The following three short articles by Luke Pickrell, Edward Varda, and Gil Schaeffer represent a recent debate on the democratic republic, political agitation, the minimum-maximum program, and communism in the strategy of the Marxist Unity Group (MUG). They were originally published in the MUG Bulletin in the lead up to the caucus’ 2023 Congress.
Putting the Democratic Republic First
Luke Pickrell
The valuable conversations among MUG members in Discord continue. There are inevitable limitations to the medium. Not everyone uses Discord, typing a post isn’t everyone’s preferred means of communication, and people “like” or “heart” posts for different reasons. Nothing substitutes for real-life, face-to-face discussion. Disclaimer aside, I’d like to highlight a particular conversation that got going after a suggested addition to the content of the Reader. This initial suggestion got the ball rolling on how many curriculums we need, the topics, and if any topic has primacy or special importance compared to the others.
Taken as a whole, my posts during the discussion said that the demand for a democratic Constitution and a democratic republic should be MUG’s primary message (or “calling card”). I expressed concern that in our attempt to respond to many different issues, we lose sight of the demand for a democratic Constitution and a democratic republic. I highlighted someone else’s comment – “I personally entered the reading group not really understanding the focus on ‘the fight for a democratic constitution.’ It’s worthwhile and absolutely worth fighting for, but I have never actually seen it as central to my thought about the United States, other than the undemocratic Constitution is an example of why America is so destructive, but has little explanatory power” – as (perhaps) emblematic of a larger sentiment in MUG. I said that “if people walk away from the reader thinking, oh, the primary task of a socialist is to connect every abuse in society to the fact that we don’t have political democracy and that the existing Constitution is the main obstacle, it has done a good job.”
There were three popular responses (i.e, they got a lot of “likes”) more or less directed toward my comments: there’s a lot more to MUG’s strategy and we should include but not limit ourselves to the critique of the Constitution; democracy is how we build a majority to remake society with us, and socialism is the reconstruction of society by the majority in an attempt to reach communism; and, we need to develop a well rounded political critique and shouldn’t have tunnel vision regarding the Constitution (or, what some people say about us will be accurate).
I was directed to one section of MUG’s Immediate Tasks document, which reads, “Finally, Marxist Unity Group will pursue a rigorous political education, for both our members and DSA as a whole. We must seriously investigate the US and global capitalist society, the history of the workers’ movement, and what it would take to achieve a socialist revolution in the United States. Marxist theory is vital for the success of any socialist movement. It provides the movement with a scientific understanding of society and the political principles needed to transform it. We hope to promote the importance of Marxist theory by expanding educational infrastructure and member engagement, creating a rich and nondogmatic intellectual culture.”
MUG contains contradictions. We are too focused on the Russian Revolution, Communism, and what we think will happen after winning a democratic Constitution. We are also too connected to providing a general, all-encompassing education. One side is too specific and the other is too broad. Lost between these two spaces is the necessity of winning people (not just Marxists and DSA members) to the fight for a democratic Constitution. We should focus on this point.
I know we think that in the United States, in the 21st century, the end goal of communism and the immediate goal of a democratic Constitution can (1) be placed in the same program and (2) win over the Marxists in the DSA. This attempt is exemplified in the phrase “democratic socialist republic” as meaning (I can only presume) something more than “democratic republic.” (As an aside, I’m curious why last year’s Perspectives Document used “democratic republic” but not this year’s). These two ideas don’t go together in the way we are attempting to manage them. The undemocratic Constitution is the issue to solve. The democratic republic is the social project to realize. We should put both of those points first.
What would MUG lose if it changed its name to the Democratic Constitution Group? What would the left in the United States lose? Would our message and propaganda become less clear? Would socialism be harder to achieve? I support MUG’s maximum program. The economy needs to be socialized to (1) avoid further disaster and (2) create a better life for everyone. However, we can make it clearer to others (and ourselves) that the only effective strategy to realize socialism in the future is the democratic republic.
“Constitutional Campaign” or Communist Program
Edward Varda
In the second pre-congress bulletin, comrade Luke Pickrell posed the question “What would MUG lose if it changed its name to the Democratic Constitution Group?”1 My reply: plenty. I’m somewhat nonplussed about this question given the name “Marxist Unity” is a quite literal one. Our immediate task in the DSA, a task given extra importance with our presence on the National Political Committee, is coalescing Marxists and communists against the state loyalist wings of the organization and the movement. Long-term, we believe the DSA can be a ground to unite the existing “activist layer” of socialist sects and other grouplets to break the managerialist conception of politics that haunts the NGO-sphere and the existing “revolutionary parties” all the same. Using a slightly stretched historical metaphor,2 a “new model” left that can decisively break with the old order, convene their forces as a mass communist party to win a democratic republic, and bring forth a future posed by capitalism’s development: communism.
I don’t think that the tasks I just laid out in this short catechism are controversial in MUG, although the reader might phrase the mission in their linguistic conventions, metaphors, and idiosyncrasies.3 One might notice that there is a great deal of other content to this outside the slogan for a democratic republic. This is not because I deny the importance of the political rule of the proletariat through a democratic constitution,4 or that I harbor a secret desire for Trotskyist economism, but because our faction can’t solely be defined by advocacy for a democratic constitution. There is unity around a set of strategic principles (strategy of patience, center tendency, socialist republicanism, old bolshevism – what’s in a name?) of which advocacy of a new republic is a key part. Luke uses the idea of a calling card as what the democratic republic should be to MUG, and I would agree — a calling card is left at the scene of the crime, a proud declaration of our cause. But it does not describe every aim, principle, or means of a thief. It’s just as much of a mistake to judge the entire content of Bolshevism by a singular slogan like “peace, land, and bread,” a mistake made frequently enough by aspiring Bolsheviks in the broad left.
In a similar vein, Luke takes issue with Mike Macnair’s view that anti-constitutionalism should be a strategic orientation contra the state loyalism of the right wing of the workers’ movement and the spontaneity tailing of the far left. Macnair warns that “putting democracy first” in a way that neglects to pose a socialist alternative to capitalism runs the risk of the democratic republic becoming a “flanderized” slogan that is repeated on end without reflection. I don’t mean to accuse comrades of this, but I do have concerns that a single-minded orientation to the constitution in place of raising political consciousness can come across as this in the long term. Macnair doesn’t recommend to “orient toward its country’s constitution in the negative,” nor does he neglect “unity around the goal of a new constitution in the near future” – the CPGB’s draft platform has plenty of concrete demands that make up their vision for democracy and the minimum program.5 The issue comes down to how we think about democracy, socialism, and the minimum program.
“Winning the battle of democracy” or “winning the battle for democracy” is a common sticking point for MUG: that is, in the terms of the Communist Manifesto, “the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy.”6 What does this mean regarding our program? In my view, the minimum program is a slate of policies and demands to be implemented immediately with the convening of a revolutionary government by a working-class party (or parties, in cases like the October Revolution) that has won a political majority, and would create the conditions for the founding of a new order beyond the capitalist state. All of the planks of the minimum program are in a sense “political”: taken together, not a zero-year immediate transition to communism, nor a list of desirable policies we’d like to see, but demands which would put the proletariat in the dominant position in the class struggle for the first time – after all, “political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.”7 The program may be split into various sections depending on the concrete conditions: political, economic, agricultural, ecological, etc but they are in the last instance a political program. This can be elaborated when we consider the economic demands of the program.
The minimum program’s economic demands are measures to subordinate the capitalist class, both by depriving it of means over the state through nationalizing the banks and the most important industries, and by depriving the class of means of control over the working class through immediate economic reforms; the famous demand being the reduction of the working day. Alex Gourevitch makes the point well enough in his book that the historical foundation for democracy, even in its limited and premodern forms, has always been the absence of economic dependency/domination, hence the classical democratic advocacy for widespread small land holding.8 The Marxist case, appealing to republican and democratic currents present in the workers’ movement, was that capitalist development gradually erased the thin possibility of individual ownership of property alleviating domination and the sale of labor-power.9 Hence Marx’s statement in the program for the French Workers Party, “That the producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production; That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them; 1.) The individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress; 2.) The collective form the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society.”10 It follows that the full democratization of society requires and presupposes the material basis of communal property, the only productive relations that allow people the means and free time to partake in methodological control of their social life. Enacting this in one fell swoop is impossible, but immediate inroads on the rights of property give the working class the ability to hold the state and its functionaries in subordination, beginning the process of liberation. A classic example of this is the Paris communards banning the strenuous practice of night work for the city’s bakers, allowing many laborers the ability to participate in political affairs for the first time in their lives.
It’s not as simple as a process of stages, that we first “win the battle for democracy” (taken here to mean only universal and equal suffrage11) which allows us to then agitate for the usage of economic measures; the two are deeply intertwined in the process of taking power. To return to the Commune, the revolution began with mass discontent breaking the unity of the French armed forces, allowing the National Guard to take power with a broad mandate from the Parisian working class. They proceeded to implement a series of economic and political measures that set free initiatives of local government and workers’ control in Paris. This was liberatory and should be celebrated, but came up short in ways that would prove disastrous. Lissagary, a correspondent of Marx and participant in the commune, notes that it was the lack of a minimum program for power that led to the defeat of the commune. Rather than a program that had been agitated for and organized around, the commune held elections and quickly found that the results “abounded in chapels, groups, semi-celebrities, and hence endless competition and rivalry,” none of which were aware that the commune was a “barricade, not a government.”12 The most infamous shortcoming that Marx notes was the failure to seize the assets of the Bank of France, which would have paralyzed the capitalist state order.13 Measures like this that make up the minimum program are the concrete meaning of the famous slogan of “smashing the state,” no matter how much reformists accuse such of being a verbal trick.14
This lesson regarding the minimum program isn’t just a shibboleth established by academic republicans or CPGB-PCC apparat (as funny as that image would be) – it was a core of the revolutionary and critical Marxism of the Second International and the expression of this tendency in Russia, the Bolsheviks. Lenin nicely summarizes this in a passage from Two Tactics of Social Democracy in The Democratic Revolution:
The next question is that of the proletariat’s attitude in general towards a provisional revolutionary government. The Congress resolution answers this first of all by directly advising the Party to spread among the working class the conviction that a provisional revolutionary government is necessary. The working class must be made aware of this necessity. Whereas the “democratic” bourgeoisie leaves the question of overthrowing the tsarist government in the shade, we must push it to the fore and insist on the need for a provisional revolutionary government. More than that, we must outline for such a government a program of action that will conform with the objective conditions of the historic period through which we are now passing and with the aims of proletarian democracy. This program is the entire minimum program of our Party, the program of the immediate political and economic reforms which, on the one hand, can be fully realised on the basis of the existing social and economic relationships and, on the other hand, are requisite for the next step forward, for the achievement of Socialism.
Thus, the resolution fully clearly defines the nature and aims of a provisional revolutionary government. In its origin and fundamental nature such a government must be the organ of the popular insurrection. Its formal purpose must be to serve as the instrument for convening a popular constituent assembly. The content of its activities must be to put into effect the minimum program of proletarian democracy.15
This basic insight is the key to Lenin’s democratic and socialist agitation – the promotion of a revolutionary provisional government that would immediately enact a program of action to create proletarian democracy (then meaning consistent democracy). This strategic orientation is consistent throughout Lenin’s revolutionary oeuvre even with rhetorical changes after the February Revolution,16 best shown by the pamphlet The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It. Faced with the refusal of the provisional government to implement desperately needed measures to sustain the Russian working class, reforms that even resembled the first steps towards a socialist transition, the convening of a revolutionary government to enact an immediate program was needed. Lenin puts it succinctly: “It all boils down to the same thing: the rule of the bourgeoisie is irreconcilable with truly-revolutionary true democracy. We cannot be revolutionary democrats in the twentieth century and in a capitalist country if we fear to advance towards socialism.”17 This agitation integrated the masses’ demands and objections, the sparks of political consciousness, into the project of revolutionary democracy – there is no “peace, land, bread” without “all power to the soviets.”
In this light, the concern about “constitutional campaigns” makes sense. The MUG resolution on “Winning the Battle for Democracy” isn’t a constitutional campaign, but a strategy to contextualize “Every fight DSA wages… under the central goal of the working class taking political power.”18 The adoption of such a goal would not create a new constitution committee of the DSA comparable to the NLC, NEC, or GND that would carry out agitational work with a single aim,19 but an orientation for all of the organization’s projects to the aim of winning a minimum program of revolutionary democracy. Communism and “what we think will happen after winning a democratic Constitution” are deeply vital for organizing a working-class political movement.20 There has never been a proletarian revolution that has ignored economic tasks to be solved later, and to do so is to both weaken the sustainability of a provisional revolutionary government and our ability to agitate for such an order.
A few final thoughts: the debate at Congress over whether to use the term “democratic-socialist republic” or “democratic republic” seems silly at first look. Contesting what people in this country view as “democratic-republicanism” is worthwhile in the same sense that continuing to call ourselves communist or Marxist is, but we shouldn’t bind ourselves to committing to singular slogans. We’re in an organization called the Democratic Socialists of America and the classics we draw on were similarly flexible in their sloganeering (red republic, social[ist] republic, democratic republic, dictatorship of the proletariat, commune-state, soviet republic, etc, etc, etc, ad reductio absurdum), so I’m fine contesting “democratic socialist” as well. The debate was worthwhile in that it drew out shades of principle, which leads me to my last point.
MUG’s points of unity are political principles that we would like the DSA to adopt as a whole. This is good: our goal is not to turn the organization into a Kautsky-Lenin reading group, but for it to accept our principles and grow into its role as a mass communist party. Putting up further requirements of theoretical or philosophical agreement in MUG would serve as a barrier to the genuinely interesting, learned, and varied perspectives that come out of our caucus. However, this can lead to some dissonance when we are asked what the “MUG perspective” on X or Y question is. Being aware that there’s no way to foreclose this question and that doing so would be counterproductive, the revamping of the bulletin and drafting of documents like the perspectives provide comrades a good opportunity to continue to reflect on and concretize contemporary developments in Marxist philosophy, social theory, and political strategy. This will draw out differences and commonalities between us, grow our understanding, and clarify positions of the caucus for both ourselves and curious sympathizers.
Who Makes the Laws?
Gil Schaeffer
The modern mass struggle for democracy began with Tom Paine’s Common Sense and the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776. Eric Foner has recounted this history in Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976), and Jonathan Israel has more recently traced the spread of these revolutionary ideas throughout Britain, Europe, and beyond over the succeeding seventy-five years in The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1776-1848 (2017). Sean Monahan has good short accounts in Reading Paine from the Left and Remembering the Chartists. Marx knew this history, citing the Pennsylvania Constitution and the Rights of Man and Citizen in “On the Jewish Question” (1843), and both Engels and Marx soon joined this democratic movement through their association with the Chartists.
By beginning the study of democracy with the mass movements that first demanded and fought for it, we can see that the struggle for democracy has always been bound up with specific demands and laws that democratic movements wanted but were denied because the power to make the laws was not in their hands. As opposed to a dictionary definition of democracy, which merely describes a formal mechanism for arriving at decisions but abstracts from any specific political content or history of democratic struggle, mass movements demanding democracy are always driven by a deep dissatisfaction with those who rule over them and an equally deep conviction that they need to seize that rule-making power for themselves.
Edward Varda does not recognize in his article, “‘Constitutional Campaign’ or Communist Program,” that we are already in the middle of a mass democratic political movement against the Constitution that began in earnest in 2009 with the failure of Obama and the Democrats to deal with the financial crisis, health care, voting rights, labor law, wars, abortion rights, military spending, etc. Instead of centering his attention on this movement and its collision with the undemocratic political institutions that place the power to make the laws in the hands of a minority, Edward is afraid “that ‘putting democracy first’ in a way that neglects to pose a socialist alternative to capitalism runs the risk of the democratic republic becoming a ‘flanderized’ slogan that is repeated on end without reflection. I don’t mean to accuse comrades of this, but I do have concerns that a single-minded orientation to the Constitution in place of raising political consciousness can come across as this in the long term.”
This short passage contains the core mistake in Edward’s, Mike Macnair’s, and MUG’s current views on the relationship between democracy, socialism, the content of political consciousness, and where our political activity and agitation should be focused. I take my views on the relationship between these concepts from Lenin’s article, Political Agitation and “The Class Point of View,” from WITBD, and Lenin’s other articles in Iskra more generally. The whole point of Lenin’s argument in these writings is that democracy is the Marxist “class point of view” and that a democratic constitution must be the primary political goal of the working class. From Lenin’s point of view, Edward’s distinction between “a single-minded orientation to the Constitution in place of raising political consciousness” is oxymoronic.21
Edward follows Macnair in believing that the working class must develop a clear understanding of the need for socialism as an alternative to capitalism in order to have the ideological vision required to carry the class struggle through to victory. That is not what Lenin believed about political consciousness. As he put it in WITBD, “Revolutionary Social-Democracy has always included the struggle for reforms as part of its activities. But it utilizes ‘economic’ agitation for the purpose of presenting to the government, not only demands for all sorts of measures, but also (and primarily) the demand that it cease to be an autocratic government.” Lenin is responding specifically to arguments about economic reforms here, but it applies to all demands. Demanding that the government cease to be autocratic is a different immediate political orientation than demanding it be socialist. Socialism is not the only perspective from which an alternative society can be envisioned. Democracy, rule by the majority, is also an alternative vision of society opposed to one ruled by a minority.
Edward is concerned that the goal of socialism will be lost and the left will not be prepared to enact and enforce the socialist measures required to seize and secure power in a revolutionary situation if we place “democracy first.” This concern is misplaced because it confuses the process and content of political agitation for democracy prior to a revolutionary situation, which is the condition we have lived in since the Civil War and Reconstruction, with the immediate tactics called for in a revolutionary situation itself. The purpose and role of a minimum program is different depending on which situation we are in. Over the past fifteen years, we have been faced with a number of economic issues that demanded socialist or near socialist solutions, including the nationalization of the banks during the 2008 financial crisis, a national health system (Medicare for All or one modeled on the VA), public housing rather than private, the Citizens United decision on corporate personhood and political donations, etc. It wasn’t any lack of public support for a radical restructuring of our country’s political, economic, and social policies that prevented change on these issues (the “consciousness” was there), but the oligarchic opposition to change rooted in our undemocratic political institutions. We should put all of these economic demands and more into the minimum part of our program because they express important and necessary changes we want and need, but the primary thing we have to explain and mobilize against is the political obstacle to achieving those changes. That means putting democracy first.
Edward doesn’t discuss the problem of political agitation for democracy in pre- or non-revolutionary times in his article. All of his examples are drawn from the revolutionary situations prevailing during the Paris Commune and the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions in Russia. He confines his comments to these revolutionary situations because he thinks “the minimum program is a slate of policies and demands to be implemented immediately with the convening of a revolutionary government by a working-class party (or parties, in cases like the October Revolution) that has won a political majority and would create the conditions for the founding of a new order beyond the capitalist state.” But in these examples the job of democratic agitation has already been accomplished and power is already in the hands of revolutionary forces. In such revolutionary situations, it is true that the political and economic demands of the entire minimum program come together because the problem of democratic power has been solved and the revolutionary forces possess the means to implement the entire minimum program. At this point, the minimum program functions as an instructional manual for implementing policy; but we are not in a revolutionary situation at the present time in the US and it doesn’t look like we will be in one any time soon.
In a non-revolutionary situation, the minimum program doesn’t function as an instructional manual for implementing policy but as an educational and agitational guide outlining our goals, the principal one being universal and equal suffrage because that is the crucial plank in the program that identifies and explains why we do not have the power to implement all the other parts of the program. Universal and equal suffrage in the minimum program is not a “stage” “which allows us to then agitate for the usage of economic measures,” as Edward characterizes it. It functions primarily as an ideological and political critique of the structure of the existing state. This focus on the structure of electoral representation is much more important in our country than in Britain because our political system is monstrously less democratic. This is where Macnair’s conception of a democratic republic proves inadequate for our use. In Modern Ancient Constitutions, Macnair writes:
a central task of the left- in the UK and in the USA, and indeed, elsewhere is the struggle for political democracy. This struggle means- as its other side- the promotion of the overthrow of the ‘mixed constitutions’ that are falsely labeled ‘democratic’. In the UK, against the monarchy, the House of Lords and the rest of the anti-democratic elements of the ‘ancient constitution’; in the USA, against the sanctity of the US Constitution and its anti-democratic structure (the Presidency, Senate, judicial review, and so on).
As in Revolutionary Strategy, Macnair makes no distinction here between universal suffrage and universal and equal suffrage and treats the British monarchy and House of Lords as essentially equivalent in power and structure to our Presidency, Electoral College, Senate, and Supreme Court. Macnair doesn’t mention the House of Commons, which, for all its shortcomings, is where legislative power lies and whose members are elected by universal and equal suffrage in parliamentary districts of about one hundred thousand. That is not an insignificant difference compared to the representational and legislative obstacles we face. But instead of evaluating the importance of electoral structure and integrating it into a theory of what political agitation for a democratic republic might look like in the US, Macnair chooses to emphasize the bureaucratic, juridical, financial, and military similarities shared by all capitalist states. As a consequence, the extremely undemocratic structure of the US electoral system barely interests him at all. Although not exactly the same as Edward’s reliance on rare revolutionary events for his illustrations of the meaning and function of a minimum program, Macnair’s emphasis on what he wants a full democratic republic to achieve greatly outweighs any interest in dealing with the uniquely undemocratic structure of the US state form.
There are many other aspects of Edward’s, Macnair’s, and MUG’s current conception of Marxism that I disagree with, but now is not the time to get into all of that. However, I will say that I think Edward is wrong to say our goal should not be to turn DSA into a Kautsky-Lenin reading group. That is exactly what will be required in order to sort through all of the ideological. strategic, and organizational issues that will confront DSA and MUG in the future, the issue of “Democracy First” being at the top of the list.
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zM-ag91WyY6L2JpkbECOWJ3jSxpbzK_prrEleB4Zqns/edit
- https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1060/doing-war-differently/
- This is good! Maoist standard English gets old.
- The “dictatorship of the proletariat” in classical marxist discourse, this exact phrasing being taken from point 18 of Engels’s Principles of Communism; for more context, see the first volume of Richard Hunt’s The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels (290).
- https://communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme/3-immediate-demands/
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
- Ibid.
- From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century.
- Not to forgo that this form of classical or aristocratic non-domination was often explicitly made at the expense of domination of another; slavery in Greek Antiquity, the genocide of Native nations in North America, etc; this point is made by Marx in Capital in the notion that the thinkers of antiquity “excused the slavery of one on the ground that it was a means to the full development of another”, and the discussion of the colonies’ “opposition to the establishment of capital” inevitably being subsumed; https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm; further discussion of this point can be found in chapter 6 of Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital.
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm
- This is step backwards; compare to to Lenin’s wider definition taken from Kautsky, that democracy is “the rule of the masses over their representatives”, or his extended comparison of “free and civilised” England to Tsarist Russia in Tasks of The Russian Social-Democrats; https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/q.htm, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1897/dec/31b.htm
- https://spectrejournal.com/after-the-commune/; further discussion in https://sci-hub.se/10.1353/ncf.2021.0003
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_22.htm
- https://jacobin.com/2020/10/towards-democratic-socialism-poulantzas-state-power; I urge readers interested in “structural marxism” to read Balibar and Althusser’s interventions in the 70s before deferring to late Poulantzas.
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/ch02.htm
- A good documentation of the continuity in the Bolshevik message in the midst of party debate is Lih’s The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism; https://sci-hub.se/10.1163/187633111X566048
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/10.htm#v25zz99h-357
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/16dzTN2IS7Y8x2hG5Vkz37UpG6MZ6T3-_Ex8FVPq3CCs/edit?usp=sharing
- To clarify, this is not referring to Luke’s resolution for a MUG constitution committee, which would have created a committee in the caucus.
- Putting the Democratic Republic First, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zM-ag91WyY6L2JpkbECOWJ3jSxpbzK_prrEleB4Zqns/edit?usp=sharing
- For newer members who may not be familiar with these arguments, my article in Cosmonaut, Lenin and the “Class Point of View, (12/2020), and a letter to the Weekly Worker in response to Macnair, Democracy, give the basics.