Class independence v. Democrats

....In his political report, “100 Years ‘On the Right Side of History,’” Barnes said that the SWP is the only party in the U.S. whose continuity as communists is unbroken. Other groups once claiming that continuity to the Bolsheviks tossed it aside — in deeds long ago, but more recently in words as well. Some, like the International Socialist Organization, have imploded and dissolved, with many ISO leaders and members going into the Democratic Party. Other organizations are well along the way.

The largest group calling itself socialist, the Democratic Socialists of America, never claimed a connection with communism or independent working-class political action. It traces its continuity to the late 1950s and striving to make real, in its own words, DSA founder “Michael Harrington’s vision of building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals” in the Democratic Party.

These socialist Democrats are apparatchiks in the main party of U.S. imperialism. “We are a political and activist organization, not a party,” DSA says on its website. They’re fighting for a strong centralized state, so working people can “run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs.”

But the state in the USA is — and can only be, short of the working class establishing its own power — acapitalist state. The course of the socialist Democrats, in fact, is one of mobilizing the U.S. population on a war footing to keep the working class at heel and preserve the power and reach of U.S. imperialism.

MILITANT/ARTHUR HUGHESJack Barnes, SWP national secretary, speaking at this year’s Active Workers Conference.

Nowhere is this clearer, Barnes said, than in the “Green New Deal” proposed by DSA member and Democratic Representative from New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats. Claiming that imminent climate disaster and today’s jobs crisis require drastic action, she argues, as she did at an MSNBC “town hall” in March: “We’ve been here before with World War II, even the Cold War. And the answer has been an ambitious and directed mobilization of the American economy to direct and solve our problem, our biggest problem."

The hero and model of the “Green New Deal” is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who proposed what he called the New Deal to try to corral and defuse the mighty rise of labor in the 1930s, which posed a threat to capitalist rule. But as today’s backers of its hoped-for reincarnation admit, the New Deal only succeeded as it grew into the War Deal in the 1940s.

And, as Barnes explained and the Democrats do their best to cover over, that, in turn, led to “the FBI Deal”— the indictment and imprisonment of leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and Midwest Teamster leaders for their campaign in the labor movement to oppose U.S. government war aims and measures to hogtie the unions in the name of national unity.

The DSA’s orientation in the Democratic Party is a deadly threat to the working class, Barnes said.

The SWP’s class course is the polar opposite — to build the unions and root itself in the working class. To advance an independent working-class political course to replace the rule of the propertied families with a workers and farmers government — as the party’s forebears led working people in doing in Russia and Cuba.

Source
https://themilitant.com/2019/07/06/conference-celebrates-100-years-on-the-right-side-of-history/