Charles: "Your second paragraph sets the scientific definition of worker - someone who has only her labor power to sell - against the stratification definition. Good. Your third paragraph admits that DSA does not recruit evenly across the entire spectrum of workers. The question is, how much of that is inevitable for sociological reasons, and how much of it is a result of DSA's ideology, arenas of action, and methods of activity?"
Both factors - objective and subjective - are at play as in all human activity, and their dialectical relationship is always evolving. The PLP and other left-wing formations were also disproportionately represented by white students and skilled workers at their inception before they began to recruit from within non-white and lower-paid working class strata. From this distance, the DSA seems to be following that path and becoming increasingly more diverse as it grows. Charles: "For example, the communist Progressive Labor Party is much closer than DSA to Black membership matching the Black proportion in the working class." What are the percentages of blacks in each organization’s membership? I was unable to find that information on the internet. Can you kindly provide the link(s)? Charles: "Insofar as DSA has an overall economic program, it is market socialism, not socialist overall allocation of investment. Market socialism offers more-educated workers opportunities to become privileged managers of market-socialist firms." That is correct. The DSA doesn’t support central planning or public ownership of the entire range of industries which collectively comprise the “commanding heights” of the economy as in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The DSA's website vaguely says it supports "social ownership of the major industries” but only cites energy production and transportation as examples. It would allow for personal property and privately-owned small business. I don’t believe it can peacefully attain even limited public ownership of the economy, but it might gather enough popular support to strengthen that wing of the bourgeoisie which comes to recognize the need to boost purchasing power and to regulate the economy to stem further political polarization and instability which is not good for capitalism - as happened under the New Deal. Undoubtedly, DSA members could become influential in administering such programs as did CP members and sympathizers in that earlier period. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42376): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42376 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120177484/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
