I suppose LBJ had the greatest Idea in history when he figured out how to keep the poor, uneducated, non-working class and low wage individuals voting to keep Democrats in power. Just feed them crumbs off the Politicians table and promise them "Free Stuff". Until real Socialist quit voting Democrat nothing is going to change,

Jah love Patrick Martin. This is a really good article. I have seen her on Youtube and she seems just like the other DEMONKKKrats with a pretty Brown face and a nice smile. I am not sure how she will implement her anti poverty program either. And, I would like to know what the SEP plans to do about Racial inequality, Anti-Blackness as well as Police Brutality. Thanks. Blessed love.

What planet are you on Patrick Martin? I tend to read WSWS frequently and am a Communist. This is truly an absurd, hyperbolic article. Are you a troll who is paid to get people to DISLIKE socialist candidates? How are you able to substantiate with FACTS that which you have claimed? Instantly judgmental attitudes are what prevent socialists from gaining momentum. Plus, you're really going to rip on Bernie Sanders? That man has put his life on the line against billionaires and special interests for over three decades around the clock, sometimes being the sole voice of reason in a sea of corruption. What have you done, Patrick Martin, to move us forward towards any sort of progress? You can sit and write an article bashing people who are trying to make a change, but what are you doing that is realistically and constructively bolstering socialism? Stop writing and get out there and do something worthwhile!

You call yourself a Communist and you support the Democratic Party? I think you're the troll.

the article does not calls into question her "good intentions", nor it "bashes who is trying to make a change" - please!

the questions raised here are political, and, therefore, must be evaluated in political terms.

the only thing patrick martin and the WSWS have - for a long time already - showed is how far from socialism she and the DSA are - and they are right about it.

https://www.wsws.org/en/art...

well, and it was not the first time true socialists listen to things like "Stop writing and get out there and do something worthwhile!": it was what Lenin used to hear more than 100 years ago - and you can't say, by no means, that he did nothing.

The ad hominems aside, if you read the WSWS you would have several months worth of reporting and analysis that answer your questions on the Sanders campaign and "Our Revolution" initiatives, and what exactly it is that someone like Patrick Martin does with his time. No one's bashing here, this is politics--not a popularity contest.

Recently, and this will be relevant to you, since you are a "communist" who finds himself supporting Democratic Party candidates, that that party -- mired as it is in crisis and bleeding mass support due to its own right-wing character -- is not only experimenting with candidates that will use the S-word to get elected, the party is also running an unprecedented number of candidates this year with backgrounds with the intelligence agencies and the military in an effort to reinforce its flagging political influence. I suggest you consider very carefully what the implications are of heatedly insisting that socialists are bound in any way to support this right-wing, pro-war party of Wall Street, or any of its candidates.

See the multipart article "The CIA Democrats": https://www.wsws.org/en/art...

WOW......... Really.......???

You heard it here first. :)

Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez is the new face of Hope and Change!

She is Change That You Can Believe In--honest!

In short, Ocasia-Cortez is a New and Improved Obama!

In that she is female and hispanic?
And shouldn't "hope and change" require 'scare quotes' in these post-Obama days?

Aside from WSWS's censoring of my polite comments, it does seem to be the only genuinely socialist org among my socialist org bookmarks. There are other ways to know of course, but the commentary on the election of Alexandria is a handy litmus test to determine who are fake socialists among self-identified socialists.

She is not a socialist, she is a social democrat. She is already backing up from her stand against war. She is not going to change Washington, on the contrary, Washington is going to change her. A socialist running for a capitalist party.

Remember that it was Social Democrats who murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Well you are doing a poor job at your revolution.

The USA doesn’t even have a national health care system never mind a viable socialist party.

Like democrats you talk a lot but zero action.

One has to wonder why socialism isn’t more popular even after the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

By design I imagine.

Neither does England and for the same reason. The top dog in the Imperialist food chain buys off its majority male part of the working class with a small share of the loot and many privileges both positive and negative with respective to other workers. Imperial Russia did this with the transformation of runaway peasants into Cossacks. America calls them cowboys. The United Kingdom being a much smaller country did not need too create any such an artificial class. They called them British who lords similarly over the Welch, Scots, Irish, etc.... The French have their foreign Legion.

Smaller capitalist powers cannot afford the Imperial luxury.

Your criticism of Socialist parties does have some merit. The Working class remembers the misrule of petty bourgeois in these parties. It remembers the betrayal of the sacred principles of Internationalism as it is asked to sacrifice its interest for one foreign Stalinist party after another.

However we cannot cry over spilled milk or throw out the baby with the bathwater. We must fight to restore Working Class control over its institutions, both unions and parties all over the World. We have no other alternative our class enemy is organized so must we be.

I agree 100%

But I also watched as unions in the USA didn’t stick together and supported candidates like Clinton’s who are vociferous anti union anti workers criminals and let their numbers decline.

Who’s fault is that

Socialist consciouness doesnt take place based on crisis or economic calamity, it is a process of education, and the ruling class of the USA has done a very good ideological work in the minds of the US workers, most system of comunications, the education system, radio and tv are highly controlled by the ruling class, in many countries the socialists have the privilege to participate in the capitalist press and radio, and peoples are more attracted to socialist ideas, and peoples read more about socialism. In many of those countries in the past the USA prohibited to goverment to let peoples read the works of Marx or Engels, it was a capital sin. The ruling class has had a long war against socialist ideas, the USA is one of the worst country to become a socialist/communist

I need to remind myself that the pro-socialism of the German people was easily muffled and converted by Nazi hate propaganda and blatant racism enforced by need, fear, and some murderous Brownshirts. All (or at least the vast majority of) we humans are susceptible.

How can we strengthen against our basic weakness as every new disaster of Climate or Empire opens the door wider for fascism's deadly boots?

The first thing to pay for everyone's healthcare and college is to make all parents (and their parents) liable--tax them on every child for their entire life, rather than a tax write-off. This not only contributes to free health care and college, but helps eliminate overpopulation and young, ignorant parents. ("The greatest threat to the world is young and/or ignorant parents." -jlepley; "Overpopulation is caused more from the younger you have children rather than just how many. So is ignorance." -jlepley

RE: "The program offered by Ocasio-Cortez is a considerably watered-down
version of the program on which Bernie Sanders ran in 2016: single-payer
health care, a federal jobs guarantee, free college tuition, a
$15-an-hour minimum wage. Like Sanders, she avoids all foreign policy
issues, saying nothing about the ongoing US-backed wars in Syria,
Afghanistan and Yemen, or the campaign of drone-missile assassinations
launched by Obama and continued by Trump."

Bernie Sanders didn't run on a jobs guarantee in 2016. He recently supported the idea.

He has been outspoken against US support for the war in Yemen. He tried to pass a resolution against it: https://www.govtrack.us/con...

Wow, AO-C hasn't even been in office a few days, and WSWS has written her off. Kinda sad really. I would have suggested maybe judging her by her actions. And if you expect her on her platform to write off capitalism, then I guess she may have gotten a handful of voters. One more thing WSWS should consider, is getting economically literate and learning about MMT. It's going to be a long time before capitalism comes to an end, and in the meantime, if anyone is running candidates, they better know how they are going to pay for this and that. #LearnMMT is the hashtag to find out.

She hasn't been in office at all, as she won the primary, not the general election, which is in November. She is expected to win the general election though. But these are minor things—"factual literacy," we could call it—compared to your demoralized attitude.

Your claim that "[i]t's going to be a long time before capitalism comes to an end" is so impressionistic. The working class is on the eve of revolutionary struggles, a majority of young people in America—the center of world imperialism—consider themselves socialists, and you resign yourself to tinkering with the edges of capitalism as the entire international economic order is about to come tumbling about your ears in war and/or economic crisis. One is reminded of those who thought in 1770 that the ancien régime was eternal or those in 1904 who thought that the Romanov dynasty would have another 300 years.

You accuse us of being economically illiterate (clearly you haven't read a Nick Beams article), yet you are politically illiterate.

I wrote her off the first time she said she supported the Democrats and Hillary Clinton. No socialist would touch an imperialist and capitalist party with a ten-foot pole. All socialists know that Hillary Clinton is an enemy of the people. So she has out of her own mouth declared that shse is NOT a socialist.

Obviously.

You're right. We should judge people by their actions, yet the folks at WSWS don't seem to do such things. I'll give an example. Let's say, hypothetically, a bill for single payer comes up, that is, single payer healthcare. If she votes for this bill, I'm betting my next paycheck that WSWS would have some problem with it. Like, do you NOT want everyone to have free healthcare, like the other modern nations? The other thing which rubs me the wrong way is the lack of policies proposed. Like okay, you don't like single payer, or free college, or whatever social democratic platform we pick. What's your solution? Hint that "abolishing capitalism" and "ending the profit motive" is not a policy. That is a GOAL. We can discuss the legitimacy of these goals, but in the end, in any civilized society, you need to have real policies which help people. So if they don't like getting a Green new deal, living wage, and other policies, I wanna know what they would rather have us do instead beyond posturing and sloganeering.

The devil is in the details when Social Security was rolled it specifically was design to demographically exclude most African American males. Who did not live long enough to enjoy the benefits that their long suffering lives of tax paying and exploitation paid for. Similar tricks are built into the design of all reforms. What these design tricks don't do the implementation of which completes the job.

What you have left is the greasing of the squeakiest wheel creating a new constituency supporting the capitalists.

If there was a reform that did not favor one group over another then no Socialist with be against this reform.

The $15 a month movement is example of this divide and rule tactic. Instead of a National movement to raise all minimum wages all at once without any restrictions. The most militant are bought off with local oases like in Seattle. These workers now enjoy these higher wages and live in fear of losing them. They have a subclass interest to ignore their fellow comrades or at least be less militant. Workers in the South for example, Trump supporters resent these comrades and their privileges. These divisions in the working class is deadly.

I might add that the $15 law in Seattle had exclusions built into it.

"The FAS Director shall have the authority to issue a special certificate authorizing an employer to pay a wage less than the Seattle minimum wage but above the Washington State minimum wage."

Workers in small companies suffer from discrimination in the law with respect to those in Larger companies.

So even within the pseudo Leftist oasis of Seattle, workers divided against each other.

The rising tide of reform cannot sink the smaller and less privileged oppressed.

The problem with real reform is that the capitalists will not concede it. This is what transforms reform into revolution.

Another point comrade, have you not notice how reforms that are over a hundred years old are being overthrown? Child Labor law restrictions is the current project for the Trump administration.

Isn't time we stop playing the Capitalist "game of whack-a-mole"? We need Permanent Reform and that means Permanent Revolution"!

"Like, do you NOT want everyone to have free healthcare, like the other modern nations?"

You assume that such things are possible, while you assume that other things are not possible. Has it occurred to you that others simply don’t share in your assumptions? It’s all well and good to talk about reform, but what’s your program for getting a single payer healthcare bill passed? If it’s by electing more and better democrats you’re simply wasting everyone’s time.

The biggest problem with a single payer healthcare plan under capitalism is that it would be watered down from the start, and over time whatever was left of it would be watered down still more to the point of privatization. You know, like what's been happening to Social Security and Medicare? The solution to this problem? End capitalism.

So this raises the question: what is the better use of one's time, working toward reform, or working toward ending capitalism?

I don't agree with that. The idea that electing better dems as a waste of time is a little absurd- after all, "Democrat" is just a label, it has no real meaning outside of the policy positions supported. I mean, it is objectively a good thing when "better" people are put into office, it's kind of tautological and I don't see how anyone could question that. On the issue of tactics, what we need, like most societies, are serious, popular movements which challenge the people in power to serve the public will in an organized manner. Change is never won by one person, but by a moment, movement, a network of people. Also, as I said in my first comment, it seems like everyone on this website only talks to each other, given the terminology used. We can discuss reform as much as we'd like, but let's put this aside for a moment: "Ending capitalism." Okay. Let's get under the hood of this notion. How? What exactly would this mean, and more importantly, HOW would this be accomplished? Like, what are the nuts and bolts of this? Surely, you must understand, that even if we accept this as legitimate, it would never happen overnight and would have to be taken piecemeal, as Marx advocated. My point is that one does not simply "end capitalism". That's a multidimensional process. So if you could, and I ask this from genuine curiosity, what exactly do you mean when you say abolish capitalism, and *how* might this take shape in practice?

"'Democrat' is just a label"

Okay so the Democratic party is just whatever we make it. So all the corporatists have fashioned it into a party of Wall Street and big businesss, and it’s just a matter of electing an Ocasio-Cortez here and there to refashion it back into the party of FDR, presumably. Good luck.

Among other things this idea is historically ignorant. There was a time when the ruling class was willing to make concessions, because it was afraid of what would happen if it didn’t. Plus, profits were still high, and there was more wealth to spread around. We don't live in that time period anymore. Profits have fallen and it's a time of all out war on the working class. Do you deny this?

Oh, please. Your arguments in defense of the capitalist Democrats are old and stale. They carry no weight with me whatsoever.

Also, this is what is happening/has happened to the NHS in the UK.

“Those who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.” -- Rosa Luxemburg

Yes, and along came MMT, an exciting new theory of managed capitalism, except nobody was interested. But I'm sure the election of Ocasio-Cortez will change all that!!

I know of no Marxist critique of MMT on WSWS, but here's another blogger on MMT and Keynesianism in general:

https://thenextrecession.wo...

Well, here we go again, another election, another round of fake lefts being supported by bitter left-radicals who can't stand the fact that the WSWS tells the bald, honest truth. We went through this most painfully with Sanders in 2016, and now I suppose we'll do it again with Cortez. Will the madness never end?

You guys are still closet communists and are destined to be the dodo bird of economics!!

Closet??? Not at all!

I absolutely, 200% agree with the WSWS that the workers CANNOT, under ANY circumstances, vote for a capitalist candidate, and must make an unequivocal, absolute, and complete principled break with the Democrat, Republican, and all other capitalist parties, and achieve their political independence.

Here is a question for the party then: if the position of the SEP is that it is the ONLY workers' party in the US (and as far as I know, that is the SEP's position), and if it is not running candidates in a given election, then what does the SEP advocate workers to do in those elections?

I think there is room for a party to not give a position for local elections in which it doesn't field candidates, when this party is still in the process of becoming a mass party and many people have still never heard about that party. At such a stage, simply analysing what the voters swings mean can be enough (again, it's a different matter in a national election or on a referendum)

There is no room for any revolutionary party to be neutral in any capitalist process, electoral or not. If two capitalists are running for the same seat of course the party should denounce them both equally. Revolutionary parties don't follow voter swings but educate the working class of the specific causation of those swings, which are not acts of Gods but the action of the capitalist system.

If a party lacks expertise, then you are right it should just shut up and work on getting that required expertise.

there are countless elections on every level fro local to national all over the world, we don't need a full report on each, and giving voting instructions on one without a full study in not advisable either.

Full Reports are not necessary. It is enough to advise comrades not to waste their time, contradict their principles and even be responsible for the election of some dangerous figure.

Obama had very obscure beginnings. He got a fellow Democrat tricked out of her seat and then another trick with the release of private divorce papers of his opposing candidate in his senatorial campaign. They were sealed by the court. To this day no knows who and how they were released.

A better managed and speedier Manchurian candidate could not be found then Obama. So even an obscure election deserves a blanket condemnation.

The only positive comments and advice should be relegated to well established Marxist Candidates.

Good question

Not vote! If you break you own it. No one should smear their consciousness with the voting for a reactionary killer

Yes. In nearly all circumstances I'm an advocate of a principled Donkey vote. Where there is not an ICFI candidate what is the point? To say there's not been a qualitative difference between party forms and rule is not being put forward here, although the substantive difference between the two capitalist programmes since the 2000 election has successively been all but eroded away. For example, since 2016, and maybe before, the Democrats have moved to the right of the Republicans on foreign policy.

The Donkey vote system is the most opportunistic, eclectic and unprincipled form of voting possible if it were distributed among class enemies of the working class.

Liberals, Religious, Conservative, Pseudo Leftists, etc,,, are all class enemies.

This is system of voting is only valid with a revolutionary party, were all the candidates are truly progressive and committed to the working class.

If you cannot alienate yourself from Capitalists how can you help the working class to do the same. We have to get out of being in bed with Capitalists in every manner. Including whining and nagging the most degrading of all oppressed relationships.

The more these fake socialist con artists keep talking socialism without following through or meekly capitulating, the more people will distrust the “left” message and turn to the Right/Fascism, especially when living conditions gets worse.
That is a part of her contribution to an increasing Fascistic trend.
And her support for a Democratic Party that is Fascistic in many ways.

Political purists who find some evil in every progressive candidate are the reason we are saddled with Trump and headed straight to fascism. Keep up the good work.

SEP would have a problem with a living wage or free college/daycare if it didn't obediently follow their exact program. This is partly why they have no serious political power. The reality is that most Americans DON'T support real socialism, or Marxian economics. Most Americans are New Dealers, and even if you talk to or poll millennials, most of them almost certainly don't want to wholesale do away with capitalism and install a revolutionary society. Yes, we can point to polls that many, if not most I think, millennials don't like capitalism, but this says nothing of what millennials DO want- a real socialist society? Unlikely.

I was always confused about that phrase 'political purist', as if the DSA or other pseudo-lefts were just a somewhat watered-down version of the SEP. The truth is socialism and capitalism are diametrically opposed to one another, and Ocasio is just that, a capitalist politician. What you really mean to say is that we should be ashamed for having political principles that conflict with those of the ruling class, of which Ocasio is an appendage.

The exact opposite is true. As long as so-called "progressives" keep voting for the Democrats as that party moves further and further to the right, they are enabling the crimes of the Democrats. You keep electing them, they keep on moving to the right. You are not "pushing them to the left". Not in this universe or in any universe.

Trump got elected because the Democrats had nothing to offer the working class except for a war criminal named Hillary Clinton. No worker with any honor would vote for her. The confused people who turned to the Republicans made a huge error, as we know. This is mainly because they are largely prevented from learning anything about alternatives to the two-party runaround. But the responsibility of running unelectable right-wing Democratic candidates rests entirely with supporters of that imperialist party.

And by the way, the only progressive candidates are those of the Socialist Equality Party. I don't know who else you think is progressive.

Sorry, the Democratic Party has done half of the leg work to bring a Nazi like scenario to the US. Voting for people you actually want to vote for is... and I know this is going to surprise you... the only expression of democratic power in the bourgeois republican states. Voting for the “lesser of evils” (none of which are remotely “progressive”) is actually an expression of defeatism in this state of affairs. People who refer to the policies of Obama, Clinton, Sanders, or even Ocasio-Cortez as “progressive” must have decided to wind the clock of their minds back 85 years. We’ve already seen far more drastic soft capitalist policy from the elitist FDR than any of these pseudo leftists are aiming for. And that was 85 years ago and FDR blatantly and directly explained how it was to save capitalism in a time of extreme capitalist crisis! So can we all please retire this tired and long disproven idea that voting for capitalism-lite is in any way going to help a working class that is on the precipice of police state lock down, hyper technological spying/tracking, and brutal authoritarian repression? Thanks.