Re: "Nero fiddles while Rome burns"

Hi Tony. Thanks for clarifying the sanctions which would be available to the DSA if an elected member of the organization misbehaves while in office.

You also write:

"You suggest I may be calling on DSA to campaign for constitutional changes enshrining popular recall and salary caps, and that both could gain traction inside DSA and in the class. They might. It is not what I am proposing, and I would resist it becoming the answer, for the reason that goes to my whole argument. A constitutional campaign takes a mechanism the organization could operate on itself this year and relocates it into the bourgeois constitution, where it will be enacted, if ever, by the institutions you and John have both just correctly said would neuter it. That is displacement... I have no objection to agitating for popular recall. I object to it answering the question of what we do about our own electeds, because then the answer is "after the amendment passes.”

I didn’t mean it in terms of displacement; the DSA can both  disassociate itself from its maverick member, as you’ve described above, and publicly agitate for constitutional  recall and a salary cap.

While John, you, and I agree there is zero chance the bourgeois state would accede to granting popular power to the people - the fate of all such demands -  the campaign is what it is important.  Seems to me a pay cap and the right of  recall would provide a ready illustration of the huge divide in wealth and power which exists between the people and their elected representatives from the “billionaire class”, highlighting the unequal and  undemocratic nature of the system.

Anyway, just a thought, based on my expectation it would receive strong, perhaps near unanimous, support  if I were active in my local NDP riding association and moved that the party adopt these demands in its campaign platform. (That the national leadership would undoubtedly balk at campaigning around such unorthodox and radical demands as recall and a “workers’ wage” would be a secondary consideration).


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