not gonna hold my breath on that one. but you never know.
IF they don't let Trump get another nominee through, it's because they're shrewd enough to understand they would be jumping the shark. that it might actually be the final straw that causes liberals to lay down jefferson's manual and actually demand Democrats wield power for once, and possibly even for the Democrats to be miffed enough at McConnell to actually answer that call. not because they care so much if the court is a 6-3 conservative majority, or what harms it might cause to the public, but because McConnell will have exceeded the boundaries of their non-aggression pact. they want to look like they are trying their best and just coming up short, to keep up the charade. if they look like they're being made fools of, the voters might actually primary them, or even worse: donors could lose confidence!
Schumer is probably throwing a party, considering libs nearly crashed ActBlue last night, dumping something like $15 million into senate races. unfortunately, i figure 90% of that went to McGrath's money bonfire. though there is no reason why he couldn't insist she transfer some of it back to the party (unlimited transfers) so they can spend in senate races where they stand a snowball's chance in hell.
believe it or not generic democrat and you-hate-to-admit-it-but-he-really-is-a-zaddy Jon Ossoff is neck in neck to flip a seat in Georgia. astronaut Mark Kelly (the only one of Schumer's cast of centrist losers that I don't totally loathe because space is cool) looks sure to beat McSally. Gideon is edging out Collins. Hickenlooper should beat Cory Gardner if he doesn't frack himself in the dick. Schumer is on the verge of becoming majority leader, and he sure as hell doesn't want AOC to primary him in 2022.
RBG keeling over was surely his wettest of wet dreams. honestly who even cares if Biden wins, so long as Dems flip the senate. that has to be what Schumer is thinking. (and honestly, that is imo the best outcome for the left, too.) he is liable to expand a senate majority in 22 is Trump wins. i am sure he's fucking giddy. hell, i wouldn't put it past him to have blasted the old witch with the CIA cancer ray himself.
so long as Dems flip the senate. that has to be what Schumer is thinking. (and honestly, that is imo the best outcome for the left, too.)
The best outcome for the left in this election would be for working people to turn away from the Democrats en masse, because the Dem Party exists for the purpose of engineering the rule of the enemy class.
The Dems have literally nothing to offer working people, which is why they actively fought to keep any promise of reform off of the ballot this election.
Not only are they hostile to working class interests, the fact we are even talking about their marginal preferability (to Republicans) is a testament to their ability to co-opt and extinguish class conscious positions.
i think you have bought into a false premise if you think we need to "abandon" the Democratic party. mostly because, the "Democratic Party" is actually not a party. it's an electoral organization. 99% of what they do is nominate and run candidates for office. but outside of that, it's actually pretty pathetic how little true political work they do. they don't educate, organize, or coordinate beyond candidates in election cycles.
if you really think about what a Party should be, the DSA (for example) is more of a political party than the Democratic Party, even though the DSA is explicitly not registered as a "party", and they don't want a ballot line. but it's important to understand "party" in this context (like how you register with the FEC and IRS) means almost exclusively an electoral apparatus that runs candidates on a ballot line, and not the capital-p Party in a communist or socialist context.
when you stop thinking of the Democrats as a Party, and instead as a ballot line for bourgeois elections, then suddenly, it turns out, there is nothing to leave. there is just a ballot line to run candidates on, and everything else is ancillary to the ballot line. the phone banking, the canvassing, the massive fundraising, all the boutique service businesses like pollsters, printers, c o n s u l t a n t s, even the lobbyists -- it's all just ancillary to a ballot line. they have this massive infrastructure, and basically, all they do is run candidates. that's it! it's a pretty pathetic showing, they could add in so much political work, if their agenda was to be anything other than an electoral apparatus.
you do see some candidates getting more involved in their communities, offering services, that kind of thing. like AOC was organizing some mutual aid stuff. but still, that is not through the local Democratic party, it's through NGO's in the orbit of the Democratic party. imagine, for example, the kind of power the Democrats could wield if they really decided to take up political work beyond elections. you have some legislation you are trying to get through? some blue dogs or moderate republicans are stalling you. ok, you use your deep ties with organized labor to do a work stoppage. or you have protests shut down traffic or crowd out a certain business or whatever is relevant to what you are trying to accomplish.
one example i can think of is the recent GOP covid stimulus bill. it was anemic but did offer some aid to people on unemployment ($300/wk). but it also had some crazy poison pills like forcing all schools to reopen full-time. well, if the Democrats were a Party and not just a ballot line org, they could have worked with teacher unions to pass the bill with that poison pill, and rely on the teacher unions to strike to keep the schools closed until the pandemic subsides. that's a dual power strategy the Dems leadership won't touch with a 100 ft. pole.
but the flip side is this: you don't have to "leave" the Democratic party, because it's not a party. it's nothing more than a ballot line. this is the DSA's take. if you want to run a candidate in an election, make a tactical decision about the best approach. that will often be running a strong challenger in the Dem primary. but in some cases, like Bernie Sanders, it makes sense to run as an independent. in some cases, like Kshama Sawant and her comrades in SA, it makes sense to run as a third party. another example: the Working Families Party has a fusion ballot line in New York. there is no point or meaning really to "leave" because affiliation with the Democratic party is all but meaningless. in a few states, it means you registered to vote in bourgeois elections and marked Democrat. sometimes you need to do that to vote in the Democratic primary. so what, that doesn't make you politically a part of the Democratic party in any way. "being a Democrat" is purely about how you self-identify, and in this context is nothing more than a liberal vice.
even talking about "entryism" to the Dems doesn't make any sense because the Dem party is nothing but a ballot line! use it like a tool, when it's the right tool for the job. that's all it is.
the other thing you have to accept, as much we all hate it, is that with a few exceptions (like Maine which recently switched to ranked-choice) elections in the USA create a fairly strict "two-party" system. or more accurately a "two ballot line" system. (1) first past the post and (2) winner-take-all just creates that kind of system. it's not necessarily less democratic than any other kind of system, because of the way primaries work. they are mostly codified into state law, making them a legally-binding construction. they are not strictly "party business" but also not strictly state elections. they are a kind of hybrid quasi-election. just like how a one-party system is not inherently less democratic than a multi-party system, because all of the democracy occurs between different caucuses in the one party. (in most jurisdictions, we have effectively one-party systems. only a few jurisdictions are actually "contested" between the two parties.)
any talk of an electoral third-"party" can only mean, outside of a small transition period, that you replace one of the two major parties. you aren't ending the dUoPoLy you are just becoming one of the 2 players in it. that has happened nationally once or twice in US history, with the Democratic-Republican party split, and the Whigs. but even in those cases, you really just had the same voters operating under a new name. it's not like you magically come up some new pool of voters out of the aether. sure you might boost turnout a bit, but not enough to constitute a force equal to one of the two major parties. (while i am getting out pet peeves, it's also why talking of ShEePdOGgInG is dumb as hell.)
if you made a new left-wing party, you know who it will almost exclusively consist of? former Democrats!! so what, you changed the sign on the door. but for this "new" left-wing party to be meaningfully different from the Dems, you really only have a couple levers to adust (1) change the roster of elected officials (2) change the roster of party leadership (3) the composition of the electorate (either political re-alignment and maybe a modest participation boost) (4) have the party start doing political work beyond elections (which will be a function of changing leadership).
but the thing is, you don't actually have to change the name on the door to do any of those things. just do them. vote in the primaries. vote in the party elections. it's happening all over the country. and for better or worse, certain demographics are extremely invested in the "Democrat" brand and you are never going to pry them away from it, and that is (especially older) black voters. i am sorry, but you will not be able to build a winning electoral coalition without black voters, and most of them will never abandon the Dem brand. and honestly, a capital-p Party without black folks in it is probably going to be pretty lousy, too.
it's so much easier to go play in a make-believe electoral sandbox where you make all the rules and everyone is awesome, but you end up with nothing but a lot of energy spent on yet another ballot line for candidates to lose on. the hard electoral work is taking over a real electoral apparatus that actually puts your left-wing people into office. so far that has not been Greens or PSL, it's been Justice Democrats. it's been Sunrise Movement. it's been DSA. yeah, they are a lot of libs, but we wouldn't have Ilhan or Rashida without them, not to mention the newcomers like Cori Bush or whose power level we haven't even witnessed (cringe, i know, but srsly she's good), and especially with the DSA, a slew of actual socialists in local government and statehouses across the country. that makes a material difference in people's lives, within the limits of bourgeois democracy.
so if what you mean by "leave the Democratic party" is "create a new ballot line to run candidates on" that is going to be monumentally stupid most of the time. that is why the People's Party thing is dumb. they don't want to create a real Party from what i can tell, they just want an electoral apparatus, a new ballot line to lose on. if your goal is to create a real capital-p Party, whether that means a disciplined Marxist-Leninist Party doing vanguardism, something more like the DSA which does electoral and non-electoral work (and is fairly multi-discipline despite being a DemSoc org), anarchists forming mutual aid networks, or even something like the Socialist Rifle Association which by a non-electoral definition, is far more of a "Party" than the Dems -- then go for it. unless perhaps something that fits that description already exists, and then maybe considering just joining up with those comrades.
if you want to run a candidate in an election, then probably use one of the two credible electoral apparatuses, (with the Dems making more sense than the GOP, though there are exceptions.) or maybe run as an independent if you think you can actually win. or if you are in a race where it makes sense, use the WFP or SA or Green, or PSL, or peace and freedom, or whatever ballot line. there are 1000 ballot line "parties" (some do other political work, no shade on PSL) to run on. it makes almost no sense whatsoever to roll up a new one just because you are frustrated with how much current Dem leadership sucks.
TLDR, "leaving" the Democratic party doesn't even make sense because it's not a real Party, it's a ballot line. creating a new ballot line doesn't make sense because our elections are structurally two-"party". whatever it is you want to do politically, there is probably already a group of like-minded comrades out there trying to do it who would love to have you.
“In its struggle against the collective power of the propertied classes, the working class cannot act as a class except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to all old parties formed by the propertied classes.
This constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to insure the triumph of the social revolution, and of its ultimate end, the abolition of classes.”
I have no idea why you needed to write an essay to tell me that “D” is just the letter on the ballot line, which is quite literally not true as the Dem Party exists as one of two organizations that have governed the US for the past 150 years, and not as an abstract concept.
This isn’t any less true because the Democratic Party is structured to deny normal people any privileges associated with membership, instead reserving anti-democratic control over the organization for certain segments of the capitalist class.
The fact that literally none of your analysis is grounded in any sort of class perspective is why you think that the capitalists are going to allow you to use their “electoral organization” (in reality, one of their mechanisms of class rule) to exploit “deep ties to organized labor,” which again, in reality, is like a short, collaborationist leash for organized labor held by the capitalists who control the Democratic Party.
Yea, it turns out that if you accept at face value only those forms of politics and struggle held out to you by the ruling class, that your options seem limited in the ways you describe. I’m not “frustrated” with the current Dem leadership, I understand, from a materialist perspective, that the leadership are just manifestations of the class interest of a ruling class that literally governs through the Dem Party, the “second-most-enthusiastic capitalist party in history.”
You don’t, which is why you celebrate the non-existent accomplishments of socialists in the Democratic Party, who have failed in all respects to drag Democratic politics to the left, despite the DSA having had members elected to the Dem Party for decades now (although Ron Dellums went on to have much success as a lobbyist for health insurance companies).
of course, it's one of only two coalitions to govern, because the structure of our voting contests creates inherently a two-party system. there are only two, there will always only be two, it will always be the same two, even if the names change. even when there is a complete inversion of the meaning of the parties. the GOP was a progressive party of Lincoln. the south was staunchly democratic. then the southern strategy -- well you know all this surely. so what does it matter what name is on the ballot line R or D. it is not like saying the "social democratic party" or the "communist party" or the "labor party" or "conservative party" -- those carry an inherent, if imperfect, ideological meaning. but here in the USA it's two parties with names derived federalist minutia of the 18th century, not any real ideological implications. they are just blank vessels in which to conduct elections, bucket A and bucket B.
Marx regarded Lincoln and the Republican party fondly as progressive in his day, finding abolition invigorating to the cause of the working-class. but he would surely be aghast at what they have become today. but we don't have to call anyone revisionist, or it a "degenerated worker's party" or counter-revolutionary, or any such thing because the meaning of "Republican" vs "Democrat" empty and fatuous in the first place.
and today, the Democratic party is barely cohesive as an electoral organization, having someone like Joe Manchin in the same "party" as Lee Carter. you can't seriously think what Marx is saying here as "political party" means whatever these two generic electoral buckets are? yes, they control the bourgeois state between them, of course they do!! and they always have and always will as long as we have a two-party system! but the goal of the working class Party is not to win control of the state at the ballot box and legislate socialism into existence. maybe for DemSocs it is, but that wasn't Marx's idea. and in any case, even if he did mean "political party" in the form of the Democratic or Republican parties, that intended to win at the ballot box -- he was clearly addressing European democracies which were and are multi-party parliamentary systems, not a two-party presidential system like the USA. He might have written to the modern USA, "form a caucus" or "form a political committee" or "form a 501c4" though I don't think his meaning of "political party" here is that vulgar or that literal.
look at either party, and you can see fairly plainly each contain caucuses that would be independent parties in a European parliamentary system. for the Dems the blue dogs and centrist problem solvers caucus would be their own party, as compared to the progressive caucus which would be its own party. the same situation in the GOP, the Freedom caucus would be the far-right party, and the "Republican Main Street Partnership" and "Tuesday group" (what fucking names) would be center-right, and so on. there would be at least 5 or 6 active parties if the US were a multi-party system. we are just in a system where there are two parties for elections and bourgeois democracy. that's not going to change no matter how you take Marx's conception of "political party"
i don't even know what you are talking about "privileges of membership"? like a 10% discount at Denny's? if you want to, i dunno, sit on the central committee -- there are open state party elections/caucuses. what can you do then, not very much, maybe vote on the party chairperson? what can they do? basically, dick all. because it's not a fucking political party, it's one of two electoral apparatuses. only the elected officials (as opposed to party officials) really have any power, and that power is both over the electoral apparatus and the state. and all of this is codified into state election law. for example, the state party committee can't meet and decide they don't like a candidate who won a primary, and then arbitrarily replace them. because nominations are not strictly "party business" governed by party rules, but by rather state election law. because it's not a real party! it's just an arbitrary electoral vehicle. one that is a legal construction as much a political one.
i am not sure how it is a materialist perspective to conflate a two-party presidential system with multi-party parliaments if that is even the meaning of what Marx is saying here. i think he means a revolutionary party that also runs in elections as part of a broad organizing strategy. but the corollary in the US two-party electoral system would be running in a primary election. not fighting state law to maybe after a great deal of organizing, get a ballot line to lose on. you might as well forget fooling with the elections entirely at that point, it's not worth the waste of energy.
to the extent this matters at all is, in my opinion, to maybe accomplish some basic social-democratic reforms while we organize long term for revolutionary action, and revolution will not happen within the electoral apparatus. and it can give elected officials a platform to spread a broader socialist message. and to some degree we can use the infrastructure they have developed for elections, to do other kinds of organizing. so maybe you are ostensibly canvassing for a candidate using NGP-VAN database, but you can also have other conversations or leave other literature while you are knocking doors and meeting your neighbors.
and pooh-pooh the leftward shift in the center-of-balance for the Dems all you want. it was Bernie Sanders who reinvigorated the left in the USA, running as a Democrat. sure he was running on a social-democratic minimum program, and not full worker ownership, but you cannot deny there were many of us who went on to become socialists or communists because of him opening that space. it seems so strange to me that we have an overlapping coalition of left-wing orgs like the Justice Democrats, the DSA, even he Sunrise zoomers, successfully following the playbook Marx has described here and in other writings, in terms of running in elections as an explicitly proletarian party (in the US context, a caucus, a political "committee"), and you are shitting on them as if they are sellouts to capitalism because they didn't run with an "S" by their name and crash out at <1% of the vote.
they are mainly DemSocs, some of them maybe are left-libs, they're not communists. but they are using their platforms to get broad left-wing (not just "progressive") ideas into the mainstream. who cares if AOC calls Pelosi a "momma bear" that is meaningless when she is mostly using her national platform to talking about worker ownership or mutual aid. or Ilhan and Rashida calling out Israel apartheid and imperialism. (too many state and local to even statch the surface). do i expect them to achieve socialism in the Congress? that's just absurd, of course not. but you seem to think since they aren't doing that, their work is a failure, they are just propping up a capitalist "party"? if you expect to achieve socialism through revolution, then this bourgeois-democratic work is just playing with monopoly money anyway. it's messaging, it's a show of organizing mettle. and sure, work vigorously within its limitations improve the material conditions of the working class along the way. but it is not the primary vehicle for advancing the working-class.
i just find your perspective so incoherent, it seems driven mostly by a desire to shit on anyone or anything that hasn't suffered abject failure. if someone scores a win, ah well, that must be because they sold out. no true scotsman socialist can ever catch a W.
btw i am not writing at you, just am just posting on adderall bro, getting my thoughts out there before they evaporate.
Grassley, Collins, Murkowski, Romney have all verbally committed to not confirming a Supreme Senate seat until after the election.
Of course, that's assuming you trust the verbal assurance of a Republican Senator.
not gonna hold my breath on that one. but you never know.
IF they don't let Trump get another nominee through, it's because they're shrewd enough to understand they would be jumping the shark. that it might actually be the final straw that causes liberals to lay down jefferson's manual and actually demand Democrats wield power for once, and possibly even for the Democrats to be miffed enough at McConnell to actually answer that call. not because they care so much if the court is a 6-3 conservative majority, or what harms it might cause to the public, but because McConnell will have exceeded the boundaries of their non-aggression pact. they want to look like they are trying their best and just coming up short, to keep up the charade. if they look like they're being made fools of, the voters might actually primary them, or even worse: donors could lose confidence!
Schumer is probably throwing a party, considering libs nearly crashed ActBlue last night, dumping something like $15 million into senate races. unfortunately, i figure 90% of that went to McGrath's money bonfire. though there is no reason why he couldn't insist she transfer some of it back to the party (unlimited transfers) so they can spend in senate races where they stand a snowball's chance in hell.
believe it or not generic democrat and you-hate-to-admit-it-but-he-really-is-a-zaddy Jon Ossoff is neck in neck to flip a seat in Georgia. astronaut Mark Kelly (the only one of Schumer's cast of centrist losers that I don't totally loathe because space is cool) looks sure to beat McSally. Gideon is edging out Collins. Hickenlooper should beat Cory Gardner if he doesn't frack himself in the dick. Schumer is on the verge of becoming majority leader, and he sure as hell doesn't want AOC to primary him in 2022.
RBG keeling over was surely his wettest of wet dreams. honestly who even cares if Biden wins, so long as Dems flip the senate. that has to be what Schumer is thinking. (and honestly, that is imo the best outcome for the left, too.) he is liable to expand a senate majority in 22 is Trump wins. i am sure he's fucking giddy. hell, i wouldn't put it past him to have blasted the old witch with the CIA cancer ray himself.
The best outcome for the left in this election would be for working people to turn away from the Democrats en masse, because the Dem Party exists for the purpose of engineering the rule of the enemy class.
The Dems have literally nothing to offer working people, which is why they actively fought to keep any promise of reform off of the ballot this election.
Not only are they hostile to working class interests, the fact we are even talking about their marginal preferability (to Republicans) is a testament to their ability to co-opt and extinguish class conscious positions.
i think you have bought into a false premise if you think we need to "abandon" the Democratic party. mostly because, the "Democratic Party" is actually not a party. it's an electoral organization. 99% of what they do is nominate and run candidates for office. but outside of that, it's actually pretty pathetic how little true political work they do. they don't educate, organize, or coordinate beyond candidates in election cycles.
if you really think about what a Party should be, the DSA (for example) is more of a political party than the Democratic Party, even though the DSA is explicitly not registered as a "party", and they don't want a ballot line. but it's important to understand "party" in this context (like how you register with the FEC and IRS) means almost exclusively an electoral apparatus that runs candidates on a ballot line, and not the capital-p Party in a communist or socialist context.
when you stop thinking of the Democrats as a Party, and instead as a ballot line for bourgeois elections, then suddenly, it turns out, there is nothing to leave. there is just a ballot line to run candidates on, and everything else is ancillary to the ballot line. the phone banking, the canvassing, the massive fundraising, all the boutique service businesses like pollsters, printers, c o n s u l t a n t s, even the lobbyists -- it's all just ancillary to a ballot line. they have this massive infrastructure, and basically, all they do is run candidates. that's it! it's a pretty pathetic showing, they could add in so much political work, if their agenda was to be anything other than an electoral apparatus.
you do see some candidates getting more involved in their communities, offering services, that kind of thing. like AOC was organizing some mutual aid stuff. but still, that is not through the local Democratic party, it's through NGO's in the orbit of the Democratic party. imagine, for example, the kind of power the Democrats could wield if they really decided to take up political work beyond elections. you have some legislation you are trying to get through? some blue dogs or moderate republicans are stalling you. ok, you use your deep ties with organized labor to do a work stoppage. or you have protests shut down traffic or crowd out a certain business or whatever is relevant to what you are trying to accomplish.
one example i can think of is the recent GOP covid stimulus bill. it was anemic but did offer some aid to people on unemployment ($300/wk). but it also had some crazy poison pills like forcing all schools to reopen full-time. well, if the Democrats were a Party and not just a ballot line org, they could have worked with teacher unions to pass the bill with that poison pill, and rely on the teacher unions to strike to keep the schools closed until the pandemic subsides. that's a dual power strategy the Dems leadership won't touch with a 100 ft. pole.
but the flip side is this: you don't have to "leave" the Democratic party, because it's not a party. it's nothing more than a ballot line. this is the DSA's take. if you want to run a candidate in an election, make a tactical decision about the best approach. that will often be running a strong challenger in the Dem primary. but in some cases, like Bernie Sanders, it makes sense to run as an independent. in some cases, like Kshama Sawant and her comrades in SA, it makes sense to run as a third party. another example: the Working Families Party has a fusion ballot line in New York. there is no point or meaning really to "leave" because affiliation with the Democratic party is all but meaningless. in a few states, it means you registered to vote in bourgeois elections and marked Democrat. sometimes you need to do that to vote in the Democratic primary. so what, that doesn't make you politically a part of the Democratic party in any way. "being a Democrat" is purely about how you self-identify, and in this context is nothing more than a liberal vice.
even talking about "entryism" to the Dems doesn't make any sense because the Dem party is nothing but a ballot line! use it like a tool, when it's the right tool for the job. that's all it is.
the other thing you have to accept, as much we all hate it, is that with a few exceptions (like Maine which recently switched to ranked-choice) elections in the USA create a fairly strict "two-party" system. or more accurately a "two ballot line" system. (1) first past the post and (2) winner-take-all just creates that kind of system. it's not necessarily less democratic than any other kind of system, because of the way primaries work. they are mostly codified into state law, making them a legally-binding construction. they are not strictly "party business" but also not strictly state elections. they are a kind of hybrid quasi-election. just like how a one-party system is not inherently less democratic than a multi-party system, because all of the democracy occurs between different caucuses in the one party. (in most jurisdictions, we have effectively one-party systems. only a few jurisdictions are actually "contested" between the two parties.)
any talk of an electoral third-"party" can only mean, outside of a small transition period, that you replace one of the two major parties. you aren't ending the dUoPoLy you are just becoming one of the 2 players in it. that has happened nationally once or twice in US history, with the Democratic-Republican party split, and the Whigs. but even in those cases, you really just had the same voters operating under a new name. it's not like you magically come up some new pool of voters out of the aether. sure you might boost turnout a bit, but not enough to constitute a force equal to one of the two major parties. (while i am getting out pet peeves, it's also why talking of ShEePdOGgInG is dumb as hell.)
if you made a new left-wing party, you know who it will almost exclusively consist of? former Democrats!! so what, you changed the sign on the door. but for this "new" left-wing party to be meaningfully different from the Dems, you really only have a couple levers to adust (1) change the roster of elected officials (2) change the roster of party leadership (3) the composition of the electorate (either political re-alignment and maybe a modest participation boost) (4) have the party start doing political work beyond elections (which will be a function of changing leadership).
but the thing is, you don't actually have to change the name on the door to do any of those things. just do them. vote in the primaries. vote in the party elections. it's happening all over the country. and for better or worse, certain demographics are extremely invested in the "Democrat" brand and you are never going to pry them away from it, and that is (especially older) black voters. i am sorry, but you will not be able to build a winning electoral coalition without black voters, and most of them will never abandon the Dem brand. and honestly, a capital-p Party without black folks in it is probably going to be pretty lousy, too.
it's so much easier to go play in a make-believe electoral sandbox where you make all the rules and everyone is awesome, but you end up with nothing but a lot of energy spent on yet another ballot line for candidates to lose on. the hard electoral work is taking over a real electoral apparatus that actually puts your left-wing people into office. so far that has not been Greens or PSL, it's been Justice Democrats. it's been Sunrise Movement. it's been DSA. yeah, they are a lot of libs, but we wouldn't have Ilhan or Rashida without them, not to mention the newcomers like Cori Bush or whose power level we haven't even witnessed (cringe, i know, but srsly she's good), and especially with the DSA, a slew of actual socialists in local government and statehouses across the country. that makes a material difference in people's lives, within the limits of bourgeois democracy.
so if what you mean by "leave the Democratic party" is "create a new ballot line to run candidates on" that is going to be monumentally stupid most of the time. that is why the People's Party thing is dumb. they don't want to create a real Party from what i can tell, they just want an electoral apparatus, a new ballot line to lose on. if your goal is to create a real capital-p Party, whether that means a disciplined Marxist-Leninist Party doing vanguardism, something more like the DSA which does electoral and non-electoral work (and is fairly multi-discipline despite being a DemSoc org), anarchists forming mutual aid networks, or even something like the Socialist Rifle Association which by a non-electoral definition, is far more of a "Party" than the Dems -- then go for it. unless perhaps something that fits that description already exists, and then maybe considering just joining up with those comrades.
if you want to run a candidate in an election, then probably use one of the two credible electoral apparatuses, (with the Dems making more sense than the GOP, though there are exceptions.) or maybe run as an independent if you think you can actually win. or if you are in a race where it makes sense, use the WFP or SA or Green, or PSL, or peace and freedom, or whatever ballot line. there are 1000 ballot line "parties" (some do other political work, no shade on PSL) to run on. it makes almost no sense whatsoever to roll up a new one just because you are frustrated with how much current Dem leadership sucks.
TLDR, "leaving" the Democratic party doesn't even make sense because it's not a real Party, it's a ballot line. creating a new ballot line doesn't make sense because our elections are structurally two-"party". whatever it is you want to do politically, there is probably already a group of like-minded comrades out there trying to do it who would love to have you.
I have no idea why you needed to write an essay to tell me that “D” is just the letter on the ballot line, which is quite literally not true as the Dem Party exists as one of two organizations that have governed the US for the past 150 years, and not as an abstract concept.
This isn’t any less true because the Democratic Party is structured to deny normal people any privileges associated with membership, instead reserving anti-democratic control over the organization for certain segments of the capitalist class.
The fact that literally none of your analysis is grounded in any sort of class perspective is why you think that the capitalists are going to allow you to use their “electoral organization” (in reality, one of their mechanisms of class rule) to exploit “deep ties to organized labor,” which again, in reality, is like a short, collaborationist leash for organized labor held by the capitalists who control the Democratic Party.
Yea, it turns out that if you accept at face value only those forms of politics and struggle held out to you by the ruling class, that your options seem limited in the ways you describe. I’m not “frustrated” with the current Dem leadership, I understand, from a materialist perspective, that the leadership are just manifestations of the class interest of a ruling class that literally governs through the Dem Party, the “second-most-enthusiastic capitalist party in history.”
You don’t, which is why you celebrate the non-existent accomplishments of socialists in the Democratic Party, who have failed in all respects to drag Democratic politics to the left, despite the DSA having had members elected to the Dem Party for decades now (although Ron Dellums went on to have much success as a lobbyist for health insurance companies).
of course, it's one of only two coalitions to govern, because the structure of our voting contests creates inherently a two-party system. there are only two, there will always only be two, it will always be the same two, even if the names change. even when there is a complete inversion of the meaning of the parties. the GOP was a progressive party of Lincoln. the south was staunchly democratic. then the southern strategy -- well you know all this surely. so what does it matter what name is on the ballot line R or D. it is not like saying the "social democratic party" or the "communist party" or the "labor party" or "conservative party" -- those carry an inherent, if imperfect, ideological meaning. but here in the USA it's two parties with names derived federalist minutia of the 18th century, not any real ideological implications. they are just blank vessels in which to conduct elections, bucket A and bucket B.
Marx regarded Lincoln and the Republican party fondly as progressive in his day, finding abolition invigorating to the cause of the working-class. but he would surely be aghast at what they have become today. but we don't have to call anyone revisionist, or it a "degenerated worker's party" or counter-revolutionary, or any such thing because the meaning of "Republican" vs "Democrat" empty and fatuous in the first place.
and today, the Democratic party is barely cohesive as an electoral organization, having someone like Joe Manchin in the same "party" as Lee Carter. you can't seriously think what Marx is saying here as "political party" means whatever these two generic electoral buckets are? yes, they control the bourgeois state between them, of course they do!! and they always have and always will as long as we have a two-party system! but the goal of the working class Party is not to win control of the state at the ballot box and legislate socialism into existence. maybe for DemSocs it is, but that wasn't Marx's idea. and in any case, even if he did mean "political party" in the form of the Democratic or Republican parties, that intended to win at the ballot box -- he was clearly addressing European democracies which were and are multi-party parliamentary systems, not a two-party presidential system like the USA. He might have written to the modern USA, "form a caucus" or "form a political committee" or "form a 501c4" though I don't think his meaning of "political party" here is that vulgar or that literal.
look at either party, and you can see fairly plainly each contain caucuses that would be independent parties in a European parliamentary system. for the Dems the blue dogs and centrist problem solvers caucus would be their own party, as compared to the progressive caucus which would be its own party. the same situation in the GOP, the Freedom caucus would be the far-right party, and the "Republican Main Street Partnership" and "Tuesday group" (what fucking names) would be center-right, and so on. there would be at least 5 or 6 active parties if the US were a multi-party system. we are just in a system where there are two parties for elections and bourgeois democracy. that's not going to change no matter how you take Marx's conception of "political party"
i don't even know what you are talking about "privileges of membership"? like a 10% discount at Denny's? if you want to, i dunno, sit on the central committee -- there are open state party elections/caucuses. what can you do then, not very much, maybe vote on the party chairperson? what can they do? basically, dick all. because it's not a fucking political party, it's one of two electoral apparatuses. only the elected officials (as opposed to party officials) really have any power, and that power is both over the electoral apparatus and the state. and all of this is codified into state election law. for example, the state party committee can't meet and decide they don't like a candidate who won a primary, and then arbitrarily replace them. because nominations are not strictly "party business" governed by party rules, but by rather state election law. because it's not a real party! it's just an arbitrary electoral vehicle. one that is a legal construction as much a political one.
i am not sure how it is a materialist perspective to conflate a two-party presidential system with multi-party parliaments if that is even the meaning of what Marx is saying here. i think he means a revolutionary party that also runs in elections as part of a broad organizing strategy. but the corollary in the US two-party electoral system would be running in a primary election. not fighting state law to maybe after a great deal of organizing, get a ballot line to lose on. you might as well forget fooling with the elections entirely at that point, it's not worth the waste of energy.
to the extent this matters at all is, in my opinion, to maybe accomplish some basic social-democratic reforms while we organize long term for revolutionary action, and revolution will not happen within the electoral apparatus. and it can give elected officials a platform to spread a broader socialist message. and to some degree we can use the infrastructure they have developed for elections, to do other kinds of organizing. so maybe you are ostensibly canvassing for a candidate using NGP-VAN database, but you can also have other conversations or leave other literature while you are knocking doors and meeting your neighbors.
and pooh-pooh the leftward shift in the center-of-balance for the Dems all you want. it was Bernie Sanders who reinvigorated the left in the USA, running as a Democrat. sure he was running on a social-democratic minimum program, and not full worker ownership, but you cannot deny there were many of us who went on to become socialists or communists because of him opening that space. it seems so strange to me that we have an overlapping coalition of left-wing orgs like the Justice Democrats, the DSA, even he Sunrise zoomers, successfully following the playbook Marx has described here and in other writings, in terms of running in elections as an explicitly proletarian party (in the US context, a caucus, a political "committee"), and you are shitting on them as if they are sellouts to capitalism because they didn't run with an "S" by their name and crash out at <1% of the vote.
they are mainly DemSocs, some of them maybe are left-libs, they're not communists. but they are using their platforms to get broad left-wing (not just "progressive") ideas into the mainstream. who cares if AOC calls Pelosi a "momma bear" that is meaningless when she is mostly using her national platform to talking about worker ownership or mutual aid. or Ilhan and Rashida calling out Israel apartheid and imperialism. (too many state and local to even statch the surface). do i expect them to achieve socialism in the Congress? that's just absurd, of course not. but you seem to think since they aren't doing that, their work is a failure, they are just propping up a capitalist "party"? if you expect to achieve socialism through revolution, then this bourgeois-democratic work is just playing with monopoly money anyway. it's messaging, it's a show of organizing mettle. and sure, work vigorously within its limitations improve the material conditions of the working class along the way. but it is not the primary vehicle for advancing the working-class.
i just find your perspective so incoherent, it seems driven mostly by a desire to shit on anyone or anything that hasn't suffered abject failure. if someone scores a win, ah well, that must be because they sold out. no true
scotsmansocialist can ever catch a W.btw i am not writing at you, just am just posting on adderall bro, getting my thoughts out there before they evaporate.
God I wish what my boomer parents believed about Democrats was true.
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oh no