The New York City DSA's infantile, sectarian criticism of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

The New York City Democratic Socialists of America has issued a statement censuring comrade Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for saying in an  interview with CNN that she “look[s] forward to… us rallying behind all Democratic nominees, including the governor, to make sure that he wins in November"

It is unsigned but presented as a "NYC-DSA Statement" and it castigates Ocasio Cortez  for having violated "a responsibility to name our enemies."

"An endorsement for Cuomo suggests that working people across New York should accept him as an ally," and worse, Ocasio Cortez "erases the real distance between insurgent socialist candidates and the Democratic Party establishment."

The most troubling thing is that this statement reeks of factionalism, of people being lined up in some private little group built around an important “principle” like we must “name our enemy,” or that DSA members “who seek to speak on behalf of working people” must defend X, Y, or Z position. And it is a very transparent attempt to drive AOC out of the organization.

But the DSA is not and must not become a faction – and no one should be required to act as if they were in one. The DSA is the beginning of a party, and a party is not a faction.

A party, a genuine party represents a class, section of a class or some other social force. In the case of parties based on working people, ideally it is defined by its base, not what it says on some paper, but what its adherents believe and want. You can tell the DSA is the beginning of a party from the way people are joining – on pure class instinct and identification.

A faction is defined by its ideas. It’s borders are not set by class interest but by agreement with a whole litany of positions. No matter how big it is, a faction that sets itself up as a separate, independent organization with a position on everything under the sun that you have to accept is not a party but a sect.

Viewed as a whole, the far left in the United States mostly wasted the entire last 100 years precisely on this mistake.

We called it “Leninism,” and “building a party of a new type,” and only in the past decade or so have many of us learned that this was a bureaucratic fabrication and not what Lenin thought at all. In his very last major work, Left Wing Communism: an infantile disorder, Lenin wrote:

History, incidentally, has now confirmed on a vast and world-wide scale the opinion we have always advocated, namely, that German revolutionary Social-Democracy ... came closest to being the party the revolutionary proletariat needs in order to achieve victory.

Not "a party of a new type."

Alexandria was entirely within her rights to speak as she spoke. Even if the organization had adopted a position to not vote for "all Democratic nominees," an anti-endorsement, so to speak, she would still have been entirely within her rights to express her own views.

As for the specific infantile stupidity of creating a principle that you must never say vote for X if X is a bad person, people might want to read the Lenin pamphlet I just quoted, especially the part on "critical support."

In a separate post I will take up the question of electoral tactics, and then this idea of publicly pillorying one of your own members, without bringing charges, without giving her a chance to defend herself, on the basis of unstated rules about what you must and must not say if you are a candidate, or perhaps just if you're a Latina who is a candidate.

--José G. Pérez