How Both Sides Obscure the Struggle for Socialism
In recent weeks, the Democratic Socialists of America has claimed a handful of electoral “victories.” In New York’s 7th and 13th Districts covering Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated the Democratic Party old guard in the primaries. In Colorado’s 1st District, Melat Kiros unseated 15-term incumbent Democrat Diana DeGette. These candidates have run on common platforms such as Medicare For All, Abolish Ice, Ending War, Housing for All, and Unions for All.
As prices for rent, food, gas, insurance, and more continue to climb while wages stay low, and with jobs being few and far between, the workers of this country look for a way out. Daily stress from bills, debt, and harsh workplaces wears us down. Our families are more and more burdened by this week-to-week, day-to-day struggle. Meanwhile, the capitalist class throws a parade. The stock market reaches atmospheric heights, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, billions more of our dollars are sent to fight wars against competing states, and impossible sums of money are poured into AI technology that the capitalists will use to surveil and displace us from work to their exclusive benefit. The situation is worsening. In the desperate grasp for a way out of this reality (worker’s daily reality within capitalism), the ruling class has developed two opposing and equally pernicious political options, both aimed at keeping capitalism alive and well.
On the one hand, we have the MAGA movement, spearheaded by Trump. MAGA reaction seeks a forceful imposition of labor discipline, of division amongst the working class against itself, to better exploit us, as well as a more aggressive confrontation against the USA’s capitalist rivals in China, Russia, Iran, and so forth. It emerged as a force resisting the trend of relative US political, economic, and military decline on the world stage. Now, MAGA kicks and screams, deploying one repressive measure after another against the workers and people of this country and of the whole world in their futile attempt to maintain the US as the unchallenged supreme imperialist power. Their attempts to discipline labor with ICE raids, and by beating back competitors such as Iran, have worsened the situation for workers. More boss terror, higher prices. This is the MAGA agenda.
On the other hand, we have the “progressive” movement, led by a number of different forces, including notable DSA allies and members such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker. As in previous times in the history of capitalism, a social force seeking to put lipstick on the capitalist pig through reforms gains momentum. The DSA’s June victories with Valdez, Chevalier, and Kiros are the latest for this “progressive” trend that steals the name of socialism and claims to be the voice of the working class. It must be highlighted that each and every one of the named victorious candidates ran, not as members of the Democratic Socialists of America, but as members of the Democratic Party, the very same political party that supported the invasion of Iraq, the Wall Street bailouts, the genocide of Gaza—in short, the exploitation and oppression of all workers and people.
The DSA’s strategy is to develop the “left” wing of the Democratic Party, to transfigure the Democrats into a party that, per Mamdani, “can win [nationally by] a focus on working people.” This strategy fails to recognize the fundamental clash between workers and capitalists. Capitalists can only exist by having a class of people (the working class) who they may exploit for their labor power to generate all of their profits. Without labor to exploit, there can be no profit; no profit, no capitalist. The government serves the needs of the capitalists, by keeping the entire exploitative system in place with its legal, educational, cultural, and political arms. There can be no changing, no reforming, of such a government, built to exploit all workers, just as one cannot “reform” a Toyota Corolla to use as a cargo ship. The DSA, by making its strategy to mutate the Democratic Party into a worker’s party, diverts the upswell in popular energy against this system towards a cliff-dive. Their unofficial mouthpiece, Jacobin, celebrated the electoral wins as securing “strong partners in government.” This is the grand horizon of the “progressive” trend exposed in its own words: not the abolition of the capitalist state, but a “friendlier” seat within it. The DSA declares that workers, now struggling to decide which bills to fall behind on this month, should be glad that their exploiters can look forward to a fresh round of “strong partners.”
Under the leadership of Trump, the MAGA movement has from the outset labeled these DSA social democrats, Mamdani, and other progressives as “communists.” Facing record-low approval ratings and the threat of losing control over the legislative branch of the federal government, Trump employs the age-old tactic of red-baiting, whipping up a false characterization of the threat of communism. In this way, both sides obscure the actual definition of socialism-communism as a system free from exploitation, defined not by endless profit-seeking but by the fulfillment of the needs of all workers and people through the establishment of a worker’s state and the construction of a new political economic system.
To be clear, both MAGA and “progressivism” sow illusions in the consciousness of the workers and people of the US. Each uses the other as a political commodity, to ensure victory and channel popular indignation into bourgeois methods of managing the system and averting crises. Objectively, these forces delay any challenge to the power of the bourgeois state itself, prolonging the workers’ subjugation. In essence, both prop up capitalism, containing the class struggle and channeling it into system-compliance.
In response, the CWPUSA asserts that both MAGA reaction and progressive reform are dead ends. Both will be swept away by the organized working class in its historical and inevitable quest for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—the very system that is exploiting us all, that is wholeheartedly represented by both reaction and reform.