Facing U.S. Rulers’ Democrat/Republican Duopoly

Party for Socialism and Liberation:
A Revolutionary Alternative?

By Lucy, Roser, and Rosario

CHICAGO, August 24 – Over the past days, a team of Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY) comrades has been distributing revolutionary literature and talking with leftist-minded protesters outside the Democratic National Convention, held in the United Center on Chicago’s Near West Side. As Kamala Harris – the VP of “Genocide Joe” Biden – and her running mate Tim Walz formally accepted their nomination, the chant (actually, war cry) of “U-S-A!” repeatedly resounded in the convention hall. Thousands of hand-held flags were waved.

From the huge elevated stage, veteran Democratic war-mongers and mass deporters like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama pledged fervent support for the nominees. Backing them up and doing their bit for the red, white and blue were “electeds” like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America. Yet demonstrators we spoke with outside haven’t forgotten the genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, armed and funded by the Biden-Harris administration of the Democratic Party, which like the Republicans has carried out an endless list of atrocities in the service of U.S. imperialism.

At protest events here, we’ve intersected a good number of young people who have been drawing some radical conclusions from society’s multiple crises, can’t stomach backing war-criminal politicians and push back against attempts to “guilt” them into doing so. Facing the seemingly eternal Democrat/Republican duopoly, a few, though not many, express some interest in the Green Party, which is running Jill Stein for president. A minor bourgeois party whose purpose is to pressure the Democrats, its confrères in Europe have long been part of war-waging government coalitions. A handful pay some heed to Cornel West, the sometime presidential candidate presenting an eclectic and eccentric platform of “Truth, Justice and Love.”

To their left is the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which is running Claudia de la Cruz for president and Karina Garcia for vice-president. Calling to “Vote Socialist,” this is the fifth time the group has run its own presidential candidates. However, while the fight for a clear and sharp break from the Democratic Party is at the center of genuinely revolutionary politics in the United States, the PSL’s actual politics cut against that struggle. Throughout its history – and today – it advances “tactics” that help tie workers and youth to the Democrats, as we will show in some detail below.

The PSL was established in 2004 as a split-off from the Workers World Party, which had been founded by former Trotskyist Sam Marcy and a number of his co-thinkers in 1959. It maintained the WWP’s core politics of adapting to nationalist and Stalinist movements and regimes abroad, while pursuing “popular front”-type alliances of class collaboration domestically – but projected a more energetic radical vibe. It has recently attracted some former DSAers and others seeking a leftist alternative to vanilla-flavored social democracy. One of the areas where it’s been active is the Denver region, where PSL supporters who led protests against the August 2019 racist murder of Elijah McClain were targeted with frame-up charges. In solidarity, against this attack on basic rights, we called to defend the PSL against the police/prosecutor vendetta.¹ Fortunately, the attempted frame-up fell apart and all charges were dropped in 2021.

Program and Practice: Revolutionary or Reformist?

What is urgently needed today is a class-struggle workers party that puts forward genuinely revolu­tionary politics consistently counterposed to all capitalist parties and politicians, that fights intransigently for the political independence of the working class, and forthrightly advances a program of international socialist revolution. Does the PSL represent that? No – that is very far from the case. Instead, it consistently tails after existing leaderships that tie the workers and oppressed to capitalist politics; continually promotes class-collaborationist “coalition-building” on a program that “everyone can agree on,” including with capitalist politicians, as we saw again here in Chicago over the past days. And the PSL has a record of following the rest of the reformist left in repeatedly building illusions in the Democrats’ pet “socialist” Bernie Sanders, counseling him in 2015 (for example) to “run as an independent” and in 2016 “encourag[ing] those voting in the upcoming Democratic Party primaries to vote for Bernie Sanders”; and assiduously promotes reformist demands that can only build illusions.

Start with the question of the bourgeois state – which marks the fundamental line between revolutionary and reformist politics – including the question of the capitalists’ military apparatus. Going back to the origins of the modern socialist movement, the revolutionary call is “Not a person nor a penny” for the imperialist war machine.² In contrast, the PSL’s 2024 platform promotes outright reformism, calling to “Cut the Military Budget by 90%.” Let’s see: according to defense.gov, “On March 11, 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration submitted to Congress a proposed Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 budget request of $849.8 billion for the Department of Defense….”

So what the PSL’s demand boils down to is for U.S. imperialism’s murderous military machine to have a budget for next year of “only” $84.98 billion, which over a 10-year period would amount to going on a trillion dollars.³ Hardly the program of international socialist revolution put forward by communist revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky, based on the need for the working class to smash the bourgeois state and establish what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., a workers state.

Let’s take a look at the PSL’s 2024 campaign video, which is featured on the site of its newspaper (liberationnews.org) and gives more of a sense of what they’re campaigning on than any fine print or formal platform. Produced in the style of a standard slick campaign ad, it does list some key ills of capitalism, but says not a word about revolution, the need for a workers state or working-class internationalism, instead talking Sanders-like about billionaires taking over “our [!] government,” and the need for “an economy that puts people over profits.” (For that matter, it’s hard not to notice that the PSL’s constant “for the people” populist appeals evoke the same “We the People” bourgeois ideology this capitalist country was founded on, as does the motto of Kamala Harris’ “people-powered” campaign, “For the People.”)

What’s really striking is how the PSL’s 2024 ad echoes the famous 2018 “Courage to Change” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 2018 campaign ad that launched AOC’s career (though the PSL video’s production values are much better). From the subway platform scenes and “people vs. money” rhetoric to the music – literally the same music! – the parallels are unmistakable, and clearly deliberate. It’s like a 2-minute and 42-second object lesson in electoral opportunism.

It’s an indication of the purposes pursued by the PSL in its campaign: not to bring revolutionary Marxist consciousness into the struggle, opposing it forthrightly to the bourgeois ideology of the ruling class, as V.I. Lenin insisted on in What Is to Be Done? (1902), nor to provide a “bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution,” as Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s co-leader of the Russian Revolution, called for in the “Transitional Program” (1938). Instead, for the PSL, like similar groups, “meeting people where they’re at” is the pretext for adapting to and echoing existing illusions – and tailing after “the movement,” even when it’s moving in a cycle of class collaboration.

Coalitions of Coalitions to Build Coalitions

“I hear what you’re saying about some of this stuff, but aren’t you kind of overstating things?” a thoughtful PSL supporter might say. We’re not. Let’s take a look at the PSL’s activity over the past weeks. In the build-up to the DNC protests, the PSL and the ANSWER Coalition that it leads were official “coalition members” of the “Coalition to March on the DNC,” which called on all and sundry to join them in “bringing our demands to the Democratic National Convention” in order to “bring the people’s agenda to within sight and sound of the Democratic Party leadership."

Prior to the Coalition to March on the DNC’s August 19 protest, the PSL’s Claudia de la Cruz joined fellow presidential candidates Jill Stein of the bourgeois Green Party and maverick left-liberal Cornel West as speakers at something called the “Abandon Biden Convention,” held at Chicago’s Alhambra Palace on August 18-19. This convention was the second held by the “Abandon Biden” campaign, a hodgepodge grouping seeking to pressure the Democratic Party (and maybe even the Republicans) to “listen” by “punishing Biden at the ballot box” (AbandonBiden24.com).

Also held on August 18 was the “Chicago People’s Assembly,” held at the headquarters of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition – the organization still headed up by its founder, longtime Democratic politician Jesse Jackson Sr., who ran for president in 1984 and 1988, and briefly attended this year’s DNC. At the People’s Assembly launch rally, heavily promoted by the PSL, candidate Claudia de la Cruz and Jill Stein stood side by side as featured speakers.

In a brief conversation with De la Cruz at a subsequent event later that day, a Revolution reporter said that she was “wondering if you’re going to be endorsing Jill Stein, since you had a joint conference together today.” The PSL candidate replied “No,” explaining “I don’t think we should just put down the work we’ve already done to pick up someone else’s.” “But,” she quickly added, “I support her and she supports me and we support each other.” The Marxist term for “support” to and from candidates of a bourgeois party is class collaboration.

The PSL and the “Uncommitted Movement”

The examples we’ve mentioned are not random slipups, but rather expressions of the PSL’s overall political orientation. Seeking big-time political influence as popular-frontist coalition-builders for each new movement is at the core of its politics. So when, within the Democratic Party itself, the “Uncommitted Movement” arose this year, the PSL jumped on board. The PSL’s paper Liberation (15 April) hailed “the massive movement to vote ‘uncommitted’ in the Democratic primaries” as one of the factors that “have piled tremendous pressure on Biden” with regard to the war on Gaza. An official Claudia/Karina 2024 Statement declared:

“Our campaign and the PSL call on those who are voting in the Democratic primary to not vote for Biden: vote uncommitted, ‘none of the above,’ or, where that is not possible, leave the top of the ticket blank.”

–“Democrats Voting ‘Uncommitted’ and Abandoning Biden Are Sending a Powerful Message,” votesocialist2024.com, 5 March

We all know what actually happened: when the top of the Democratic ticket was left blank on July 21, with the withdrawal of Genocide Joe from the race, his VP Kamala Harris filled it in, vowing to continue his “ironclad” commitment to the so-called “defense” of Israel, armed to the teeth by U.S. imperialism.

In late May, the PSL, ANSWER Coalition and others built a “People’s Conference for Palestine” in Detroit, which featured as a “special guest” Democratic Party Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. It’s one thing to point out that Tlaib has faced an ugly backlash and was censured in Congress over her criticisms of Israel – and Marxists would be for physically defending her against Zionist or Islamophobic attempts to silence or attack her. But politically allying with Democratic politicians is quite a different matter. It should also be noted that in April, Tlaib, like the other Democrats in Congress, voted for $61 billion more in military funding to Ukraine in the U.S./NATO imperialist war on Russia.

The PSL’s orientation toward sectors of the Democratic Party, and its pressure-politics “tactics,” were also exemplified at the Detroit conference’s “Uncommitted Votes” plenary session. This was addressed by PSL leader Brian Becker, Reema Ahmad of the Movement Voter Project and Layla Elabed, regional organizer for the We the People-Michigan voter mobilization group and Co-Chair of the Uncommitted National Movement, in which capacity she would meet with Vice President Harris in early August. In her May 26 speech to the conference co-organized by ANSWER and backed by the PSL, Elabed said:

“What do we do to hold ‘Genocide Joe’ accountable? … We cannot afford to not leverage our political power that we’ve built, especially now. So when the idea of using Michigan’s presidential primary and the vehicle of the uncommitted option on our Democratic ballot, it was such a strong, very strategic strategy …. We spoke the language of electeds and we took our protest vote to the ballot box…. Let me tell you right now, electeds are public servants, they work for us. Joe Biden needs to work for us. And that is what Uncommitted has sent, that message, resoundingly….

“We are taking our anti-war, pro-peace, pro-Palestinian, pro-ceasefire agenda all the way to the DNC to say this is another pressure point that we are going to continue telling this administration that in order to save our democracy, fight fascism, that you need to be held accountable, you need to listen to your core constituency.”

In his remarks at the same session, PSL leader Becker made sure to be on the record with some valid points against the two-party system, but the key was this: “I want to shout out the Listen to Michigan campaign and the Uncommitted Campaign because given the available options, which are so limited in this tortured form of democracy,” the campaign organizers “have used the electoral arena to register something that Biden couldn’t ignore.” In reality, of course, Biden did.

Regarding the Listen to Michigan and Uncommitted campaigns, it’s worth recalling what one of their central organizers, former Democratic Congressman Andy Levin, told the New York Times (14 February): “I am working with some people who feel like they will never vote for Joe Biden, but there are many, many, many I feel will vote for Joe Biden on Nov. 5 if he changes course…. This is the best way I can help Joe Biden.”

Suggestions for “Socialist” Sanders

Back in 2015, as referred to above, the PSL expressed the wish that bourgeois politician Bernie Sanders would run as an “independent,” sounding much like social-democratic groups such as Socialist Alternative, the now-defunct International Socialist Organization and the International Marxist Tendency. All promoted similar fantasies and illusions obscuring the real role of Sanders’ Democratic “socialism.” Following standard operating procedure for erasing the class line, the label of “tactics” was stuck on the whole package like that made it all OK.

“Does it really make sense tactically for more radical socialists, at this moment and under these circumstances, to emphasize that Sanders ‘isn’t really a socialist’? Does it make any tactical sense, if you want to truly popu­larize socialism with the millions of new Sanders supporters who are supporting him precisely because they want change and see a ‘socialist’ candidate as the vehicle for change, that they are just really wasting their time or worse?

“No, it does not make sense…. We should argue that Bernie Sanders’ program for guaran­teed health care, college education and other major reforms is what’s important and if Sanders is truly serious about winning these reforms, he should run as an independent…. If Sanders ran as an independent candidate for president, as a ‘democratic socialist,’ he would receive the votes of mil­lions of people. That would be something really significant in creating a new political dynamic in the United States.”

–“Socialist tactics and the Bernie Sanders campaign” (Liberation, 19 October 2015)

The following year, a statement titled “Why Registered Democrats Should Vote Sanders in the N.Y. Primary,” declared: “The Party for Socialism and Liberation and the … PSL Presidential Campaign are joining together with other left-wing forces and labor unionists who are encouraging already registered Democrats to cast a ballot for Bernie Sanders….” It noted that since PSLers were not registered as Democrats, they couldn’t vote in New York State’s closed primaries. “But those who are registered as Democratic Party voters can play a decisive role” in the race “by voting for Sanders on Tuesday” (Liberation, 18 April 2016).

And then in 2020, the PSL declared: “Although we are not Democrats, we encourage those voting in the upcoming Democratic Party primaries to vote for Bernie Sanders…. This is consistent with our Party’s orientation to the 2016 election” (Liberation, 4 February 2020). (As we noted at the time: “That’s a little like saying: for all those drinking the Kool-Aid, though of course we don’t, we recommend the Sanders Blast flavor.”) The same Liberation article, after calling his campaign “the vessel for a progressive, vaguely socialist insurgency within the confines of the Democratic Party,” went on to promise: “If Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination … the PSL will not run candidates in battleground swing states.”

What It Means to Follow the “Marcyite Tradition”

So where does all this come from? Let’s trace it back a bit more. In 2004, the “Founding Statement of the Party for Socialism and Liberation” declared: “As former leaders and members of Workers World Party, we defend that group’s historical tradition and mission, particularly that of its founder Sam Marcy.” It was an accurate affirmation. The PSL ran its first presidential election campaign in 2008, when the Democrats were running Barack Obama. While criticizing Obama, they hastened to declare: “Our campaign has absolutely no quarrel” with those campaigning for “a Black candidate – regardless of his politics” (Liberation, 10 June 2008). As the Internationalist Group emphasized at the time, Obama’s election in November of that year represented a “social change in this country founded on chattel slavery,” but “has not changed the system of imperialist capitalism one iota.”⁴

Far from some kind of fluke, the examples we’ve cited (out of the many on record) are faithful expressions of the “Marcyite tradition.” Interestingly, this is highlighted by the background to the locale of the August 18 “People’s Assembly” built by the PSL. It is the HQ of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, formed by the merger of Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), which Jackson founded in 1971, and his “Rainbow Coalition,” the theme of his campaign speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention and the name of the alliance formed to back that campaign.

In the run-up to the ’84 DNC, Sam Marcy came out for support to Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, and Workers World (8 December 1983) ran a long piece titled “Why we support the Jackson campaign: Statement of WWP.” “Of course,” it stated, “participation in the capitalist primaries … keeps the masses tied to one of the major bourgeois parties.” So the Marcyites found a “theoretical” pretext to jump on the bandwagon, calling the campaign within racist U.S. imperialism’s Democratic Party “but a new form of the movement of the Black people,” which should not be “obscured” by “[t]he fact that this is a struggle in the bourgeois parliamentary arena, in the primaries” of this partner party of the capitalist state.

The 1983 statement continued the standard Marcyite “dialectics” of opportunism, insisting that Jackson’s campaign “is as genuine a movement of struggle as its predecessors, despite its bourgeois electoral form. The content of this movement is wholly progressive, the form is not.” Etcetera. Of course, soon enough Jackson dutifully saluted the flag and backed Democratic nominee Walter Mondale, a “machine Democrat” who had fulsomely supported the genocidal war on Vietnam under Democrat LBJ (president 1963-1969). And a quarter century after backing Jackson, following the same tradition, Workers World (27 November 2008) proclaimed that Barack Obama’s election “is a triumph for the Black masses and all the oppressed.”

We can justly say that at least the Marcyites are consistent. After all, one of Marcy’s original big differences with Trotskyism, prefiguring the formation of the WWP (and later the PSL), was his advocacy of “critical support” on “tactical” grounds, of course, to the 1948 Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace, who had been vice president in the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the time Marcy was still a member of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, led by James P. Cannon, a founder of the Communist movement in the U.S., who insisted that support to the latest in the long line of “people’s” “third-party” gambits would mean crossing the class line in order to “maneuver within the parties of the bourgeoisie.”⁵

In a key document of the Marcyite tradition, Sam Marcy observed that in the dispute over the Wallace presidential campaign, he had come out strongly against “Comrade Cannon’s position … that it would be ‘crossing class lines’ to give critical support to Wallace.” Instead, he insisted, it would have meant “reaching out our hand” to sectors “we could not reach in any other way except through critical support of Wallace. (This, as everybody on the NC knows, was my position, and it flowed from the international orientation I also elaborated…”).⁶

From 1948 to the present, the method of Marcyism is to tail bourgeois forces, the leaderships that serve them and the illusions they rely on. Instead of a revolutionary Marxist alternative to capitalist politics, it means erasing the basic Marxist conception of the class line and revolutionary political independence of the working class. As our comrades have pointed out:

“For those whose guiding light is ‘relating to people where they’re at’ rather than telling the unvarnished truth to the masses, the very idea of a class line in politics is sneeringly derided as sectarian. Yet so long as working people are tied to the parties of the bourgeoisie, whether red, blue or green, they will be chained to the capitalist system of war, poverty and racism.”

– “Bernie Sanders and Pressure Politics of the Opportunist Left,” June 2015, reprinted in Left Reformists in Existential Crisis (2019)

Tailing the Tailists

The PSL is a dead end for those seeking to commit themselves to the cause of workers revolution. While much more could be added regarding its line on a range of issues we haven’t had space for, we will conclude here with just a few words about two other groups. Having mentioned the presidential campaign of Cornel West, we would do an injustice to leftist opportunism if we failed to mention some of its most devoted practitioners: Socialist Alternative (SAlt for short), which could win a gold medal if opportunism was an Olympic sport.

During the boom in Bernie boosterism, SAlt went all-out creating both “socialist” excuses and front groups for backing his bourgeois campaign, as they, plus the now-defunct Interna­tional Socialist Organization and other social-democratic currents had done before that for Green candidate Ralph Nader.⁷ SAlt has recycled such material with articles on “The Enormous Potential of Cornel West’s Independent Campaign for President” (socialistalternative.org, 16 June 2023), “Students for Cornel West: Fighting Back Against the Billionaires & the Right Wing” (23 August 2023), etc. Then on July 3 of this year, SAlt’s executive committee issued a statement broadening the class-collaborationist options, calling to “Vote For Jill Stein Or Cornel West And Build Movements To Stop The Right Wing.”

Last and least, there is the very ex-Trotskyist Spartacist League, which in its frenetic search for get-rich-quick gimmicks calls to “Vote Working Class – Vote PSL!” In bold italics back in April, the SL’s Workers Vanguard delusionally enthused: “The more successful the PSL campaign, the better will be the position of black people, workers and all the oppressed to fight back against the new administration, whether it’s Biden or Trump.” On August 21, their Chicago branch held a forum publicized with a flier featuring photos of the PSL candidates, their campaign symbol and the title: “WHY YOU SHOULD VOTE PSL.” Various of their members now run around in Claudia & Karina shirts and/or hats.

And so it goes, since tailing the tailists is now their vocation. It would be tempting to echo the SL’s oft-repeated clichés about “the syphilitic chain” of opportunists who are “all in this together.”  Instead, let’s just note that by breathlessly running after an interlocking series of popular-frontist blocs with bourgeois politicians, the SL’s call to vote PSL is a very far cry from the Trotskyist program it upheld so long ago. Yet the program of revolutionary class independence is more vital than ever, and that’s what we’re fighting for today.■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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