The US left is a graveyard of wasted motion, but nowhere is the dead rotting flesh more visible than in the bookkeeping of its "vanguard" parties.
>>The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is currently nursing a seven-figure debt, cutting half a million dollars from its own staff while chasing the electoral dragon. The entire organization spent just $10,783 on federal elections in 2024, a pittance that gets swallowed whole by a single real estate developer’s check. They dump millions into campaigns (just look at the $28,000 a single mayoral candidate paid his local DSA chapter for "texting"), yet can’t scrape together the funds to keep a single free clinic running. This is the political economy of the professional left, burn cash on consultants, beg for donations to pay off debt, and call it "building power."
>>Meanwhile, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) isn’t even in the same league. Their idea of a "revolutionary" budget is a phone bank asking for $101 donations to "defeat the extreme-right," with zero transparent accounting of how those dollars translate into actual working-class power. For all their talk of centralism, they’ve been reduced to a glorified NGO, fundraising for Cuban pacemakers instead of organizing the oppressed in their own backyard.Where does all this money go? It certainly doesn’t go to the people. DSA pours its resources into "inside the system" electoralism, running candidates on the Democratic Party line and calling it a "conquest of ballots". They spend fortunes on primary campaigns, Jamaal Bowman’s loss was the most expensive primary in U.S. history, while anarchists and real leftists open free clinics in dingy squats, scraping by on shoestring budgets because they actually live with the people they claim to serve.
This is the hypocrisy of the white‑collar left. They are careerists, middle managers, and petty‑bourgeois intellectuals who have never missed a meal. Their politics are a hobby, not a survival strategy. They call the lumpen "counter‑revolutionary" and the blue‑collar worker "crude," then retreat to their academic castles to write another resolution about "building dual power." Meanwhile, anarchists, the ones with actual class composition rooted in the working class and the dispossessed are the ones running the real mutual aid networks, organizing prison strikes, and keeping the lights on in the community spaces tha
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