************************************ The Loyalty Test and Its Beneficiary ************************************
On September 1 the House passed H.Res. 1490, condemning the Democratic Socialists of America by name along with socialism in all its forms. [^1] Ben Burgis answered in Jacobin two days later. His argument was that the resolution's anti-Stalinist preamble is throat-clearing and that what the drafters actually object to is the expansion of democratic demands into places where they have been absent for forty years. [^2] Charles Andrews answered Burgis in New Worker on September 5, under a headline announcing that DSA had reaffirmed its anti-communism. [^3] I want to take Andrews's central comparison seriously before I explain why the piece squanders it. He asks what separates the self-described democratic socialists. Congress red-baited now from the Americans for Democratic Action liberals it red-baited in the 1950s. Both denounce communism. Both are oriented on elections. Both keep class struggle at arm's length. Both treat the overthrow of capitalism as an embarrassment rather than an objective. His answer is that the liberals were honest about what they were doing and that DSA sells the same electoral reformism under a name that implies something else. This is correct, and it is not a small thing to have gotten right. It is also arrived at from the wrong direction, which is a separate problem I will come to. I have spent most of this year working through the DSA caucuses against four mechanisms: recall, the workers' wage, the binding mandate, and fraction discipline. These are not a purity checklist. They are the specific institutional devices by which a working-class organization holds its representatives to account, and without them the relationship between an elected socialist and the organization that elected him is indistinguishable from the relationship between any Democrat and any endorsing group. Groundwork displaces them onto conditions that do not yet exist. Bread and Roses displaces them onto a future national apparatus. Red Star displaces them onto the chapter. Reform and revolution displace them onto a democratic culture that is supposed to make formal mechanisms unnecessary. The pattern is consistent enough that I have stopped treating it as coincidence. So when Andrews says the liberals were at least honest, he is pointing at something real. The word "socialist" in DSA's practice is doing descriptive work that the practice does not support. No mechanism in the organization currently makes an officeholder answerable to anything but the next primary. Then he takes that observation and converts it into a loyalty test about the Soviet Union, and the whole thing collapses. Here is why the conversion matters. A structural critique is a question an organization cannot decline. Ask DSA where its recall provision is, and there is no answer that does not either produce the provision or concede its absence. Ask DSA whether it will affirm the achievements of the Stalin period, and it can simply say no, at zero cost, and walk away with its electoralism entirely intact. Andrews has handed over the one form of criticism that permits the accused to refuse the terms. Congress gets its denunciation, DSA gets to look principled, refusing a Stalinist ultimatum, and the four mechanisms never come up. Everyone at the table is better off except for the argument. The Stalin passage is also where the piece stops being usable by anyone not already persuaded. Andrews credits the Soviet Union with "putting centuries of famines to an end," which is a claim that cannot survive contact with 1932 or with 1946. He is entitled to argue that industrialization under conditions of encirclement required measures that cost lives and that the Red Army broke the Wehrmacht. Those are arguments. Sliding a famine claim past the reader in a subordinate clause is not. And the paragraph contains its own refutation: he mocks Burgis for invoking the crimes of Stalinist authoritarianism as a phrase that requires no specifics, then offers a ledger of achievements equally free of them. Both parties are naming a thing rather than describing it. He notices this in his opponent. The headline does work the body cannot pay for. One column by a philosophy instructor becomes an organizational act, performed by DSA, in the present tense. Burgis is introduced as a prominent DSA ideologist, and Jacobin is DSA's unofficial magazine, which converts a relationship of overlapping readership into something like a party press. If the thesis is that DSA is constitutively anti-communist, the evidence for it exists and is public: convention resolutions, NPC votes, the 2021 and 2023 floor fights, and the platform. None of it appears. This is the part I find hardest to forgive, because the work of documenting what DSA actually decided, in which body, by what margin, is available to anyone willing to read minutes. Andrews reviewed a magazine article instead. The Castro comparison at the close is a category error. Moncada was a criminal trial with a fifteen-year sentence at the end of it, argued by a defendant who had led an armed attack on a garrison and expected to be convicted. H.Res. 1490 is non-binding, symbolic, and carries no penalty whatsoever. Asking why DSA did not respond to a press release the way Castro responded to a prosecution mistakes the stakes by several orders of magnitude. There is also something worth saying about the line itself. "History will absolve me" defers judgment to a tribunal that has not convened. It is a magnificent closing sentence, and it is not an argument, and a writer who has just faulted his opponent for invoking phrases in place of specifics might have noticed the resemblance. Now the direction problem. What Andrews and Burgis are conducting is not a dispute between communism and reformism. It is a dispute internal to socialism from above, and neither position requires the working class to do anything on its own behalf. Burgis defends a coalition whose respectability is secured by its distance from the Soviet record. Andrews defends a state that conferred development downward on a population that had, by the end of the 1920s, lost every organ through which it could have contested how. Draper's distinction was never between those who are hard on the USSR and those who are soft on it. It was between socialism as an act of self-emancipation and socialism as something arranged for workers by a body that knows better, whether that body is a ministry, a party apparatus, or a caucus with a slate and no mandate. [^4] On that axis, the two sides here are closer to each other than either is to the tradition Andrews thinks he is defending. Which is also why the anti-communism charge is aimed at the wrong organ. DSA's disavowal of Stalin costs it nothing precisely because DSA has no theory of the state to compromise. You cannot renounce a road to power you were never on. The organization's problem is not that it condemns the Soviet Union. It is that it has no account of how a socialist government would hold, no mechanism binding its officeholders to anything, and no answer to the question of what happens the first time a DSA mayor faces a bond market. Andrews could have pressed any of that. Instead, he asked whether the defendants would salute. I do not have a clean ending for this, and I am not going to manufacture one. The mechanisms I keep pointing at require organizations capable of enforcing them, and those organizations do not currently exist at a scale where enforcement would mean anything. Saying "self-emancipation" is a description of a criterion, not a program, and I am aware that it can function as its own kind of unfalsifiable invocation if I am not careful with it. What I can say is that both parties to this exchange spent their column inches on a question whose answer changes nothing, and that the questions whose answers would change something went untouched by both. The House passed a resolution about a threat that does not yet exist. The reply on one side was that we are respectable, and on the other that we are loyal. Neither is a claim about what the working class is going to do. [^1]: H.Res. 1490, 119th Cong. (2026). [^2]: Ben Burgis, "With Anti-DSA Bill, Congress Is Red-Baiting Like It's 1955," Jacobin , September 3, 2026. [^3]: Charles Andrews, "DSA Reaffirms Anti-Communism in Face of Congress' Resolution," New Worker , September 5, 2026. [^4]: Hal Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism (Berkeley: Independent Socialist Committee, 1966). -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43380): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43380 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121137801/21656 -=-=- 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
