> On Jul 26, 2026, at 14:54, Dennis Brasky via groups.io > <[email protected]> wrote: > > If the party leadership does this, they would basically be expelling the > left, paving the way for a new party of the left,
The capitalist media was all atwitter this morning about this: https://www.foxnews.com/media/dsa-co-chair-embraces-abolishing-senate-ice-borders-democratic-infighting-escalates "A top Democratic socialist leader on Sunday embraced abolishing the Senate <https://www.foxnews.com/category/politics/elections/senate>, national borders, prisons and more, laying bare the movement's sweeping agenda as ideological divisions within the Democratic Party <https://www.foxnews.com/category/us/democratic-party> continue to deepen." I think this is what would be considered part of a "far left" platform in the US today, but it falls far short of a socialist program for many of the reasons covered by Tony and others on this list: It is top-down socialism that grants gifts to the working class in the form of reforms, however radical. It is also a gift to the US "far left" who advocate abolishing the police, the borders, the military, etc. Here "far left" means folks with the most radical demands. They don't want to reform the police or even defund the police, they want to abolish the police! Same with borders and same with imperialism. Give me a reform and I can give you a more radical one. What's wrong with this is that we want the working class to collectively and democratically make the decisions on policing, borders, forever wars, corporate ownership and running the nation. And how do we do that? Non-reformist reforms (Gorz), transitional demands (Trotsky), and Luxemburg who wrote about "The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its goal" (https://socialistworker.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Reform.pdf). Their revolutionary-socialist strategies focus on reforms that increase workers power. Abolishing police as a plank in a reform platform that becomes legislation does nothing, by itself, to empower the people who are most affected by crime in a capitalist social order of "all against all" where powerful exploit powerless. Community self defense or "peace keeping" might be transitional, non-reformist reforms if they deepen democratic organization within the community and transfer power from a state entity to organized working people. Mark p.s. One final note. There is a body of contemporary work on transitional/non-reformist reforms that is news to me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-reformist_reform). This includes work produced by legal scholars like Amna Akbar (https://www.nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/NYULaw-93-3-Akbar.pdf). I have not digested these materials yet, but the crossover is interesting regardless of the content. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42685): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42685 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120458891/21656 -=-=- 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
