This piece is part of an ongoing debate within this collective, as well the mass organizations we’re involved in, about whether we can electorally transform society in ways that the oppressed need. It is a call for the nonnegotiable necessity of an independent revolutionary movement able to take initiative in long term strategic ways, a movement that has a separate apparatus, identity, program, and agenda than those that are part of the legal left. This means a movement whose defining unity is a profound radical change in society — toward a socialism that is not conceived as “welfare state writ large” or a bit of nationalization, but as a movement with a unified understanding of the need for the deep structural and uncompromising uprooting of empire, national oppression, the inequality of women and non-men, police and prisons, and the exploitation of one human by another. This piece will show what we strive for in the organizing projects, propaganda projects, and theoretical projects our members are involved in as it relates to elections. We encourage communists and non-communists alike to study this and criticize us as part of a living dialogue against strategies that urge us to abandon revolution for the system’s politic of the “real.”

A black hole occurs when millions of star’s worth of gas gets compressed into a supermassive space that sucks in matter for lightyears around it, depriving the local area of star making material. Eventually, as the star-building material gets locked up in black holes, white dwarfs and other star relics, the galaxy becomes fainter as the massive, short-lived stars wink out and only the long-lived red dwarfs remain. Eventually, these too will fade away, leaving a dead, dark and desolate galaxy filled with nothing but black holes, black dwarfs (White dwarfs that have cooled down) and the occasional cold, dead planet that survived its star’s death.

THE EVENT-HORIZON

The system and its ruling class generally push people, especially the proletariat, out of political life. Then, once every few years, it drops vast sums of money and energy to indoctrinate people in its politics which is the management of the state of affairs. And it mobilizes people temporarily in this ritualized process of electioneering and voting. This arena, and even these local elections here in the working class neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, are not an opportunity for revolutionaries, but one of the least advantageous times for conducting our politics – it is the place and time where revolutionary voices are blown away, and a relentless (and very reactionary!) logic grips. Some “socialists” don’t even feel the need to hide their opportunism, they don’t even feel the need to even imply that they see these sham elections that mean nothing to our class as somehow illegitimate, they explicitly invest money and support in running people for senate or city council, upholding this system, its offices, the constitution, “American democracy,” the due process of this racist lynching court system, the “will of the people,” and so on. Who are those that wish to push us into this black star – which has historically and will today swallow us, if we choose to steer our ship into it?

This goofball bunch of pig apologists, collaborators, NGO poverty pimps, and water carriers for the ruling class have gained momentum since the election of Kshama Sawant in Seattle to City Council and Bernie Sanders’ nearly successful securing of the Democratic presidential candidacy. While us, poor people, alienated youth, black people, immigrants (especially the undocumented) become tense when cops arrive into a situation because we know that the police are the enemy. But these “socialists” see a potential Sheriff they can help elect. While we have mothers who warn us that confrontation with the police can lead to death, to swallow pride in front of magistrates and put on passive, non-hostile poker faces to not go to the jail, the Democratic Socialists of America see an excellent opportunity helping one run for office! In Brooklyn there was a DSA candidate for District Attorney in the Democratic primary and there is now a DSA city council candidate who works as a clergy liaison with the NYPD, the “stop and frisk” and mass surveillance police agency. In Pittsburgh we have the endorsement of Mik Pappas by the DSA to be the Magistrate of Garfield, East Liberty, Stanton Heights, Morningside, Upper Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, Friendship, and Highland Park.

These neighborhoods are ground zero for urban displacement (what people call “gentrification”) in Pittsburgh, it’s where the smashed ruins of Penn Plaza are at, a housing complex which was sold to LG Realty to be turned into a Whole Foods for the new residents. Pappas’ office is actually located on Penn Avenue, a street in Garfield and Upper Lawrenceville that was once mostly Black, but that now caters to yoga studios, dog wash stores, art galleries, tech incubators, and other gentrifying businesses that aren’t there to suit the needs of the people in the neighborhood. In Pappas’ Magisterial district there was 650 landlord-tenant cases last year alone, data revealing deep economic trauma and abuse by politicians, city planners, developers, bankers, and landlords against the working class.

But will this end, or at least meaningfully mitigate, that trauma? No, we all know it will not. One sees that this politics that advocates a gamble in trauma mitigation is (in essence) liberal and social democratic, not communist and revolutionary. What is harmful though, is the pitch they are making to the revolution-inclined in the neighborhoods, those people who are ready to fight for their lives and for a new society. Its point is, inherently and rather consciously, the liquidation of independent communist work as “ultra left” and the promotion of an illusion that a stage of social democratic activism will create more favorable conditions for radical social change.

Pushing for elections, then, represents the liquidation of any militant anti-gentrification movement. It represents flying into the blackhole, running a campaign as nothing more than part of a immediate social movement protest around immediate demands, with “socialism” as a passing reference. It means never creating a revolutionary situation. What are some examples of elections liquidating militancy? And it’s also easy to talk about the liquidators, but what are the methods of initiating revolutionary struggle and gathering revolutionary forces?

?2. LIQUIDATIONISM: THE BLACK HOLE OF STRUGGLE

History has showed that when phony “communists” in the USA entered into elections, it’s been both disastrous and a predictable joke—immediately upon entering the process of supporting ‘progressive’ candidates you enter into a process in which you find yourself supporting the empire, its enforcers, and its illusions. You find yourself arguing that domestic concessions are more important than opposing worldwide murder… and you’ll find yourself exaggerating the differences between different shades of imperialist and pro-police politics. Most important: You spend your time training anyone you meet, influence or lead in bourgeois politics (cut of the pie, budgetary approach to policy, inner-imperialist compromise, imperialist foreign policy, focus on reform at the margins, etc) rather than in proletarian politics. This is, in short, liquidationism—the reformist theory, strategy, and tactics of a capitalist reformist movement infiltrating and overcoming the revolutionary theory, strategy and tactics of a revolutionary communist movement through the latter entering into alignment with the former and thus losing its ability to fight. There are many examples of this in 20th century USA to help us guide our thinking on the question of liquidationism.

The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) supported the Democratic Party—from the inside and outside—since the 1936 Presidential election. It dumped the Trade Union Unity League and other mass worker organizations and marched them into the AFL-CIO. CPUSA became a junior partner within Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War coalition, which allowed it to rise to its greatest size in history – with hundreds of thousands of members – but as the left wing of the Democratic war coalition. It enforced “no strike” pledges in the industries it organized, dropped all pretenses of support for Puerto Rican independence as the “blood tax” (what they called the WW2 draft there) marched them as colonial subjects off to fight, and angrily attacked Communists in Alabama who chose to organize black sharecroppers, as this upset the Klan-affiliated Dixiecrats who were part of Roosevelt’s electoral coalition. For all this pandering and reactionary work, the CPUSA was then discarded and shattered when their good graces no longer served U.S. imperialism in its temporal and opportunistic alliance with the Soviet Union.

From there the CPUSA still supported Democratic candidates, with the exception of their third party attempt with Henry Wallace after WW2. They would also “run” their own Communist candidates, but mainly as a gimmick, so that their favored “progressive” Democrat could disavow Communist support (“how can you accuse me of association with the Communist Party, they are running someone against me!”)

In the Democratic primaries of 1968, thousands of antiwar college students went “Clean for Gene,” cutting their hair and straightening it. These efforts at first demobilized many people, while conversely, for all things are in contradiction, the 1968 Democratic National Convention showed who the gatekeepers of the Party were – and the riots that followed taught a harsh lesson against trusting in bourgeois elections and politicking.

But still afterwards quite a few sheepdoggers (i.e. those who gather up the people who drift away from their “rightful” bourgeois leaders”) continued their liquidationist work – for instance Carl Davidson, the Aliquippa DSA water-carrier for the Democrats. Davidson saw the George McGovern campaign in 1972 as an arena for finally pressing through the antiwar victory everyone had been fighting for. Not just liberals, but supposed leftist forces joined into the sheep dogging;, including, for example, Jane Fonda who had famously gone to North Vietnam and made a series of historically important defeatist statements, including in broadcasts to American GIs. More, the Vietnamese Workers Party urged revolutionaries to actively support McGovern. Curiously influenced by that, the Revolutionary Communist Party’s close collaborators in party-building at that time, the Black Workers Congress, was urging McGovern support. The word was put out (deceitfully) that “The Vietnamese are losing the war” — and that if we didn’t support McGovern, they might suffer a military collapse. This, again, caused considerable disorientation and confusion.

So where was the DSA during this? Its leader Michael Harrington was at first to the right of even Carl Davidson. As author of “The Other America,” the forces that grouped around Harrington were greatly encouraged by the rise of Lyndon Johnson to the U.S. presidency, especially with his attempt to formulate a “Great Society” of new social programs (wedded to the voting rights act), as a response to the struggles of black people for liberation.

The excitement over the liberal “domestic agenda” made the democratic socialists scared of the new antiwar movement, which had started during Kennedy’s opening of intervention in Vietnam. They used the rebating excuse of “communists” in the antiwar movement to take a distance. Today, funny enough, DSA members are still barred from being “a member of a Leninist organization,” just as back then they were wedded to an old and very reactionary 1950s policy of refusing to work in any coalition that included “the Stalinist totalitarians,” since (they argued) such a movement would not have any credibility in the USA. This was opportunism, considering that what they cared more about was seeking sympathy and possible allies in ruling class circles than the construction of an independent proletarian politics.

Michael Harrington’s intuitive sympathy for Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Humphrey meant that the democratic socialists were MIA in the creation of the greatest anti-imperialist movement in U.S. history (and it meant that, as a trend, they were not able to build themselves a new political current out of the 1960s revolutionaries even though the ground was as fertile for their trend as it was for others).

Later the DSA was instrumental in backing Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. Using a lot of self-deception and ignoring the dangers of again tailing liberal electoral campaigns, the DSA again never learned and walked into the wolfs den. Jackson then worked ruthlessly to dismantle (shatter!) those forces that had grouped around him, precisely so they could not operate as an independent force. How could he broker his career as a fixture within the Democratic Party if he allowed anything “independent” to operate? The aftermath of Sanders’ defeat, of which the DSA has done little summation or analysis, also showed a similar process of dismantlement, with an emphasis on a “political revolution” around supporting Hillary that came after.

These all should be raised as the cautionary tales they are. Analogies are difficult, and Bernie Sanders (for many reasons) will never simply be “today’s Lyndon Johnson” — even as he now emulates him in some ways by voting to escalate Trump’s Afghan war and aggression towards Korea. While this history should underscore the importance of opposing the U.S. government (whoever sits in the seats of power), and developing a revolutionary communist movement with real and proletarian independence from bourgeois machinations, initiative, and a public radical critique of the capitalist system itself, the DSA will continue smashing its head on the pavement, continuing Harrington’s tradition of being fascinated with the “domestic agenda” of liberals-in-power, and an ambivalent or paralyzed and paralyzing stand toward their attacks against the people.

When the social democrats, in this ambivalence, do not take a stand with the masses, it will prove forever unforgivable. The masses are watching. History is watching. These false socialists and their so-called progressive candidates will inevitably commit crime after crime against the people and their revolutionary initiative, and it will be necessary to resist their influence if we do not wish to capitulate totally to liquidation.

?3. REFORM OR REVOLUTION?

Freidrich Ebert, The Bern, and Mik Pappas