|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
DSA and Ocasio-Cortez: No Kind of Socialists Democrats, Republicans: Class Enemies of Workers and Oppressed We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party! With her surprise victory over incumbent Joseph Crowley in the June Democratic Congressional primary, the Bronx’s 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), became an overnight media sensation. She has since been a regular feature of late-night talk shows and the liberal press, which view her and her cothinkers as a shot in the arm of the so-called resistance to Trump. The aim of Ocasio-Cortez and other DSA-backed candidates is to refurbish the Democrats’ image so as to better rope disaffected youth and workers back into the party, which, no less than the Republicans, represents the capitalist system of exploitation, racial oppression and imperialist war. Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory is the centerpiece thus far of the various “progressive” challenges to the Democratic Party leadership following Trump’s election. Pennsylvania DSA members Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato won their primaries for seats in the state assembly, while Julia Salazar is challenging a 16-year incumbent for the New York State Senate. Also in New York, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo is fending off a challenge from Sex and the City star and recently self-identified “democratic socialist” Cynthia Nixon. The bulk of the Democratic leadership has responded to these challengers with barely concealed contempt, with House leader Nancy Pelosi admonishing people to not get “carried away” by Ocasio-Cortez’s victory: “They made a choice in one district.” For their part, Trump’s friends on Fox News have labeled Ocasio-Cortez “a communist” and “downright scary.” In a Fox News interview, Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis launched into a racist diatribe against Andrew Gillum, the black Democratic candidate supported by Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing Gillum. Ocasio-Cortez, Nixon, et al. represent disgruntled elements in the Democratic Party who believe that victories in the midterm and the 2020 presidential elections require more than invented “Russiagate” scandals and the generic sales pitch of being less openly racist, anti-union and reactionary than Trump. The label “democratic socialist” has increasingly come to define liberal Democrats who still rally behind the party, but don’t fancy its establishment leadership. (read on) |
|
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.
Adopted at the Third International Conference of the ICL in early 1998, the declaration presently exists in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, German, Russian, Polish, Italian, Turkish, Indonesian, Greek, Korean and Tagalog. In this post-Soviet period, marked by a deep regression of proletarian consciousness, we continue to be guided by Trotsky's statement that "the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow; it must swim against the current." Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!
