Cutrone's critique of Rockhill is sharp, but he ends up doing the same thing he criticizes. He uses the lessons of Marx and the Frankfurt School to defend a position of standing alone, without a party. My main point is that when critique is separated from the group context that Marx stressed, it turns a specific defeat into a permanent way of thinking. This misses the point of Marxist practice and what it leads to.

[. . .]

This essay argues that DSA’s commitment to electoralism within the Democratic Party, its reformism without a developed theory of the state, its class composition, and its ideologically diffuse “big tent” model together forms a set of contradictions that Marxist analysis reveals as structural rather than accidental.

[. . .]