Fight the Constitution: For a Democratic Socialist Republic - Selected Writings from Marxist Unity Group

by Marxist Unity Group (Contributor), Donald Parkinson (Preface)

Marxist Unity Group is an organization committed to political struggle within the Democratic Socialists of America. This makes us a DSA faction, and we aim to be a constructive one. Our words "Marxist Unity" are we hope to rally thousands of Marxists in DSA around a shared vision for our movement's future. Fight the For a Democratic Socialist Republic is a selection of essays by Marxist Unity Group's members, covering their views on democracy and the state, political parties and their programs, and electoral and labor strategy. It represents a diversity of views within the scope of our points of unity, sometimes dovetailing and other times in conflict, rather than a party line.

Genres: Politics

418 pages, Paperback

Published August 15, 2023

Reviews

[Donald]

This collection argues that the architecture of the US Constitution is too limiting towards democratic input and that socialists should unite against its strictures. This is joined with a defence of Marx's democratic-republicanism and Marxist party-building before the First World War. Building such a party in the American context would require retrieval of the minimum-maximum program and many strategic assumptions that have fallen away over the course of the 20th Century.

The articles include a lot of historical examples and quotations, although they lean heavily towards establishing the views of Marx, Lenin and a few others. I've not read many Cosmonaut articles otherwise, so I'm missing the full picture, but I was surprised that there's not as much about other Communist parties and national liberation movements in the Cold War period. I think everything sort of hangs together, and I appreciated the discussions, but it seems pretty easy to imagine countermoves. For example, essentially promising to overthrow the Constitution in favour of a process of renewal makes sense to me, but it would also seem to open up the organization to an intensification of repression. Of course, the left will be repressed either way, but it's not hard to imagine a small organization being crippled by actions to exclude it from politics far before it has the critical mass of support for many people to care.

Part of the issue for me is that we have a Communist Party here in Canada that fits many of the programmatic demands of MUG and has a very small role in national politics. They run independent candidates where they can afford to, criticize the ruling parties including betrayals by reformists, have a minimum-maximum program set-up and such. They also operate largely as a sect. Canada arguably doesn't have the same explicit constitutional limitations on democracy as the USA. So I think that the MUG book is useful to think through but I'm not sure how much actually depends on clarity around the Constitution or program.

[Gabriel Embrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm impressed by the work of the Marxist Unity Group. First, it seems that they are genuinely attempting to mine the history of 19th and 20th-century socialism for guidance without being beholden to the specific practices of any party/movement uncritically. For Euro-American Marxists, there is a lot more to learn from the second international style Social Democrats than many would care to admit and the Marxist Unity Group seems to be able to genuinely pull from that history without uncritically lauding it. Second, I applaud the political clarity that this project- and by extension the text- has been established with. Very rarely do I see such analytical sobriety coupled with revolutionary optimism. Some of this is rooted in the theoretical currents the MUG/cosmonaut writers pull from, I find the work on the Minimum-Maximum program to be especially compelling. However, I think that would not have been possible if they hadn't started their theoretical project from the vantage point of the possible. MUG carefully navigates between that naive excitement that the DSA is a big new socialist group and has weathered some major storms and the jaded pessimism that it is but another doomed reformist effort. They see the DSA for what it is and genuinely try to bring together a program that strengthens its positives while steering away from its negatives. I'm glad to see there are historically informed and ideologically committed Marxists within the DSA fighting to see it positively transformed beyond what it was founded to be back in the 1980s. Despite its wonky presentation and at times odd lurching between different manners of writing (an unavoidable issue when collecting essays by different authors) I found the case laid out Marxist Unity Group to be compelling.

[Mary Carpenter · Rating 5 out of 5]

That's my caucus baby!!!