Take from veteran libertarian syndicalist Tom Wetzel’s FaceBook page
“DSA was caught ‘back-footed’ by the anti-racist uprising, and was unable to work with the new layer of leaders that emerged to help organize an ongoing anti-racist organization independent of the NGOs and the Democrats. Rather than seeing the need for a radical reorientation of its activity, DSA’s leadership seems even more committed to ‘down-ballot’ Democratic Party electoral politics. The ostensible DSA ‘left’ – the Bread & Roses caucus in particular – have abandoned any talk of an eventual ‘dirty break’ with the Democrats and the need for an independent working people’s party, in favour of a practice that is indistinguishable from the failed ‘realignment’ project of the social-democratic left of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to transform the Democrats into a party of a different nature.
What is to be done by radicals and revolutionaries inside and outside DSA? We need to recommit to the centrality of extra-electoral organizing and struggle in the coming period. In these struggles, we need to be clear that Biden and the Democrats are as much our enemies as Trump and his middle class hordes. We need to help build spontaneous struggles and on-going independent organizations that will arise against racist police violence, renewed ‘silent’ deportations, mass unemployment, evictions and foreclosures; and renewed attacks on living standards and working conditions.
These struggles will have to go far beyond the ‘campaign’ mode favored by the NGO/non-profit complex, with their emphasis on lobbying, stage-managed demonstrations and the like, or trade union mobilizations that are unwilling to countenance transcending the legal limitations on their actions. We need to look back to the last living examples of mass struggles in the US – the unemployed workers movement of 1929-33; the mass industrial workers’ strikes of 1934-1937, the early Civil Rights and Black Power movement and the wave of multi-racial working-class job actions in the late 1960s and early 1970s – for our inspiration.”
