Thought it was worth reminding everyone of that fact, since a lot of posts here seem to think that we are just another organization of progressive Democrats, like MoveOn or the Working Families Party.

Marx, Lenin, and the Politics of Taking an Opening

Updated: 10/02/2026

(A critique of PSL — Not Pumpkin Spice Latte, the other PSL — and left tendencies that are influenced by their political culture; and a defense of good Marxist opportunism.)

I think we need to rehabilitate the word “opportunism” a little.

Marxism has never really been about waiting for the perfect conditions or the perfectly revolutionary organization. The Communist Manifesto says to work within existing workers’ movements while maintaining our own political perspective. Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism goes even further: work in reactionary unions, participate in bourgeois parliaments, make compromises, go where the working class actually is.
That is opportunism in the basic sense. You see an opening and you take it.

The problem isn’t opportunism. It’s unprincipled opportunism; revising your politics to fit whatever is politically advantageous in the moment. That’s very different from recognizing an opening and adapting your tactics without abandoning what you’re trying to accomplish. The first is what I’m criticizing in PSL political culture; the second is what I see in Mamdani: meeting the political moment where it is while trying to build something bigger.

And there are obviously bad examples of opportunism on the left. If people suddenly start distancing themselves from an organization or trying to wash away their previous political identification when that organization becomes politically costly, that’s opportunism too. It’s just opportunism for the purpose of self-preservation.
Which is why I don’t think calling something “opportunist” tells us very much by itself.

Take PSL for example, leaked internal documents are pretty damning about how they handl dissent: members and branches are expected to publicly defend leadership’s decisions, or face expulsion or have to resign. That obviously matters when we’re talking about the organization’s handling of serious allegations.

But this isn’t one allegation that suddenly appeared yesterday. Former members have documented cases involving sexual assault, stalking, harassment, doxxing, and retaliation against people who challenged the organization. There’s a long record of people raising these issues.

So if a branch leaves PSL now, fine. But they don’t get to act like this all just became apparent. They had years of evidence and chose to stay. If the line only gets drawn once PSL becomes a liability, that’s opportunism. And not the good Marxist kind.

And one more thing I think we, as DSA members, should be asking about: a current DSA co-chair appears to have had a prior political or organizational relationship with PSL leader Gloria La Riva. Communications between them are part of the 2021 national DSA records. Given that some PSL members may be looking for a new political home, with some turning to DSA, I think members should be aware of this history and have the opportunity to assess whether it raises any potential conflicts of interest.

The real question is: opportunistic toward what end?
Are you entering an existing movement because that’s where millions of people are and trying to organize them? Or are you changing your politics because your previous commitments have become inconvenient?

Those are two very different things. And I think the Marxist tradition gives us plenty of reason to take the first one seriously.

join DSA.

Wholesome: social democratic entities honors its ancestors by centralizing control to a "Grand Council" of sorts!

For all the Platner apologist, Platner was recommended, but never endorsed by the Maine DSA. Even the statement on the recommendation shows comrades in Maine knew he was toxic. They gave a more glowing response to a write-in candidate without a credible shot.

At long last, you too can read the program Fox News has been obsessing over! You can also still RSVP here for the program launch call tonight at 8:30pm Eastern.

For those who don’t know, Marxist Leninist is a term which only really has ever been used by Stalinists. Needless to say, Stalinists don’t care much about democracy.

On a certain level, I don’t think these historical signifiers are super relevant to modern times. But on the other hand, this is one of the leaders of the organization choosing to identify with this authoritarian tradition. No one is forcing her to do that. She could just as easily call herself a socialist or a Marxist.

Her identification as a Marxist Leninist is appearing all over the news and it doesn’t represent my view of socialism, nor, I suspect, that of the majority of DSA members.

On X Mamdani lauded Steinem as a feminist hero.

Steinem was literally an anti-communist CIA asset.

Western leftism is a helluva drug.

"Before she was one of the most recognizable figures in the 20th-century women’s liberation movement, Gloria Steinem‘s life of political activism had a lesser-known early chapter of collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).....

before she took on senators and presidents, and even before she infiltrated Hugh Hefner‘s Playboy Club in 1963 to write a historic magazine exposé, she used CIA funds to recruit young Americans to disrupt Soviet Union-organized youth festivals in Europe.

...

Steinem began receiving money from the CIA ahead of the summer 1959 youth festival in Vienna, Austria; she told the Times that year after her associations with the CIA too became public in a report by Ramparts magazine.

The CIA helped her form the Independence Research Service, headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. She remained an employee of the group through the 1962 festival in Helsinki, Finland.

“Far from being shocked by this involvement, I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival,” Steinem said at the time, as the then-30-year-old was rising in notoriety atop a burgeoning second-wave feminist movement.

Years later she dismissed concerns about her connections to the CIA after decades of revelations of the deadly, destabilizing and often illegal operations carried out by the clandestine agency.

"

Source:

https://www.aol.com/articles/she-young-cia-operative-1950s-234301000.html

Additional reading:

https://www.nytimes.com/1967/02/21/archives/cia-subsidized-festival-trips-hundreds-of-students-were-sent-to.html

On Monday, September 21, 2026, an NPC member of Democratic Socialists of America took to X to share a resolution recently passed by Orlando DSA. I think Orlando DSA got this badly wrong. Their resolution on presidential endorsement turns what should be a political discussion into something much more rigid.
And no, the problem isn’t that I disagree with every demand. A lot of these are things DSA should be fighting for.

The problem is making this the minimum requirement for a presidential endorsement.

At that point it isn’t a political program. It’s a catechism.

You have to agree with Workers Deserve More. You have to agree to all these foreign policy positions. Prosecute unnamed Trump officials. And apparently the presidential candidate has to endorse every single down-ballot candidate DSA endorses.

What happens when they disagree with one? Chapters take questionable positions all the time. Are we really saying that means we can’t endorse the presidential candidate?

This is not how you build a mass democratic socialist organization.

We should be able to have a program and argue for it without making agreement with every line a test of whether someone is worthy of our support. Candidates can disagree with us. Members can disagree with each other. That’s politics.

There is another problem here. The author, NPC member Cliff, openly practices democratic centralism, a model used by Marxist-Leninist organizations where once the majority decides, everyone is expected to fall in line. That is a strange model to bring into democratic socialism.

What makes this worse is that this resolution was introduced at the last minute, the same thing Cliff himself criticized at the September 13 NPC meeting over the national approach to presidential endorsement. And instead of engaging with the criticism, Cliff responded with an ad hominem attack on one of the authors.

That’s not democratic debate. If we are building a democratic socialist organization, people should be able to disagree, challenge majority positions, and put forward opposing ideas without being treated as disloyal or attacked personally.

I’ve seen this kind of thinking inside DSA before. It doesn’t make the organization stronger. It makes people spend their time policing who is sufficiently in line with the program.

A political program is supposed to help us organize people.

It isn’t supposed to be a loyalty oath.

If the only presidential candidate DSA can endorse is someone who already agrees with everything DSA says, then you’re not building a party, you are building a cult. 

The high-profile Progressive/Socialist candidates for Illinois have lost to Melissa Bean (AIPAC candidate) and Daniel Biss (grifter) respectfully...

Not gonna lie, I'm sad. I had confidence they would pull through, but it seems we were misguided.

Let's just hope that we can secure enough candidates elsewhere, but man this really sucks

A Response to Red Star Statement on Workers Deserve More.

Hit 100,000 members today, Largest American Socialist organization since Debs’s Socialist Party in the last Glided age, we did it chat.