<Marxist Unity Group and Reform & Revolution are proud to announce that we have combined our programs, and will propose this Fighting Socialist Program together at DSA conventionhttps://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/a-fighting-socialist-programOk let's check it out.
>Whereas in order to build a new society, our organization must have unity around our goals and beliefs and an ability to explain our politics to people in our lives and communities.This is coming from people who can't even explain what value is.
>Whereas historical socialist parties have developed unity by adopting a program which explains capitalist society, includes demands which connect to present consciousness, and clearly states that the working class will need to conquer political power.They don't argue why the working class needs to conquer political power (they don't even elaborate on what that is). They just state it lol.
>We live in a country run by a class of bosses and billionaires called capitalists. They have bought and run the Democratic and Republican parties, most news outlets, colleges and universities, and every branch of government from city halls to the Senate. They use their power to exploit the vast majority who work to live—the hundreds of millions of us who make up the working class. This system can only be ended by the working class taking political power from the rich and building a new society. We in the Democratic Socialists of America fight for that society: a democratic socialist society.And thus capital isn't an alien social force, it is a cabal of billionaires who have co-opted two political parties.
>Our wages are stagnant, our hours are long, and prices are only growing higher. We increasingly live paycheck to paycheck, one bad day away from financial ruin. And yet it is our labor that powers this unjust system. The capitalists who own the businesses we work at take all the profits for themselves and use them to control our society. This is the exploitation that defines the capitalist system.What has the first part got to do with the second? They don't even know what exploitation is, just calling profits lol.
>The capitalist system exploits Black, immigrant, and Indigenous people by dividing them from the rest of the working class. Millions of people of color face discrimination, unemployment, and police violence, locking them out of political power and an equal quality of life. Oppressive laws restricting abortion, marriage, and self-expression force women and queer people to choose between being controlled by their family or living in poverty outside of it.Black, immigrant and indigenous people are all automatically working class. They say but don't elaborate that all working people have an interest in opposing discrimination. Trying to argue that just because they're working class means they automatically should.
>Capitalism is a global system that exploits workers around the world. The most powerful capitalists use their wealth to influence governments into waging wars, toppling other governments, and starving entire peoples with sanctions and embargoes. They use this power to coerce other countries into selling their natural resources, labor, and goods for cheap prices. This imperialist exploitation forces workers of wealthy and poor countries to compete in a race to the bottom. More of this capitalism is bad because of consciously bad capitalists lol. If only we had some noble socialists running bourgeois states. 😭
>The United States has become a superpower through exploiting and oppressing countries throughout the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa while crushing and bribing workers at home. As workers in the most powerful country on the planet, we must build a global movement against the exploitation of the working class by opposing our government's imperialist goals and toppling its capitalist backers.US exceptionalism, a weird appeal to nationalism. The US, the most bourgeois country in the world, where even their socialists are bourgeois, should naturally lead world communism. Also this isn't how the US became a superpower. And here we go again with capital as individuals. Most Americans don't even have passports.
>Both political parties work for the capitalist class in a political system rigged to keep the ruling class in charge. The working class needs a party of its own to change this. We need an organization by and for our class, where our politicians reflect our values and where we make our decisions democratically. Democratic Socialists of America is that party. We are united by a program of putting workers in control. In our fight against oppression and exploitation, we sit with our neighbors on rent strikes, stand with unions in strikes to win better pay and benefits, protest oppression, and feed our communities. We elect our own members to legislatures around the country to speak out against injustices while fighting for healthcare and cheap groceries. More of capital as individuals. Lol rigged. Bourgeois democracy can be as free as you like and it will still dominate the state. The working class needs an "organisation" (not a party?) to make it unrigged?
>Winning reforms or building a mass workers’ party alone is not enough. The Constitution is written to protect the rich few from the working majority. Anything we win from the rich can be taken away with the stroke of a pen. The historic victories of the labor movement, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement are already being stripped away. In order to protect our victories and implement the wider changes we need, the working class must take political power from the rich and create a new republic based on a democratic constitution. How are they winning reforms and building a mass worker party? Lol all of their demands are petty bourgeois and mostly are about price control. The focus on the constitution is stupid, it's just a piece of paper that reflects society. They have it backwards they're pb morons.
>But winning the battle for democracy is just the start of the fight. The capitalist class will fight back tooth and nail with their control of industries and money. If we want a government by and for workers to stand a chance, we must immediately use political power to seize control of key industries and finance. We will replace the secret deliberations of a few shareholder boards with public, democratic control at every level of the economy. We will have a socialist society where economic prosperity will serve our needs instead of profit. What's the end of the fight, chief? They've misunderstood what the battle for democracy means and literally think it's a battle FOR democracy. See Lenin's PRRK. They also confuse again what value is by arguing that profit should be used for good.
The rest of it is just demands over price controls that are just copies of what is popular now. Maybe they think they're working class demands and are trying to follow the mass line or something lol how can you argue for price controls and then a minimum wage? It is the conservative or bourgeois socialism that Marx mentions all the way back in the manifesto, right down to the demands for prison reform.
>>2357157>Reform & Revolutionbruh they arent even pretending anymoer
>>2357159>More like Fighting Socialismlmao i read it like that too and had to do a double take
>>2357157Are there any contemporary marxist parties leftypol is okay with?
Just asking cuz applying a purity test as an excuse to not be a member in any party is the ultimate of being a sectarian ancom.
>>2357503the point of the union form is not whatever demands are ever achieved but that its mostly or only proletarians engaging with another and spreading association :)
even marx criticized this aspect of unions but still presented it as revolutionary for the proletariat, but youd know that if you werent just a larper lib 👍
>>2357522enough money can be converted into capital, the point of the proletariat is that they cant save up enough to stop being proletarians
>economismwe just making up words now
>>2357526>>2357527>labor aristocracyyou dont even understand what this word means
maotards are so fucking braindead bruh
>>2357530>Any worker with a union job can save up and escape their classyou live in a bubble
>>2357531economism is when you point out interclass reform is not strictly proletarian
>>2357329These replies are fucking delusional, the electoralist-reformist wing of DSA is just as sectarian as any tiny self proclaimed Leninist vanguard but with the added bonus of having no worthwhile political vision.
People who use the phrase "purity tests" unironically sound spineless and possess zero critical thinking.
>>2357329no I dont think so
>>2357350wtf is that first one
>>2357157
> They don't argue why the working class needs to conquer political power (they don't even elaborate on what that is). They just state it lol.
< In general [The Erfurt Programme] suffers from the attempt to combine two things that are uncombinable: a programme and a commentary on the programme as well. The fear that a short, pointed exposition would not be intelligible enough, has caused explanations to be added, which make it verbose and drawn out. To my view the programme should be as short and precise as possible. No harm is done even if it contains the occasional foreign word, or a sentence whose full significance cannot be understood at first sight. Verbal exposition at meetings and written commentaries in the press take care of all that, and the short, precise phrase, once understood, takes root in the memory, and becomes a slogan, a thing that never happens with verbose explanations.Engels, Critique of the 1891 Erfurt Programme
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm
> And thus capital isn't an alien social force, it is a cabal of billionaires who have co-opted two political parties.Reread the what you're quoting.
< We live in a country run by a class of bosses and billionaires called capitalists. … This system can only be ended by the working class taking political power from the rich and building a new society.
> What has the first part got to do with the second? They don't even know what exploitation is, just calling profits lol.Exploitation is extraction of surplus value. Surplus value related to the rate of profit. You wouldn't have profit without exploitation
< The capitalist's profit is derived from the fact that he has something to sell for which he has paid nothing. The surplus-value, or profit, consists precisely in the excess value of a commodity over its cost-price, i.e., the excess of the total labour embodied in the commodity over the paid labour embodied in it. The surplus-value, whatever its origin, is thus a surplus over the advanced total capital. The proportion of this surplus to the total capital is therefore expressed by the fraction s/C, in which C stands for total capital. We thus obtain the rate of profit s/C=s/(c+v), as distinct from the rate of surplus-value s/v.Marx, Capital Vol. 3 Chapter 2
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch02.htm
> Black, immigrant and indigenous people are all automatically working class. They say but don't elaborate that all working people have an interest in opposing discrimination. Trying to argue that just because they're working class means they automatically should.Bad-faith reading. And beyond that another example of the programme vs. commentary Engels mentioned in the quote I provided above. Don't expect a programme to be a commentary.
> More of this capitalism is bad because of consciously bad capitalists lol. If only we had some noble socialists running bourgeois states. 😭More bad-faith reading. The first sentence you quote refers to a global system.
"The most powerful capitalists" makes sense since the paragraph is describing nation-state actions, not some local petty bourgeoisie getting their city to do something. Capitalists do lobby their governments for military actions. This is a concrete thing that happens which undergirds the more abstract thing we call the bourgeois state.
I can continue but I think you're just interested in smelling your own farts by the sheer amount of bad-faith readings I see in this and the rest of the post. Compare how you structure your critique to how Marx criticizes the Gotha Programme or Engels criticizes the Erfurt program. Both of them are clearly trying to make refinements to programme drafts for a workers' movement they believe in. You aren't saying "Okay let's check it out" in order to advance a critique that attempts to further refine the program, sharpening it into something more useful. You're just pretending to smug and know more about Marxism than you actually do.
>>2357494anon if you think that all criticism is pedantic that would explain your problem
to be specific, i dont disagree with most of the criticisms the OP raises, i disagree with their relevance. the statement is not well written imo, but because
1. despite using simple language it lacks actual clarity, relying on a lot of stock phrases
2. most of the phrasing & vocabulary seems more intended to defuse intra-"leftist" bickering than to clarify itself to any mass base e.g. the weird aside about "different types of oppression" could accomplish the same point more effectively by just defining what they regard as "working class", starting from the unity of that category instead of starting themselves on the backfoot presuming liberal identitarianism. its your statement, if youre advocating primacy of class, say that and move on, preemptive defensiveness makes it look weak & unsure of itself
3. the biggest point, where i fully agree with the OP: all goals are either reformist policy proposals or maximum demands for a socialist republic, with NO indication of any kind of strategic roadmap on how to get there. for me this is the only thing thats really unforgivable. especially the membership and also the leadership dont need to have a perfect grasp of critique of political economy or anything else, and its unrealistic & counterproductive to demand that as a standard, tho of course political and economic education should be a pillar of any organization. what they DO need is clear goals in the short, medium, and long-term and an outline of a strategy to reach those goals. that is the only way a political organization can really be evaluated, by its ability to accomplish the goals it has set and its ability to adjust strategy and goals as needed when unsuccessful. without this, the only way to evaluate the org is on the basis of its principles and theoretical premises, which inevitably just runs in circles because you can debate principles and theory forever without it leading to anything
Unique IPs: 23