ummmmmmmmm is this allowed?

Yesterday, news broke that the NYC DSA endorsed Cynthia Nixon.

Typically, I don’t like to concern myself too deeply with the internal affairs and projects of the major urban DSA, PSL, etc, chapters. I don’t live there, I can’t aid with their objectives. Obvious reasons.

I am, however, a millenial and that means that I am (toxically) plugged into the internet at all times. I inevitably witness the big city twitter socialist discourses, the socdem comedian egoist squabbles, and the occasional good news of labor victories over capital.

This morning, I scrolled upon something uniquely concerning; The NYC DSA chapter had endorsed actress-turned-progressive-Democrat Cynthia Nixon.

For those of you who don’t know, Nixon is famous for being on HBO’s Sex and the City. Here’s another important fact about her.

Nixon, clearly coat-tailing on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, declared herself a Democratic Socialist earlier in July. It’s interesting how “Democratic Socialist” apparently just means “somewhat empathetic capitalist” now.

I’m honestly not sure how New York DSA’ers justified this decision. I’m assuming their calculation looked something like this:

Says She is a DemSoc, So She Must Be + Welfare Platform = Definitely Socialism :):):)

In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida describes a historical phenomena that I think applies to this situation;

“The degradation of the language is the symptom of a social and political degradation; it has its origins in the aristocracy and in the capital city.”

“Democratic Socialist” is a word that has lost its denotation within the rotting American socius. This should have been expected. There is an extensive tradition of Democratic operatives subsuming leftwing energy and converting it into a debased platform more palatable to the American bourgeoisie. Cynthia Nixon is fundamentally not a prole. Her policy goals offer standard welfares that even rightwing parties across the globe support. Nothing about her candidacy suggests she is a legitimate socialist. And yet, one of the nation’s most prominent DSA chapters has decided to cosign her campaign as an authentic movement. A rather confusing metric of pragmatism seems to have been exercised in order to validate this choice.

Why did the NYC DSA endorse her? The easy, but also likely salient, answer is that a significant portion of their organization is comprised of unprincipled social democrats. Or maybe this voting bloc is simply a cohort of naive idealists who sincerely believe Cynthia Nixon is a DemSoc because that’s what she proclaims. Regardless, the Nixonians within the NYC DSA should heed Lenin’s letter to the Secretary of the Socialist Propaganda League:

“We do not preach unity in the present (prevailing in the Second International) socialist parties. On the contrary we preach secession with the opportunists. The war is the best object-lesson. In all countries the opportunists, their leaders, their most influential dailies & reviews are for the war, in other words, they have in reality united with “their” national bourgeoisie (middle class, capitalists) against the proletarian masses. You say, that in America there are also Socialists who have expressed themselves in favor of the participation in a war of defence. We are convinced, that unity with such men is an evil. Such unity is unity with the national middle class & capitalists, and a division with the international revolutionary working class. And we are for secession with nationalistic opportunists and unity with international revolutionary Marxists & working-class parties.”

Nixon is an unambiguous opportunist of the ruling class, and despite her charitable sympathies for workers, she is allied with the imperial organs of the United States. She might be to the left of the party’s Cuomos, but the American bourgeois regime has an undeniable political gravity. The kind intentions of socdems cannot overcome the austerity of capital’s dictatorship. More simply, we can’t tax away the ruling class.

I’m aware that personally commenting on this endorsement is mostly futile. I reiterate, I’m distantly removed. That being understood, I can’t help but feel disconcerted. Historically, revolutionary currents have originated in populated urban centers, only to spread from these locales to galvanize workers elsewhere. Cynthia Nixon has zero potential to spur this transformative mobilization. It worries me that a considerable number of self-described DemSocs, people from a larger, supposedly more organized chapter, have accepted a bourgeois politician as an arbiter of “socialism.” There are, of course, a myriad of other laudable socialist organizations in New York City, but my scruples linger.

Under DSA’s big tent, various strategies have been employed to incite workers and many important fights against capital have been instigated. A lot of crucial work has been done, however, endorsing millionaires is a tactic that I hope does not continue.

When evaluating NYC DSA’s approval of Nixon, the thought of Marx and Engels remains essential;

“We cannot, therefore, go along with people who openly claim that the workers are too ignorant to emancipate themselves but must first be emancipated from the top down, by the philanthropic big and petty bourgeois. Should the new party organ take a position that corresponds with the ideas of those gentlemen, become bourgeois and not proletarian, then there is nothing left for us, sorry as we should be to do so, than to speak out against it publicly and dissolve the solidarity within which we have hitherto represented the German party abroad. But we hope it will not come to that.”