Abortion Access, a Luxury Jet, and Leaked State Secrets: Two Weeks in The Story of American “Democracy”
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Abortion Access, a Luxury Jet, and Leaked State Secrets: Two Weeks in The Story of American “Democracy”
Articles

Abortion Access, a Luxury Jet, and Leaked State Secrets: Two Weeks in The Story of American “Democracy”

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Luke Pickrell argues that recent political events in the U.S. reveal the necessity of the Marxist Unity Group’s ‘Winning the Battle for Democracy’ resolution for the 2023 DSA national convention. The resolution can be read and signed here.

The Movement 5, no. 10, Nov. 1969

Three years before his death, Friedrich Engels wrote a short letter in an Italian socialist newspaper addressed to “the honorable Giovani Bovio.”1 Bovio, a prominent member of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy, had criticized Engels and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) for allegedly failing to explain the form of government under which the working class would take power. “Will it be monarchic, or republican, or will it go back to Weitling’s utopia,” questioned Bovio.2 Engels, surely somewhat exasperated, responded that he and Marx had, on the contrary, described the form of workers’ rule for almost their entire political careers: “[F]or forty years,” wrote Engels, “Marx and I…repeated ad nauseam that for us the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.”3 The Italian socialists, who strove to transform the political and social spheres of society, were not to be confused with the Italian Royalist Republicans. 

Three recent headlines – a judicial attack on the abortion pill mifepristone, revelations that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took kickbacks from a wealthy friend, and the leak of Pentagon secrets revealing extensive U.S. spy programs and troops in Ukraine – provide an opportunity to dissect the undemocratic structure of the United States and the continued need for what Marx and Engels called for: the democratic republic. 

In this article, I use these events as a launching pad to present the case for supporting Marxist Unity Group’s resolution (linked above), which will bring the question of the democratic republic to the floor of DSA’s national convention this August. To provide leadership for future working class struggles, the DSA must develop a strategic vision that opposes the existing state and the constitution that undergirds the entire edifice. Each abuse of power is an opportunity to expose the current state and propose the democratic republic as a concrete alternative and necessary stepping-stone to a classless society. 

Abortion Access

On May 7, federal District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk overturned FDA approval of the widely-used abortion pill mifepristone, putting access to safe and legal abortion further at risk.4

His ruling, 23 years after the fact, comes less than a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion. Both court decisions come when most Americans think abortion should be legal.5  The courts’ flagrant disregard of popular opinion is further proof that all the basic rights we take for granted are subject to dismissal by a select number of unaccountable “representatives.” The carpet can be pulled from under our feet that quickly. 

It’s worth reflecting on how federal judges and Supreme Court Justices are elected – or, rather, how they are not elected. Federal judges are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, an elite clique based on unequal representation (a liberal or conservative majority, it makes no difference) whose raison d’être is to guard against the will of the people as (insufficiently) expressed in the House of Representatives.

Supreme Court Justices are directly appointed by the President. Thanks to the siphoning of votes through the Electoral College, the President of the United States is an indirectly elected ruler. The undemocratic nature of the Electoral College has been blatantly exposed twice in the last twenty years when the eventual President received a minority of the total votes. Yet, panic over a system capable of periodically handing us a leader without a popular mandate quickly subsides; what is an endemic problem is presented as a momentary glitch. By design, the Electoral College works when it takes direct power out of the hands of voters. 

Why are the dispensers of law chosen this way? A piece of paper, a Sacred Text known as the Constitution, worshiped in the most slovenly manner, commands such actions. Future historians will laugh at the extent of our fetishism and the degree to which we have alienated our collective human powers in “Nine Elders and an Ancient Scroll.”6 Behold the rotten foundation of our entire political system. 

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party would have us place our faith in the nine unelected Supreme Court Justices to defend access to mifepristone. Have they forgotten that this is the same Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade? If the Court rules as we want, the Justices must be good and the system must work; if they don’t rule as we want, a few of the Justices must be rotten apples in an otherwise fresh barrel. 

Will these nine enlightened beings save us from the decision of Judge Kacsmaryk? What kind-hearted souls will rule on the health and well-being of millions of Americans? To ask the question in such a way – as we are taught to do – reveals part of the problem. The fact that we look to ‘rational,’ ‘intelligent,’ or ‘benevolent’ figures for our salvation (and they must be all of those things because they can interpret the Sacred Text) and not to ourselves obscures the fundamental problem and the only solution. 

And what of this Court and its nine somber-looking Justices? To be granted such great powers and a lifetime to wield them, surely they must stand on a higher plain than mere mortals. To be placed in a position so lacking in accountability, surely they must be able to resist all temptations. Not quite. 

A Luxury Jet

On April 6, ProPublica published an extensive investigation into the relationship between Justice Clarence Thomas and real estate billionaire, Nazi memorabilia collector, and GOP donor Harlan Crow.7 For decades, Thomas traveled gratis on Crow’s private jet and vacationed at his gaudy lakeside resort. In 2014, Thomas sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property to Crow, including a property linked to the Justice’s mother.8 

Now the Democrats want a new Court Justice: how brave. But changing the players in the game (a process that would rely on the minoritarian Senate) is no substitute for changing the game itself. Clarence Thomas isn’t the problem. The Supreme Court, as the ProPublica report states, is “left almost entirely to police itself.”9 Justices can choose to “consult” a code of conduct for federal judges below the Supreme Court – should they find it interesting. One imagines John Roberts leafing through a rulebook like a bored patient skims through a tabloid magazine in a doctor’s waiting room. 

What do we expect from a person in a position of unaccountable power? The solution is not to find more “ethical” Justices but to eliminate the unaccountable authority of the Supreme Court by abolishing the independent Presidency and the Supreme Court’s right of judicial review; making all judges and other state officials recallable and elected only by the people through universal, equal, and direct suffrage; and expanding jury trials and state-funded legal services. As stated in the 1912 program of the Socialist Party of America, national laws should be repealed “only by an act of Congress or by a referendum vote of the whole people.”10 We could learn a thing or two from the brave Parisian Communards; as Marx explained, “The judicial functionaries [in the Paris Commune] were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subservient to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.”11

The solution is not to put a different person in a position of power. Nor, however, is it to immediately eliminate all division of labor and positions of authority under the assumption that power inevitably begets tyranny. Instead, the working class needs a state in which it can hold officials accountable. 

This seesaw paradigm is worn out. A benevolent master is still a master. Freedom granted by an unaccountable force is no freedom at all. It makes no difference if Justices take kickbacks from conservative friends or liberal friends, if those friends happened to collect Nazi memorabilia or miniature statues of Mother Teresa – or if they take kickbacks at all! Even the most honest and law-abiding master is still a master. 

Last May, Thomas expressed indignation over leaked documents showing the court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Thomas described the leaks as an “unthinkable break of trust” jeopardizing the entire Court. Said Thomas: “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them.”12 Thomas is correct, though not in the way he intends: given the events of the past 12 months – let alone the past 233 years – one does wonder how much longer Americans will allow themselves to stay yoked to the authority of the Supreme Court. 

Leaked State Secrets

Speaking of honesty, breaking the law, and leaked documents: on Thursday, April 13, a National Guardsman in shorts and a T-shirt was arrested by enough cop-soldiers to wage a small war for allegedly leaking Pentagon documents on Discord. 

Far more interesting than the identity of the alleged leaker is what the documents reveal and who helped betray the source. Four things are clear: there is no freedom of the mainstream press in the United States – not when the paper of record, the New York Times, works hand in glove with State funded and Intelligence Agency-connected sources like Bellingcat; the Biden administration has been intentionally overstating the possibility of a Ukrainian victory in Russia; the U.S. spies on several ally countries such as Israel and South Korea (Israel also has an extensive network within the United States: unbeknownst to the American public, the real “threat” to the 2016 elections was not Russia but Israeli agents);13 and an entire shadow state exists outside of public view, let alone public accountability. The leaked files come from a veritable alphabet soup of secret agencies, such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.14

There have been several high-profile leaks over the past 15 years. In 2010, Chelsea Manning leaked state secrets about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan – crimes for which the real perpetrators will likely never be punished. Among the leaks was a video, dubbed “Collateral Murder” by Wikileaks, showing a U.S. Apache helicopter crew murdering civilians and journalists.15 In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked state secrets detailing the National Security Administration’s global surveillance system.16

In each case, the leaker was punished for revealing unlawful acts by federal agencies because such revelations damaged the domestic and international credibility of the U.S. empire. Manning was held in solitary confinement (a form of torture as defined by the United Nations) and denied access to a regimen of estrogen and anti-androgen drugs.17 In 2020, she attempted suicide after being jailed for refusing to testify against Jullian Assange.18 Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia and faces decades in prison if he returns to the United States. In 2019, Assange was arrested inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The British government’s promise to Ecuador that Assange would not be extradited to a country where he would be tortured is laughable.19 The only country Assange would be extradited to is the United States, and prisoner conditions in this country routinely amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Assange’s punishment is ongoing, thanks in no small part to the British state, which is ultimately at the beck and call of the United States.20

The Espionage Act is a perfect example of the various anti-democratic loopholes built into the existing constitutional regime, a trick Marx observed in the constitutions emerging after the failed revolutions of 1848. As Marx noted, these less-than-democratic documents allowed various freedoms except when deemed dangerous to the existence of a ruling minority. “In order to protect the ‘constitutional liberty’ of presidents, burgomasters, [and] police chiefs,” wrote Marx, “… in order to protect the ‘constitutional liberty’ of this elite of the nation, all the rest of the nation must let its constitutional liberties, up to and including personal liberty, die a bloody death as a sacrifice on the altar of the fatherland.”21 According to Hal Draper, Marx and Engels believed that if the expression of democratic rights endangered the government, then “so much the worst for the government.”22

Each glimpse at the inner workings of the state allows us to consider the meaning of state secrets and how much of the political apparatus exists not only outside of the democratic control of the population but outside of our entire conception of the world. As Mike Macnair explains, “Regimes of official secrecy and lying [a perfect description of the US government] make public information the private property of the individual state bureaucrats whose secrecy is protected.”23 What’s the alternative to a state that stands over us – a state that, in the words of Marx, feeds like a “parasite” upon the social body and “clogs” all free movement?24

Throughout 1917, the Bolsheviks won the hearts and minds of the workers’ and peasants’ Soviets with demands for the provisional government to publish the Tsar’s secret wartime treaties (one such treaty was the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing the Middle East between France and Britain).25 In The Civil War in France, Marx praised the structural transparency of the Communard’s democratic republic, writing that “The whole sham of state-mysteries and state pretensions was done away [with] by a Commune, mostly consisting of simple working men…filling all the posts hitherto divided between Government, police, and Prefecture, doing their work publicly, simply, under the most difficult and complicated circumstances, and doing it, as Milton did his Paradise Lost, for a few pounds, acting in bright daylight, with no pretensions to infallibility…”26

The democratic republic would realize Marx’s praise for the Commune: all state secrets would be published, state officials would do their work in full view of the public, and war would be waged only by popular vote. The working class would receive universal military training and full democratic rights would be granted to soldiers. The litmus test for any workers’ state is the composition of the armed forces; only when the standing army is fully dissolved and a people’s militia stands in its place can the state be called a democratic republic. 

Our Task

The demand for a democratic republic is a challenge to sections of the existing left who equate democracy with so-called bourgeois democracy, or who claim that Marxism and socialism are somehow above democracy. Our claim that the democratic republic is the necessary form of workers’ state power – and is therefore not the same as a bourgeois republic – is profoundly unoriginal. Over a century ago, Engels explained that “If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.”27 Leaving Engels aside, we can conclude that the democratic republic is not a bourgeois republic by examining the structure (both realized and imagined) of the Paris Commune – the democratic republic par excellence.28

Dismissing struggles for democracy as naive or bourgeois paralyzes the left and keeps it marred in isolation and irrelevance. We don’t need more abstract phrasemongering; the demand for a democratic constitution and republic is far more concrete and substantive than slogans of “anti-capitalist resistance,” “breaking with capitalism,” and “smashing the state.” The social democratic maxim garnered from Engels and repeated by Karl Kautsky – democracy is the “light and air” of the working class29 – is as relevant in 21st-century America under the Constitution of the United States as it was in 18th and 19th-century Germany under the Constitution of the German Empire. Our task is not to dismiss democracy as insufficiently radical but to expose the fact that we don’t have democracy, that the working class needs it to reach socialism, and that no other social force but the united working class struggling for state power can get it. 

For those concerned that each sentence must reference the ‘revolution,’ fear not. The struggle for a democratic republic will be revolutionary. For those who search for “non-reformist reforms,” look no further. We’d be naive to assume the existing state would offer no resistance when the masses attempt to eliminate the Senate, abolish the standing army, and write a new constitution. All revolutionary periods are chaotic and only semi-predictable through a thorough study of history. But most importantly (lest we let an infatuation with insurrection overshadow the primary objective), creating a democratic constitution and a democratic republic would be a political revolution, and only from that position could we continue struggling to make the revolution a social one, too. 

The demand for a democratic republic is also a challenge to those on the left who do not want to break with the Constitution – either in the name of defending the Bill of Rights and what limited freedoms currently exist, maintaining a People’s Front against the “extreme right,” or because the working class is not currently demanding a new constitution.30 To the first point: can we imagine a situation in which, after a long period of mutual struggle, suffering, and shared sacrifice, the working class writes a new constitution and does anything but expand the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights? The only way to defend the freedoms we currently have is to take the offensive. The only way to march as an effective block is to ditch all alliances with liberal politicians proven incapable of fighting for democracy. 

To the second point: our job is to add an expansive political vision to the economic struggle, not to tail existing demands. Like the Russian social democrats, we set the democratic state as our horizon and support every protest against domination – even without the promise of tangible results.31 Furthermore, we kid ourselves if we think there already exists a unified working class making concrete demands. That unified force has to be built, and this can only be done if we stand in complete opposition to – and therefore independent from – the existing state. Complete opposition means enthusiastic treason to the Constitution. 

In 1901, Lenin wrote about a group of Russian workers who were asked about their demands.32 Only one worker shouted that they wanted a constitution and an end to Tsarist despotism. The workers’ demand, wrote Lenin, sounded out of place compared with all the other non-political demands. But soon, through the leadership of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the working class would recognize the connection between the economic struggle for better wages and the political struggle for democracy, freedom, and state power. The RSDLP did it in the early 20th century. The DSA must assist the working class in making these connections today. To be class conscious is to recognize the necessity of taking state power. 

The existing state provides us with a veritable cornucopia of abuses; each must be grasped by socialists and displayed for all to see to expose the reactionary nature of our “representatives” and the ineffective (because half-hearted) nature of our so-called champions and defenders. Each abuse, scandal, and wanton display of power points to the necessity of a democratic republic. So, expose yourself, decrepit order! We echo the invectives of Lenin toward the constitutional monarchist Cadets: “What thou doest, do quickly.”33

The demand for a democratic republic serves as a rallying point for all those struggling for freedom from domination – be it domination embodied in the employer, the police, anti-trans politicians, or the more abstract forces of capital and the market. All people want freedom for themselves; only some people don’t want it for others. The DSA has an obligation to indefatigably expose the undemocratic nature of the United States – to be the socialist political party that declares for all to hear: “The nation that holds itself out as the world’s premier democracy is no democracy at all”34 – and to offer the democratic republic and socialism as the only viable alternative. Tailing the Democratic Party’s tepid and ineffective attempts at “saving” what little democracy purportedly exists in this country is a dereliction of duty on a profound scale. So too is it a dereliction of duty to continue condemning the present without offering an alternative more concrete than “building power,” “realizing socialism,” or joining the Fourth (or Fifth) International. 

There are two options: stand with the working class and lead the fight, or remain grounded on the reef of reformism and go down with a sinking ship. How exciting that we can play a part in building a working-class movement that struggles to free all of us from a Constitutional law and order regime akin to Marx’s description of the Second Reich – a “police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms”35 – and Lenin’s view of Great Britain: a “well-equipped system of flattery, lies, and fraud.”36

We draw inspiration from the words of Marx when he stated, “Does a people have the right to give itself a new constitution? The answer must be an unqualified ‘yes!’ because the constitution becomes a practical illusion the moment it ceases to be a true expression of the people’s will.”37

We hear our task echoed in the words of William Lloyd Garrison: “The source and parent of all the other atrocities – a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell…So perish all compromises with tyranny,” bellowed the intransigent abolitionist as he publicly burned copies of the Fugitive Slave Law and the US Constitution.38

We march proudly under the unimpeachable voice of Rosa Luxemburg, who opposed limiting the struggle for suffrage to the confines of the Reichstag and stated that “By pushing forward the republican character of Social Democracy we win, above all, one more opportunity to illustrate in a palpable, popular fashion our principled opposition as a class party of the proletariat to the united camp of all bourgeois parties.”39

 Marx, Garrison, and Luxemburg stand in a long line of radicals – including the Levelers and Chartists; the American abolitionists’ Vigilance Committees and radical republicans’ Workingmen’s Parties;40 the freedmen and women of the Reconstruction period in coalition with the Knights of Labor;41 and the majority of Second International socialism42 – who struggled for democracy, freedom from the domination, and an end to servitude. We have an opportunity to join them. 

This article used recent headlines to scrape what amounts to only the surface of our so-called democracy. Such is the importance of Marxist Unity Group’s (MUG) resolution for the 2023 DSA national convention titled ‘Winning the Battle for Democracy.’ If you think the ideas presented in this article are worth discussing at DSA’s convention, please sign our resolution and consider sharing it with all dues-paying DSA members. Principled debate and discussion are our most effective tools in winning the existing left to the necessity of a democratic constitution, and a discussion on the convention floor is an important start.

 

 

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  1. Engels, Friedrich. “Reply to the Honourable Giovanni Bovio,” marxist.org, 1892, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1892/02/critica-sociale.htm.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. n.a. ‘“Unconscionable”: Planned Parenthood’s Alexis McGill Johnson Slams Texas Ruling on Abortion Pill.’ DemocracyNow!, April 10, 2023. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/4/10/fda_abortion_medication_mifepristone.
  5. n.a. “Public Opinion on Abortion,” Pew Research Center, May 17, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/.
  6. Arnold Schroder, Fight Like An Animal, podcast audio, November 3, 2020.
  7. Kaplan, J, Eliot, J, Mierjeski, A. “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” ProPublica, April 6, 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow; n.a. “Clarence Thomas Defends Luxury Gifts from Harlan Crow, GOP Megadonor and Nazi Memorabilia Collector,” DemocracyNow!, April 10, 2023, https://www.democracynow.org/2023/4/10/headlines/clarence_thomas_defends_luxury_gifts_from_harlan_crow_gop_megadonor_and_nazi_memorabilia_collector.
  8. Kaplan, J, Eliot, J, Mierjeski, A. “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal,” ProPublica, April 13, 2023. https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-real-estate-scotus.
  9. Kaplan, J, Eliot, J, Mierjeski, A. “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire” (2023).
  10. Socialist Party of America. “Socialist Party Platform 1912,” Sage American History, August 14, 2013. http://sageamericanhistory.net/progressive/docs/SocialistPlat1912.htm.
  11. Marx, Karl. “The Civil War in France,’ marxist.org, 1871. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/.
  12. Gresko, Jessica. “Justice Clarence Thomas says Supreme Court leak on Roe ‘changes the institution,’” PBS, May 14, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/justice-clarence-thomas-says-supreme-court-leak-on-roe-changes-the-institution.
  13. n.a. “Leaked Pentagon Docs Show U.S. & U.K. Special Forces Already in Ukraine as War Heads to Stalemate,” DemocracyNow!, April 12, 2013. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/4/12/james_bamford_pentagon_documents_leak_ukraine; Bamford, James. “The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel,” The Nation, April 3, 2023. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusion/.
  14. n.a. ‘“Spyfail’ Author James Bamford: What Leaked Pentagon Docs Show About Ukraine War, U.S. Spying on Allies,” DemocracyNow!, April 11, 2023. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/4/11/pentagon_leak_ukraine.
  15. n.a. “Chelsea Manning,” Wikipedia, April 13, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning.
  16. n.a “Edward Snowden,” Wikipedia, April 13, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden.
  17. Diaz, Jaclyn. “Chelsea Manning had to fight to transition in prison. She wants better for others,” NPR, April 9, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/09/1135270366/chelsea-manning-transgender-prisoners.
  18. Pengelly, Martin. “Chelsea Manning hospitalized after suicide attempt, legal team say,” The Guardian, March 12, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/11/chelsea-manning-suicide-attempt-hospital.
  19. n.a. “Julian Assange: Wikileaks co-founder arrested in London,” BBC,  April 12, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47891737.
  20. Macnair, Mike. “Victims of vengeful US mafia,” Weekly Worker, Dec 16, 2021. https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1376/victim-of-vengeful-us-mafia/.
  21. Quoted in Draper, Hall. “Marx on the Democratic Form of Government,” 1974, https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1974/xx/democracy.html.
  22. Ibid.
  23. Macnair, Mike. “Victims of vengeful US mafia,” (2021).
  24. Marx, Karl. “The Civil War in France,’ marxist.org, 1871.
  25. Graham, David A. “How Did the ‘Secret’ Sykes-Picot Agreement Become Public?” The Nation, May 16, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/sykes-picot-centennial/482904/.
  26. Marx, Karl. “The Civil War in France,’ marxist.org, 1871. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/.
  27. Engels, Friedrich. “Critique of the Erfurt Program,” marxist.org, 1891. https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm.
  28. For a concise explanation of the democratic republic character of the Paris Commune, see Leipold, Bruno. “Citizen Marx: The Relationship Between Karl Marx and Republicanism.” Ph.D. diss. St. Cross College, 2017. p. 188.
  29. Lih, Lars. Lenin Rediscovered. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2008. pp. 88-9.
  30. Pickrell, Luke, Janis, Myra. “Socialism with American Characteristics.” Cosmonaut, March 1, 2023. https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/03/socialism-with-american-characteristics/.
  31. Lih, Lars. Lenin Rediscovered (2008). p. 732. The quote reads, “All we do is express ourselves in such a way that it seems as if the worker mass is not capable (and has not already demonstrated its capability, in spite of all those who endow them with their own small-mindedness) of actively supporting each and every protest against autocracy – even when it promises absolutely no tangible results at all!”
  32. Lenin, V.I. “Preface to the Pamphlet May Day in Karokov,” marxist.org, 1901. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1900/nov/maydays.htm.
  33. Nimtz, August. The Ballot, The Streets – Or Both. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2009. p. 115.
  34. n.a. “DSA Political Platform,” Democratic Socialists of America. 2021. https://www.dsausa.org/dsa-political-platform-from-2021-convention/#deepening.
  35. Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” marxist.org, 1875. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm.
  36. Lenin, V.I. “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” 1905. Quoted in Sacks, Adam J. “Like Voting Rights? Thank a Socialist.” Jacobin, December 21, 2018. https://jacobin.com/2018/12/workers-movement-universal-suffrage-socialism-second-international.
  37. Marx, Karl. “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” marxist.org, 1843. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch04.htm.
  38. n.a. “‘A Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell,’” Massachusetts Historical Society, July 2005. https://www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/objects/a-covenant-with-death-and-an-agreement-with-hell-2005-07-01.
  39. Luxemburg, Rosa. “Theory and Practice,” marxist.org, 1910. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1910/theory-practice/index.htm.
  40. Jesse Olsavsky, interview with Cliff and Isaac, Cosmopod, podcast audio, February 20, 2023. https://cosmopod.libsyn.com/runaways-vigilance-committees-and-the-rise-of-revolutionary-abolitionism-1835-61-with-jesse-olsavsky; Monahan, Sean F (2021). The American Workingmen’s Parties, Universal Suffrage, and Marx’s Democratic Communism. Modern Intellectual History 18 (2): 379-402.
  41. Gourevitch, Alex (2011). Labor and Republican Liberty. Constellations 18 (3):431-454.
  42. Sacks, Adam J. “Like Voting Rights? Thank a Socialist” (2018).