She was one of the clearest minds and greatest souls in all our movement, and her passing into the great silence will be such a loss as will leave an aching void to those who knew her, for her place can never be filled. I admired her for her uncompromising integrity, and I loved her for her high-souled devotion to her ideals and her personal loyalty to her comrades.” - Eugene v. Debs
I hope you all get the chance to read my latest article with Real Progressives on Mary Marcy. Mary was a truly brilliant Marxist revolutionary and her writings remain relevant today.
Since AOC’s interview with DSA has been in the news recently, I also want to talk briefly about that. This interviewing is disappointing to me in many ways. First off, they call it “Talking Socialism” but in reality, it’s not about socialism. DSA is the largest socialist organization in the United States - yet they often forget that they should be pushing socialism, and not just electoral politics. Mary Marcy presents a good contrast to AOC - Mary was a revolutionary who fought for socialism every day. Whereas AOC is found defending Biden, in the following exchange:
Q: Some on the Left have looked at Biden’s record and his differences with the Bernie wing of the party, and they conclude that no progress is going to come out of the Biden administration. What’s your view?
AOC: Well, I think it’s a really privileged critique. We’re gonna have to focus on solidarity with one another, developing our senses for good faith critique and bad faith critique. Because bad faith critique can destroy everything that we have built so swiftly. And we know this because it has in the past, and it’s taken us so many decades to get to this point. We do not have the time or the luxury to entertain bad faith actors in our movement. But also we have to value our solidarity with one another. For anyone who brings that up, we really have to ask ourselves, what is the message that you are sending to your Black and brown and undocumented members of your community, to your friends, when you say nothing has changed? Perhaps not enough has changed. And this is not a semantic argument. Just the other night, we in collective struggle were able to stop the deportations of critical members of our community. And that would not have happened in a Trump administration.
This is a very problematic answer, to say the least. First off, many of those making this critique are not at all privileged. AOC is far more privileged than most of the left with her congressional salary. Critiquing Biden for carrying out his promise to billionaire donors that “Nothing will fundamentally change” is not a privileged stance to take. This is not a bad faith critique, it is a realistic take on a Biden administration that has not taken action on releasing children from cages on the border and has been deporting people at a faster rate than Trump did in 2020.
This brings up a big issue that I have with DSA - there is a distinct lack of political education within the organization. The Black Panther Party required political education for its members - 2 hours of reading a day and this education truly showed in the party. DSA has no such requirements, to become a member all you have to do is pay dues. The result is that DSA, while founded on socialist principles, has many social democrats within its ranks. Some chapters do a better job than others, but overall the national organization must concentrate on political education if we are to achieve socialism. Rosa Luxemberg is one of the most famous Democratic Socialists of all time - but the lessons she taught us in Reform or Revolution are largely ignored by the Democratic Socialists of today.
Biden represents a capitalist party that will not enact the systemic change that is needed to save us from the inevitable crisis of late stage capitalism. Rejoining the Paris Climate Accord is not a Green New Deal, it’s completely meaningless in the face of climate catastrophe. When Biden signed 31 new oil and gas leases immediately after taking office, he showed the type of action he will take on climate change. AOC should be attacking Biden, not defending him. She should be pushing for workers to seize control of the means of production, not calling actual revolutionaries bad faith actors. We need more people of the make of Mary Marcy - AOC could learn a lot by reading Mary’s writings.