The Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio link to German communists

Introduction: I was asked by an acquaintance to show why I've been saying that Democratic Socialists are hard core marxists closely associated with the German marxists who operate the Rosa Luxemburg organization, which in turn is a subsidiary of the German communist party now known as "Die Linke". This is a key topic because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been elected to the US Congress, which means she's associated via DSA with the Die Linke organization. One interesting fact is that Rosa Luxemburg, a Die Linke shop, is heavily financed by the German government, led by Angela Merkel, who was born in communist East Germany, just like many of Die Linke's top leadership. 

Item I . Rosa Luxemburg and Die Linke German communists) meet and train Democratic Socialists of America and other US communists 

"A conference “Mapping Socialist Strategies” was convened from Aug. 1 to 4 in Briarcliff Manor, New York, by the New York office of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. It brought together 100 “influential progressives and leftists” from across the United States, Canada, and Europe for an “un-conference” on socialist strategies.

Plenary No. 4 was entitled “overcoming fragmentation and rebuilding the Left.” It states: “Michael Brie and Sarah Leonard discuss building left alliances and new trends on the left. How can the left rediscover and strengthen relationships amongst natural allies in the fight to defend the public sphere and defeat encroaching neoliberalism?”

Panelist Sarah Leonard was an editor at DSA-linked publication Dissent magazine and a DSA member.

Did Leonard have any inkling that her co-panelist once spied on young foreigners like her? Does she understand that Michael Brie once sought to recruit ego-driven young idealists to spy on their own countrymen for a totalitarian dictatorship?

Most of DSA’s top leadership were present at the conference, including DSA National Director Maria Svart, DSA Vice Chair Joseph Schwartz, DSA-linked publication Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara, Jacobin magazine national organizer Neal Meyer, former Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) leader Betsy Avila and the legendary Frances Fox Piven of the “Cloward-Piven” strategy, which sought to “overwhelm the system” in America by flooding welfare to deliberately bankrupt states. Two DSA members Ethan Earle and Heidi Chua Schwa from the RLS-NY office also attended, as did several German-born staff.

Also present were Communist Party USA leaders Libero Della Pina and Judith LeBlanc. LeBlanc was a prominent organizer of the protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline. Other Dakota Access Pipeline organizers included Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza and several other affiliates of the Maoist-leaning Freedom Road Socialist Organization, including labor official Bill Fletcher, Jr. environmental activist Bill Gallegos, and San Francisco Chinese Progressive Association Executive Director Alex Tom.

Leftist media personality and host Laura Flanders was at the conference, along with Anne Mitchell and Pat Fry from the Committees of Correspondence, plus International Socialist Organization member Jonah Birch.

International guests included the head of Die Linke’s Strategy Department Christina Kaindl, Harald Wolf of Die Linke’s Executive Board, and Koray Yilmaz-Gunay, adviser for migration at the RLS Berlin."

https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-east-german-communists-training-guiding-democratic-socialists-of-america_2628662.html

Item II . Rosa Luxemburg and Democratic Socialism 

"The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (RLF) is one of the six major political foundations in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the historic founders of the current of democratic socialism ideal, focused on achieving social justice and political freedom. Inspired on these principles, the Foundation has made major contributions to political initiatives in Germany, and positions itself within original and current democratic socialism thinking.

From its beginnings, with the small groups of Social Critique and Political Education, founded in 1990 in Berlin, RLF has evolved to become an international political education organization, providing the possibility for discussion and fostering critical thought, as well as political alternatives. It is a non-profit organization affiliated with the Leftist political party (Die Linke, in German)."

Note: The head of Rosa Luxemburg is Dagmar Enkelmann, the former head of the German communist party known as "Die Linke". 

https://www.rosalux.org.ec/la-frl-en-el-mundo/?lang=en

Item III . Radical left parties in Europe (see Page 93)

https://www.rosalux.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/manuskripte-neu_2_1_.pdf

Item IV . Meagan Day explains Democratic Socialism in Vox 

"I’m a staff writer at the socialist magazine Jacobin and a member of DSA, and here’s the truth: In the long run, democratic socialists want to end capitalism. And we want to do that by pursuing a reform agenda today in an effort to revive a politics focused on class hierarchy and inequality in the United States. The eventual goal is to transform the world to promote everyone’s needs rather than to produce massive profits for a small handful of citizens"

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/1/17637028/bernie-sanders-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-cynthia-nixon-democratic-socialism-jacobin-dsa

Item V . Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio foresees the end of capitalism (from an interview)

"Ocasio-Cortez was also asked if capitalism has failed to deliver for working class Americans, in light of the nation's booming economy and low unemployment numbers.

“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs,” Ocasio-Cortez asserted. “Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids.”

Ocasio-Cortez -- who is set to square off against Republican Anthony Pappas in New York’s 14th congressional district race in the fall -- blamed "no-holds-barred, Wild West, hyper-capitalism" for the problems working Americans face.

"What that means is profit at any cost," Ocasio-Cortez continued. "Capitalism has not always existed in the world, and it will not always exist in the world."

http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/07/18/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-unemployment-low-because-people-have-2-jobs

VI. New York City Democratic Socialists' Mission (from their website) 

"We believe that the fundamental transformations we are seeking are in the broad interests of all working-class and oppressed people, and our work is focused on organizing among this base.

At the core of our base is New York City’s working class. The working class of NYC is mostly people of color and mostly rooted in the service and public sector. It includes a wide swath of people: teachers, nurses, construction workers, bus drivers, retail workers, food service workers, and more. It also includes these workers’ families, the unemployed, the underemployed, and many workers in the informal sector. Broadly, all of these people struggle under the weight of high rent, low wages, speedups, expensive health insurance, and debt.

Despite these similarities, there are important divisions within our base. People of color continue to face the brunt of police violence, mass incarceration, systemic economic marginalization, surveillance, and discrimination. Women continue to bear the burden of the gendered division of labor. Undocumented immigrants live in fear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will tear them from their communities and their families. And women, queer, and disabled people are routinely harassed and discriminated against. Our base is also divided by geographic segregation along racial and ethnic lines. Fighting back against the heavy burden of oppression is a crucial part of our work, and a prerequisite for building unity.

While the working class as a whole is the main base for socialism, not all workers have the same amount of social power. Here in New York City, workers in the education, health services, construction, telecommunications, transportation, and logistics industries have the potential power to bring the economy to a halt. Because of this, a special focus on organizing among these workers is an essential goal of the socialist movement.

We also should be aware of the increasing class consciousness of workers who are not always identified as such. Often times we refer to this group as “downwardly mobile Millennials”. They include non-profit workers, academics, and some professional class and white-collar workers who struggle economically. Years ago, these workers were often highly privileged. But today, austerity in the public sector, the attack on their working conditions, increasing tuition rates and student debt, and the rising cost of rent has aligned these workers’ interests with the broader interests of working-class and oppressed people. This group has been an important social base for Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders campaign — and recently has been drawn to DSA in large numbers as well.

Against working-class and oppressed people stands a rival base: the ruling class. Capitalists, bankers, managers, and landlords want to keep wages low, raise rent, push everyone else further into debt, cut taxes, and shred the social safety net. It’s in their interest to maintain a system of police repression to control social unrest and racially divide the working class. It is in their interest to maintain a gendered division of labor to keep the cost of caring for workers low. Allied to this bloc are some of the most well-off professionals and small businesspeople. There are differences within this group — some voted for Donald Trump, some voted for Hillary Clinton — but when it comes to city politics their interests are united. They are a minority of the city and overwhelmingly white. But through their economic power, campaign contributions, and control over the vast majority of the media they almost always get their way in the State Legislature and City Hall."

https://www.socialists.nyc/our-strategy/

VII . Democratic Socialists of America: Rosa Luxemburg: Reform and Revolution 

From the DSA website: 

"We say among ourselves—at least those of us honest enough to say it and not afraid of being branding as sectarians—that Bernie is barely a socialist. We know that while his domestic politics are a breath of fresh air in a fetid clime (though his foreign policy planks are not much removed from the Clintonesque) they are at best rehashed New Deal liberalism. ome sections of the Left are already thinking of how to integrate their work with a possible Bernie boomlet in 2020. That preparatory move may even be tactically wise, facilitating outreach, etc, but it also abrogates any possibility of these Bernie-entranced boosters acting as articulators of an anti-capitalist point of view except over coffee. We indeed have things in common with Our Revolution, the staff-dominated Sanders operation, but our many differences can’t be submerged. 

Note that in my calling for a course correction toward theorizing our politics to develop a rigorous socialist platform for the 21st century, I’m not advocating taking the exit ramp to terminal program mongering, the disease of small sects. I am suggesting that socialists must look at how a systemic critique of capital can be hammered into a popular political program,  one that encompasses what Occupy and Podemos did so well(at least symbolically). Our reall action critique of the depredations of vampire capitalism can instrumentally connect reform to revolution—Andre Gorz’s radical reform, if you will. Otherwise all our work, whether as inside or outside of the Democratic party or a mix of the two–will be just window dressing. 

This means putting more of an emphasis on developing programs, both to complement organizing work and to spur basic education. I’m talking about an internal education effort by DSA and other left organizations that goes beyond trainings to developing critical theory. A lot of discussion at the aforementioned NYDSA convention seemed to be battling shadows. Some comrades chastised others for being insufficiently Marxist by tamping down class struggle ideas and mistakenly heralding reform as of prime value in and of itself. Others treated Marxist categories as so much empty rhetoric that got in the way of real organizing and was blind to the needs of reform, something eminently winnable and capable of a mass following. 

In a less confrontational moment, I believe comrades would agree—or should agree—that “reform” and “revolution” are not counterpoised, and that the revolutionary pantheon from Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Luxemberg, Debs,Gramsci, Lukacs, Alexandra Kollontai, Dubois, C.L.R. James and Michael Harrington (at least the young Michael Harrington) would all agree. Like the arc of the universe, the list is long, but it bends toward justice. 

We can even learn from the ventures of Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, who, while no revolutionary either in theory or inclination, can be credited with contributing to the objective conditions for a nationwide upsurge by building a mass extraparliamentary movement as a catalyst for, and an adjunct to, a future left Labour government. 

Where to begin? We needn’t reinvent the wheel. Reintegrating Rosa Luxemberg’s pioneering work is no stretch, either. Her writing is largely in print, and the second volume of her projected multi-volume collected works has just been realized, which is fortuitous, given that January 2019 will mark the 100th anniversary of her murder by the proto-Fascist Freikorps under the direction of Germany’s then governing right Social Democrats. 

The sublime socialist makes clear that the two concepts “Reform” and “Revolution” are joined at the hip, something all wings of the socialist left tend to forget. The tragedy of social democracy for her was the Second International’s disengaging of reform from revolution in practice if not in theory, resulting in the horror of all but three member parties supporting their own national bourgeoisies’ murderous land grab efforts in the catastrophic World War One. 

If revolution absent reform is fools’ gold, reform absent an anticapitalist end is species extinction. 

As Marx and Engels put it in The Manifesto, the outcome of class struggle was “either a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or the common ruin of the contending classes.” Pick one! 

Luxemburg put it another way: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

True that! We 21st century Reds must do better."

https://www.dsausa.org/weekly/op_ed_reconnecting_reform_and_revolution_socialists_in_the_mist/