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If we had socialists in office they would use any & every opportunity to fight for genuine reforms that would benefit the working class.
Socialists would use the inaction & resistance of the capitalist parties to expose them & to organize the working class.
If we had socialists in office they would use any & every opportunity to fight for genuine reforms that would benefit the working class.
Socialists would use the inaction & resistance of the capitalist parties to expose them & to organize the working class.
AOC & her defenders are basically arguing that they are keeping their powder dry for future fights with the Democratic establishment. They don’t want to expend political capital on a parliamentary maneuver that they know will fail.
However this outlook is couched in The Squad’s supine deference to the Democratic Party & its “establishment” leadership, which they have sadly adopted since day 1. Each of them has drifted steadily to the right since entering Congress.
As a small, isolated rump of “socialist” representatives, feeling the absence of an independent class base of their own, the “socialist” reps in Congress have naturally found their agendas dictated by their position vis-a-vis Nancy Pelosi & her ilk.
Their outlook is to play a long game of horse trading with “corporate” Democrats, which necessitates silencing criticism from the left. In doing so, they undercut the means of developing an independent, organized, powerful socialist party - the only alternative to their approach.
Jimmy Dore is an accidental figure in all of this. There’s little value in “forcing a vote” in this circumstance since everyone knows it will fail. The Democrats will not allow M4A to pass without a determined mass class struggle to achieve it, no matter how bad it may look.
To Dore & his supporters this is an opportunity to put AOC & the rest of them to a test. But what happens when they fail the test? The only fruitful outcome to this scenario is for socialists to use it to agitate for an independent socialist party.
That seems to be why many of those around the Movement for a People’s Party are attaching much importance to this episode. It remains to be seen how MPP develops, but I think so far there has been an overemphasis on personal qualities & parliamentary mechanics before politics.
At the end of the day, the main role of a socialist in office is to expose the capitalists, their government, & their parties & to use those exposures to organize the working class to fight for socialism. That objective should be at the forefront of their activity.
Of course we aren’t going to get that from Democrats, no matter how “left.” But if the MPP is going to offer something substantively different, then it needs to first clarify its aims.
As we’ve seen with The Squad, in the absence of a class-independent party fighting for an overthrow of capitalism & holding its representatives accountable to that perspective, the system has no difficulty ensnaring & defanging radicals.
So in order for something like the MPP to offer a fundamental alternative to the Democrats, it needs to stand for bringing the working class (& not merely “the people”) to power in a decisive class showdown. There are capitalists who support M4A too.
