Thanks to Anthony P. Teso for responding to my recent letter. As I wrote, the strategic demand for democracy was crucial to classical Marxism and has been overlooked by the Left for too long. The increasing engagement with democratic republicanism and the demand for a new constitution, most evident in DSA’s new Workers Deserve More program, are welcome developments.

I also appreciate Anthony’s acknowledgment of Marxist Unity Group’s work in restoring the demand for a democratic constitution to leftist political strategy. We continue to debate the relevance of Marxism’s democratic republicanism for our current moment, but the historical record has finally been corrected.

I think Anthony and I agree that the US isn’t a democracy. I hesitate because Anthony writes that in “bourgeois society” people “assemble as formal equals.” But people in the US don’t assemble as formal equals. That’s precisely the problem. The Constitution gives more power to geographic state units than voters, meaning that the Senate and Electoral College (and by extension the President and Supreme Court) do not equally represent everyone. Popular laws are blocked, and unpopular laws are passed by Senators representing a minority of voters. Then there are the residents of Washington, D.C., and territories like Puerto Rico and Guam: more than three million Americans with no voting representation in Congress.

There are other points over which we more clearly disagree. One is the importance of rights or making claims to rights. I don’t agree with Marx’s dismissal of the Rights of Man. I prefer the interpretations of Gil Schaeffer, Guy Aitchison, and Bruce Watson. Rights are important, and they shouldn’t be dismissed as inextricably tied to private property. Contemporary socialists largely misunderstand the potential radicality of rights claims and are worse off for it. My critique of the Constitution and argument for democracy is grounded in rights claims, particularly the right to an equal vote. Given the long history of struggles for equal rights in this country, I’m confident that this critique will grab and move millions.

Another point of disagreement is the relevance of democratic republicanism to the American Left. Anthony uses examples of far-right political power and xenophobic laws in the few European countries that are democratic republics to argue against democracy as a strategic goal. This is a familiar argument: If bad things can happen in countries that are democratic republics, then the demand for a democratic republic as the means of working-class rule must be significantly flawed.

But there are several problems with this argument. The first is that there’s a difference between the working class struggling to win a democratic republic and the working class fighting for further demands once it has achieved said republic. The working class in some Nordic countries has passed that first hurdle. They face many obstacles, but the denial of equal suffrage is not one of them. Political majorities can create laws and small parties can be represented in parliament. The Supreme Court cannot make and break legislation, and authoritarian interests, while present, aren’t entrenched in an upper house like the Republican Party in the US Senate. These structural disadvantages are absent. The fact that the democratic system doesn’t produce the outcomes that we’d want doesn’t invalidate the system itself. It just means that, like I said in my first letter, the struggle for socialism will continue, but this time on much more favorable terrain. The US working class has yet to win that terrain. To do so, it will need to form itself into a political party with democracy as its primary strategic goal.

A distinction also needs to be made between winning democracy in the US compared to in other countries. We are the imperial and economic hegemon. If successful, our democratic revolution would shock the global order. As I wrote in my first letter, such a victory would also imply that the working class had successfully organized itself into a political party that could then begin tackling the economy. Anthony writes that the Nordic working class isn’t currently putting “the question of what is produced, how, by whom, and for whom” on the legislative agenda. That should be taken up with said working class and their political representatives. But that observation, if true, isn’t a knock on the Nordic political structure. It's also no reason to think that we in the US wouldn’t use our democratic republic to “wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie.”

Finally, Anthony and I disagree about what can build the working class into an agent of change. Anthony puts the politics and constitutional arguments aside to focus on developing working-class “institutions, press, and habits of debate.” Once the working class is no longer atomized, then, perhaps, we can talk about constitutions and political struggle. Until then, the “democratic-republican program” is just a “debating stance” between two letter-writers in the pages of Cosmonaut.

I agree that the working class needs to be organized. But that must be done by centering the struggle for a nationwide political party with democracy as its primary strategic goal. Instead of pulling away from politics and constitutional questions, we should lean into them. People are looking for answers. We have to provide solutions. We have to make the connection between the various problems facing society and the need to abolish our despotic government and the Constitution that empowers it. We need to lead the charge, pushing the movement forward, dragging every liberal by the coattails and stepping over the obstinate. MUG has a constitutional solution to the questions posed—democracy—and we are still working to win DSA to that position. Is this strategy correct? Time will tell. But given the long history of struggles for equal rights in this country, I’m confident that it will speak to a broad audience.

When it’s all said and done, Anthony doesn’t think that centering the democratic republic is a viable strategy for working-class power. That’s one thing. But he then extrapolates that disagreement about a particular strategy to a criticism of presenting a strategy to the working class at all, claiming that doing so represents “socialism from above.”

But the alternative to engaging in constitutional arguments is to evade the question of political power altogether and hand that terrain of struggle to the bourgeoisie. This is really a false choice. No socialist worth their salt should dodge the question of political power or, in so doing, miseducate and confuse those around them.

Fortunately, DSA is not afraid to provide the leadership that all revolutionary movements need—at least it shouldn’t be. Workers Deserve More presents a clear constitutional vision that we must spread as far as possible.

Luke Pickrell