Neal Meyer is a member of New York City Democratic Socialists of America.
By fighting Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become the next Speaker of the House, the right wing of the Republican Party won significant concessions that will make it a powerful player in Congress. The Left should learn to replicate its tactics for egalitarian ends.
The Left’s beachhead in Congress has grown in the last few years. But at the current rate of expansion, the Left will remain a minority in the Democratic Party’s congressional caucus until 2091. We can’t wait that long for change.
The Democratic Party establishment, backed by the rich, hit back hard against democratic socialists in New York on Tuesday. But the Democratic Socialists of America beat back the attacks on incumbents and successfully expanded its bench in Albany.
That workers must liberate themselves rather than rely on top-down liberation is one of the few rules for socialist organizing that Marx and Engels ever laid down. It’s nonnegotiable: socialists believe in workers freeing themselves through class struggle.
Bernie Sanders is sounding the alarm: working-class people are fed up with Democrats’ failed strategy of behind-the-scenes negotiations. But the party won’t listen. So Sanders and the Squad should take a more aggressive approach against the Democrats.
There’s no natural law that says the Democrats have to lose next year’s midterm elections. But if Democrats can’t fundamentally improve the quality of life for working-class voters, there’s good reason to think they will lose.
Despite continued proclamations that Joe Biden is a transformative president, his agenda has been much more about placating business interests than shifting power to workers.
Support for a multiparty system is widespread in the United States. Such a system is crucial to ridding this country of the two-party trap and building a real democratic system. That’s why socialists should support proportional representation in our electoral system.
Socialism is back on the agenda in the United States, thank God. And today’s newly minted socialists shouldn’t be afraid to embrace Marxism.
In a story released yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she and Joe Biden “would not be in the same party” in a different country. Centrists freaked out. But she’s right — fighters for the working class like AOC and Bernie Sanders aren’t on the same team as defenders of Wall Street and war like Biden.
Everybody’s talking about democratic socialism these days. Here’s what you need to know about it.