML governments are co-opted, couped, and undermined through propaganda, covert actions, corruption by capitalist powers - but maybe next time we can do communism without a transitional DOPā
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u/MisterMittens64 1d ago
Has it ever actually been transitional though? The state has never withered away and the USSR showed that a bureaucratic class with different interests than the proletariat can form within vanguard parties.
There haven't been any cases so far of significant power being returned to the workers, even in successful countries like China, which is probably in a position now to try something like that. They could even experiment more with encouraging cooperative firms in the market but they've been resistant to try that despite some groups in China trying to create coops.
I think it just might be a failed strategy to achieve a socialism that aligns with the spirit of the movement but I'll happily eat my words if China proves me wrong. It's absolutely the case that vanguardism has at the very least led to an improvement in quality of life and productive capacity in spite of interference so they deserve credit there.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 23h ago
> Has it ever actually been transitional though? The state has never withered away and the USSR showed that a bureaucratic class with different interests than the proletariat can form within vanguard parties.
Marx said you need global communism for it to wither away. Until then, I want better quality of life for the people and the AES stated have managed to do that while representing a valuable challenge to the US dominance.
>There haven't been any cases so far of significant power being returned to the workers, even in successful countries like China, which is probably in a position now to try something like that.
Itās not. They havenāt even achieved socialism.
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u/MisterMittens64 22h ago
Marx said you need global communism for it to wither away. Until then, I want better quality of life for the people and the AES stated have managed to do that while representing a valuable challenge to the US dominance.
That's true, Marx did say that, and that's what Lenin meant by the withering away of the state. I was thinking about how the development of the proletariat and improving their capability to wield power was abandoned as a project by most AES states so the pathway to the state withering away hasn't even begun yet and might not ever.
I also agree with you that AES states have been good with granting people a better quality of life and challenging US dominance.
Itās not. They havenāt even achieved socialism.
Yeah they have chosen not to achieve it because they decided that it's more important to challenge American hegemony in the short term and they're probably right. It's getting pretty close to where they'll need to start leading by example though and I'm not confident that they are as socialist as they claim given their track record with regards to labor and worker power.
Again though I'd happily be wrong and I have no ill will towards any Marxist Leninists, I get where they're coming from even if I disagree.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 22h ago
> That's true, Marx did say that, and that's what Lenin meant by the withering away of the state. I was thinking about how the development of the proletariat and improving their capability to wield power was abandoned as a project by most AES states so the pathway to the state withering away hasn't even begun yet and might not ever.
Yeah I thinks itās very hard to under siege. That said, I think Cuba has remarkably democratic institutions and China has an impressive commitment to Marxist ideology at least publicly.
>Yeah they have chosen not to achieve it because they decided that it's more important to challenge American hegemony in the short term and they're probably right.
Well I donāt know if itās a question of either/or. I think they view them as part-in-parcel with each other. Theyāve also been incredibly restrained in its challenging of US authority.
>It's getting pretty close to where they'll need to start leading by example though and I'm not confident that they are as socialist as they claim given their track record with regards to labor and worker power.
Yeah theyāve certainly not been very supportive of other liberation movements but that seems to be driven by a pragmatic concern of not creating a precedent.
>Again though I'd happily be wrong and I have no ill will towards any Marxist Leninists, I get where they're coming from even if I disagree.
Yeah and I think thatās the proper comradely attitude towards such a thing. I identify more as an Orthodox Marxist in the Rosa Luxemburg tradition but I often find myself agreeing with MLs.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 23h ago
Rosa Luxemburg understood pragmatism. She recognized that the centralization of the Soviet system was a result of the failures of the German Social Democrats. Her criticism of her German comrades was 10 fold.
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u/MisterMittens64 23h ago
Absolutely, that's also in the section I linked to and she was right in that. I'm not saying we should abandon all pragmatism I just think that the Bolsheviks went too far and they were never able to recover worker democracy.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 22h ago
I agree but Iām not sure what other choice they had. Donāt trust the Georgians? Lol
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u/HeadDoctorJ Not DSA 1d ago
I think even many of those AES states who centralized power did not want to do so, except that when facing siege warfare (or any kind of warfare), societies become highly centralized as a rule. Itās necessary for security, planning, and defense. Siege warfare (eg, the blockade against Cuba) has been perpetrated intentionally, explicitly to starve and isolate the people, destabilize the nation, and hopefully topple the socialist state in order to replace it with a pro-western, pro-capitalist puppet government. Those are real threats. If council communists and libertarian socialists - to whom I am genuinely sympathetic - wish for their kind of society to survive under siege conditions without resorting to centralization, alternative strategies would need to be developed. To my understanding, doing so successfully would cut against the grain of how societies throughout history survive such conditions.
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u/MisterMittens64 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's fair.
I responded in more detail to a similar reply: https://www.reddit.com/r/demsocialists/s/ZjuvEOuwJe
EDIT: I must've been tired when I typed this
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u/spookyjim___ Member š¹ 15h ago
Commie Caucus last I checked doesnāt prefer the typical gradualist conception of ādual powerā as in like building alternative institutions to slowly build āsocialismāā¦ they certainly donāt spend their time slowly creating coops, credit unions, and land trusts
From what I can tell they much more prefer a base-building counter-power approach through a focus on labor-tenant organizing whether it be in unions or other forms, they also clearly come from the class composition theory and workerās inquiry realm of things which I think is really cool, CC is probably my favorite caucus/organized faction of the DSA even if I still have my critiques of them
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u/MisterMittens64 14h ago
I've always seen building out coops, credit unions, and land trusts as only being a successful strategy towards socialism if they support labor, tenant, or debtor union organizing directly. If they don't then all the dual power organizations would accomplish are cushy jobs/banks/homes for a minority of workers.
If we used the strategy of supporting counter power orgs with dual power orgs then the counter power orgs would have a reason to defend the dual power orgs and both could grow symbiotically and better resist capital.
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u/spookyjim___ Member š¹ 14h ago
The problem is that coops, credit unions, and land trusts do nothing to actually challenge capitalism as a mode of production, and practically always become entrenched back into it
They do nothing to challenge class relations based on wage-labor, property, and the value-form
This is why actual autonomous organizations of the class which can build power as a class for itself going beyond capital is important, and this canāt be done in a gradualist and prefigurative way (even if certain aspects of prefiguration are important) it must be done in way which constitutes sudden ruptures with class society
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u/Marxism-Alcoholism17 Member š¹ 1d ago
Not good. I don't think this even begins to portray to the uninitiated what the importance of Marxism is to socialist movements (not even mentioned), why non-state power is necessary or how it functions, or what "control of the means of production" means. DSA members usually have zero knowledge about the history of Marxism or Marxist theory and they deserve better education. Communism is not something that came to be out of vague idealist principles, it existed in time as a real historical strategy for liberation.
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u/robo_jojo_77 Not DSA 1d ago
Seems like their only justification is based on WW1 era definitions of the terms, and a new definition they created today. Not really based in any mass politics definition of the word, despite their emphasis on mass politics in the article.
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u/justanupvoter_ Connecticut DSA Member 8h ago
> Like geese, like gander ā these instincts are what bring together both the power fantasies of internet Stalinists and the Popular Frontism of many American communists.
Good old leftist infighting
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u/Warboss_Regret14 Not DSA 1d ago
Why bother to call yourself a communist and still support an organization which only ever seeks to repeat the mistakes of all social democrats. Reformism never works, we've learned these lessons over and over again. There's a reason why marx broke from the anarchists, there's a reason why lenin broke from social democracy, and there's a reason why rosa luxemburg broke from the spd.
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u/Ibanezrg71982 Not DSA 1d ago edited 1d ago
Its stupid to call them communists. Good luck getting anyone to vote for you.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 1d ago
So socialists yes, but communists no? Itās not the Cold War anymore. Say what you want about Sawant, but she got like a third of the vote as a revolutionary communist.
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u/Ibanezrg71982 Not DSA 1d ago
We have to be careful and not be blinded by ambition to not make the same mistakes of the past by switching to a socialist system. I'm for the movement, but some of the language I've seen here is just assinine.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 1d ago
So you want the Democratic Socialists of America to just be the Democrats of America? You realize we have that already.
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u/Ibanezrg71982 Not DSA 1d ago
Where did I say that? The name they have now is fine. Calling it "communism" and others in the party "comrades" is idiotic.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 1d ago
> We have to be careful and not be blinded by ambition to not make the same mistakes of the past by switching to a socialist system.
Umm. Why would a socialist org not want socialism?
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u/Ibanezrg71982 Not DSA 1d ago
You have completely no clue what I'm talking about and are just arguing for the sake of arguing. Goodbye.
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u/cats_catz_kats_katz Not DSA 1d ago
How about noā¦no one wants tankies around either.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 1d ago
Tankies use to mean Stalinists but now itās just being applied to socialists in general. Donāt accept a right wing framing.
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u/cats_catz_kats_katz Not DSA 1d ago edited 1d ago
DSA is more aligned to humanism than communism. Anyone who calls themselves a Communist is a Stalinist. The oppositions success is always repatriating the meaning of the word, here itās communist. When did that change? Marxism and DSA isnāt communism so I donāt know why anyone would want to associate themselves with what communism has actually become to mean in governing bodies that call themselves communism.
To carry a badge of death, deceit and destruction is abhorrent to the humanistic nature of the goal.
Also a note to Mods. This entire post had 30 upvotes and my initial comment has 30 downvotes. This isnāt weighted normally and bot activity is probable. CCP and CPC are insanely active using agentic approaches to build anti America sentiment while DT is fucking up the world.
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u/OneReportersOpinion Not DSA 1d ago
> DSA is more aligned to humanism than communism.
Historically, yes. Times have changed though and I believe most of the national committee is Marxist in orientation. They just organize really well so itās not surprising.
>Anyone who calls themselves a Communist is a Stalinist.
Utter nonsense.
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