Re: DSA's Platform Reboot

> On Jul 31, 2026, at 12:58, Anthony Teso via groups.io <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> https://open.substack.com/pub/anthonyteso/p/the-horizon-and-its-author?r=2sbdk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

That’s a very good essay; I enjoyed reading it and largely agree.

But I think there is a crucial omission when considering only what the DSA says and how the DSA decides what to say: What is missing is what DSA does and how it decides what to do. The largest group on the left, for example, has no national plan to fight the Trump administration and growing MAGA fascism. And if there were such a strategy, there is no requirement for chapters to implement it - unless they want to. Didn’t some on this list recently complain about complacency? I think Tony’s prescriptions for democratic decision-making on the DSA electoral platform, by itself, misses the real problem of power. The power sought by the DSA is the power of elected office and legislation. I'm not saying that Tony misunderstands this, just that it's crucial when evaluating the DSA's election strategy and platforms. 

The power of elected office disappears when officials are voted out of office - or if elections are someday cancelled altogether. We have no independent power base such as national trade unions; there are no mass, broad-based coalitions to mobilize masses of people to counter mobilizations financed by the capitalists. The power of local officials, moreover, is not the power to tax billionaires, reduce the military budget, or do anything but run municipalities, which are stretched for funds during the accelerated national decline. Soon to come, no doubt, is a national budget crisis with bond vigilantes and calls for austerity. Electoral politics is the capitalist’s game as capital employs its mass media, think tanks, scholars, Internet influencers, and thought leaders to overwhelm any and all in the next election. The power of elected officials to fight this is fleeting and subject to the whims of voters who change their minds with the election cycle. 

Voters are thrashing and seeking alternatives. People will vote for a Black president in one election cycle, and the same people will vote for a vocal racist in the next; we vote for oyster farmers, influencers, professional drag queens, farmers in overalls, professional wrestlers - and socialists. Working people are looking for some replacement to the old order. Their choices seem to lack any consistency beyond a general rejection of the Democratic and Republican Parties. And those parties, their billionaire backers, bankers, paid thinkers, political operatives, all those who produce generational wealth from the old order, have not formed a consensus on what is next. Biden tried to turn the clock back to the old US imperial order, and that proved unsuccessful. The US no longer has the national wealth nor the industrial base to continue its old order of imperial military domination and unrestrained free markets. Neoliberalism has failed. While the capitalist’s politicians remain firmly in power nationally and in practically all locales, US capitalism has lost its cultural legitimacy. "Free market" ideology and other pillars of neoliberalism are widely discredited among the largest segments of US society. The idea that the US is bringing "democracy" to nations across the globe is correctly seen by millions as only a justification for forever wars.  

Unlike the Marxist state theory of Bonapartism, there is no stalemate between a mobilized and militant working class that is challenging the rule of the capitalist class. It’s not Weimar where working-class parties claim a majority of votes it national elections. Ours is a crisis of the post WW II order and the inability of US imperialism to continue as it has since WW II. The crisis is largely within the US capitalist class and its inability to provide the guns and butter of the old order to the US people. It is a crisis of legitimacy, of capitalism hegemony. I think Gramsci’s theory on cultural hegemony might better explain today's unfolding crisis than Marx’s Bonapartism.

The exclusive focus on electoral politics of the largest group on the left, and among some on this mailing list (not Tony), misses what is crucial today: the mobilization of the working class and its allies in the general population as an independent political force rather than as voters in capital-dominated election cycles.  

Mark

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