So, the DSA released a statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And boy did liberals hate it! Liberals hated it a lot! You can read it at the link in the first sentence.
However, I’m not going to bother linking to any of the liberal critiques. You can read those at your own leisure. Or you can not read them at all. Whatever. Most of those critiques are so awful they don’t merit a response. All I really wanted to do here is provide a short summary of the statement and the context of it, as far as I can tell.
DSA Statement and Org Development
For anyone unfamiliar with DSA politics, its International Committee (IC) looks most closely at issues of foreign policy. The IC released a statement a few weeks before the Russian invasion. And then it informed what the National Political Committee (NPC) said two days ago. Only the NPC speaks for the org as a whole.
The NPC statement does three things. First, it condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Second, it expresses solidarity with working-class people in Ukraine and Russia. And third, it explains some of the deeper history that led to the invasion, including the role the US played.
That makes for a solid statement. Socialists have no business supporting an authoritarian like Putin. But US socialists should recognize the role the US played in why Putin invaded. And they need to connect with the working class in both countries. Perhaps the NPC needed to offer a deeper explanation. But I thought it did well.
Liberals criticized the statement because they hold all kinds of confused ideas on foreign policy. Especially about the negative role the US often plays in the world. They long ago committed to an electoralist, PR-based strategy that fails to see how capitalism works.
On the flip side of things, there’s been a very small smattering of criticism of the DSA statement from the ‘anti-imperialist left.’ Some thought it criticized Putin too harshly. That merits even less of a response. There are only a few people in the US even in this camp. And there’s little reason to believe they’ll ever be anything other than an irrelevant sideshow. Even within the DSA.
Postscript: Left Foreign Policy
This entire debate reinforces a point I’ve tried to make in the past. Namely, the left in the US still hasn’t built much of a foreign policy stance. The DSA’s IC is doing solid work here. We also have various forces on the sectarian left that have quite a few (mostly bad) ideas.
All in all, the DSA needs to do more basic work educating its members on foreign policy – why it’s important, why we need an international working-class movement, and why the long-term interests of the US working class don’t coincide with the so-called “national interest.”
I published my book Left Foreign Policy almost a year ago in order to jump-start these activities. But whether DSA members get it from me or get it from someone else, they should make internationalism and foreign policy more central to their socialist work.
