This country isn’t going to change without a revolution, and that isn’t going to happen without a disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries to guide the proletariat to victory.

Yes but also the revolution must be a revolution of the masses, which is why the question of leadership does not resolve itself before the questions of the organizing the mass party, and the problem of consciousness of the working class. Like it isn't some little sect that leads the revolution! That's been tried and tried, and the effect is sectarian alienation from the workers movement. You say we need a revolution, reference Lenin and Marxism, but then dispense with every single principle of dialectical materialism, which is the Marxist theory of change. You're just proving my point.

The mass party struggles internally and externally to develop the vanguard and the party in preparation for revolution. Even then, the vanguard is not able to choose the time of revolution, objective historical circumstances determine it, and whether or not the workers seize power or the bourgeois, or petty bourgeois or whatever, is based on the former, pre revolutionary period. Did the party work within the class to empower the workers, to instill revolutionary consciousness, to learn to collectivize our efforts and prepare us for revolution? Did the party organize authentic centers of worker power such as the unions, and organize worker councils to reform them and unseat bureaucrats and bring them under democratic worker control? Has the party won legitimacy among the institutions that hold sway in the consciousness of working class? The vanguard is necessary to organize the mass party, the vanguard is not the party itself. The vanguard is composed of elected delegates, not self-appointed revolutionaries who never participate in revolution.

The DSA I know is composed of people like one of my comrades, who is Lebanese, and whenever he goes home to Lebanon he packs 3 bags: one small bag for his clothes and personal belongings, and two massive wardrobe suitcases full of medicine and supplies, which he smuggles into Gaza, he has done this for years. He's been arrested by Israeli police, and been through hell for it, but keeps doing it. When Oct 7 broke out, DSA had been having debates for years struggling internally against nascent Zionism and reformism. If we hadn't been having those debates, the left would not have been in a position to win them. New formations emerged, like Springs of Revolution, made up of people who stayed in DSA through the difficult process,many of whom trace their organizing roots to the Arab Spring, and their own experiences as growing up and living in Palestine. It was exceedingly difficult to get there and hang in through all the nasty debates and political maneuvering of the rightist or reformist tendencies, but now they are leaders in the highest bodies and committees in DSA, including our International Committee which orients us toward these struggles. But even now there is a long way to go, as you point out. But it was a process, and the process is working.

Lenin, when discussing participation in bourgeois elections is explicit, that as long as there is some concrete democratic basis for representing the workers and peasants in elections, that the revolutionary party should participate in them. This was not true after 1905, and Lenin advised against elections for the Duma, since Tsar Nick would just disband parliament if it didn't serve him. but it was true in later periods, like the lead up to 1917 (which Lenin wasn't even in the country for). His work, Left Wing Communism is primarily a criticism of ultralefts advocating for no participation in labor unions and elections. Granted, that was written after 1917, so those conditions don't map cleanly onto our own. But my point is that getting there was a decades long process that involved coordination among many different sections of the working class. The proletarian revolution is a mass revolution, and vice versa; not something a small group of intellectuals handles on their own. I hope that isn't the argument you are making, because if so, you should engage in more practical work and study, which we all should be doing together anyway.

Your description of DSA as an electoral-only organization, is maybe a description of the most right flank of the org. This is what I'm talking about, that you are describing DSA as one thing, when actually it is many tendencies struggling with objective conditions, unevenly distributed over wildly varying cities and regions. In order for you to be correct, DSA has to be this one thing, but what you describe is a minority tendency. Quoting half baked Marxism to justify an objectively incorrect assessments, and then using the horrors in Palestine as a rhetorical flourish, is not Marxism, it isn't Leninism, it isn't scientific, and frankly its exploiting the horrors to justify your half baked politics. Every American sectarian org is splintering, while DSA is growing and gaining mass legitimacy. Its a mess, its a tenuous and difficult prospect, but it is the best thing going in the deeply alienated and reactionary USA. We are digesting 100 years of problems of socialism, and the process isn't pretty. But it is progressing.

DSA IS inherently, if not consistently, democratic and proletarian in nature. Are we annoyingly petty bourgeois in some ways? Yes but those are sites of active struggle within the org, and the reformist and opportunist tendencies are losing ground. The circumstances in NYC DSA are unique and have to be taken together, and apart, from the national org. Frankly I think it is worth celebrating these victories, but these victories are not victories in and of themselves for most of the org, only the right-most sliver, who loses ground nationally and becomes more sectarian as these struggles play out. Its deeply contradictory, but Marxism is in part an analysis of contradiction, and practical activity on the basis of a mass party; not a striving for ideological purity. Insistence on a maximum program is just the other side of social democracy, it isn't revolutionary Marxism.

I'm sorry comrade, but the more you elaborate, the more it is clear that you don't have a Marxist theory of change, you have an idealist theory of revolution.

This country isn't going to change without a revolution, and that isn't going to happen without a disciplined cadre of professional revolutionaries to guide the proletariat to victory.

Okay I'm down, we've both been posting on this site for years. PM me the general numbers of people you've got and what your step-by-step plan is for adapting revolutionary theory to the specifics of present American conditions, connecting Point A (the USA as it is today) to Point B (active widespread proletarian revolt/upheaval), that cadres can plug into to make quantifiable progress. I assume you do have something like this and aren't just one individual whining about why we aren't pushing the Revolution button.

If you prefer private video chat I can show you my face and 10 years of personal records to prove I'm a bona fide activist.