Re: DSA's Platform Reboot

[Edited Message Follows]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2026 at 01:25 PM, Mark Baugher wrote:

> 
> Isn't that same as opportunism? We run because we can get elected and the
> other work is too hard.

No, knocking on doors and speaking with electors is not "opportunism" any more than  speaking with fellow workers on the job. Each brings you into contact with the working class and counts as organizing.  We've all done both, and it's why even today the grouplets which identify with the Marxist and Lennist traditions continue to run candidates.

Parliamentary and non-parliamentary action complement each other. True, you can't do the same sustained political work with voters as you can in daily contact with fellow workers on the job. On the other hand, unless you're in a big warehouse like Amazon, you won't reach as many workers as you can in a neighbourhood in the course of a campaign. If the unlikely event you manage to win a widely followed state and national campaign (as opposed to Mark's example of the SWP's Kansas City school board campaign), it can reap wider political dividends.

Why am I even having to point this out on a marxmail list? Electoral participation is ABC for Marxists if not for anarchists.  Mark is not an anarchist. But impatience at the lack of a revolutionary socialist alternative and frustration with the limitations of electoral politics, especially its capacity to channel and coopt dissent, has led many Marxists to abstain from electoral politics.

I can speak from my own experience with the left-centre NDP. After the WaffIe I only made brief forays into it when I saw motion to the left of the party leadership and program. All these efforts came to naught, which was not unexpected. But the interaction with both party loyalists and left reformist activists, together with the more broad-based door knocking and other forms of canvassing, gave me a finger on the pulse of the working class which in itself justified the intervention. And these later hiccups to the left of the party were nothing compared to the large scale challenges to the party establishments posed by DSA or the Waffle.


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