Does CNN believe that Lenin, Che and Hamas were “democratic socialists”?
Self-identified Marxist movements control a majority, 62%, of the DSA’s national leadership arm.
Even the Socialist Majority Caucus, often described as “democratic socialists” and whose leaders are embedded around Zohran Mamdani and which produced Clare Valdez, one of the Democrat congressional nominees in New York City, starts its platform with a Karl Marx quote, calls for a “socialist revolution” using “state power” to replace capitalism. SMC writes about “comrades in Communist Caucus, Bread and Roses, Emerge, Red Star, Marxist Unity Group, and Reform & Revolution”. So much for the claim that the DSA is “far removed” from them.
The radical makeup of the DSA leadership becomes even worse when you consider that both of the two co-chairs of the DSA National Political Committee are Marxists, Megan Romer with Red Star and Ashik Siddique with Groundwork, and Red Star is also a Communist caucus.
Megan Romer’s posts include “Come read Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara”, she hailed Communist Cuba, called America “the biggest empire the world has ever known” and tweeted that, “we do not, in fact, condemn Hamas and why no socialist should.”
Does CNN believe that Lenin, Che and Hamas were “democratic socialists”?
The Red Star caucus states openly that “our primary goal, the goal which informs all of our organizing work, is to abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism.”
The Red Star also warns that the only choice for socialists is to be against America or for it, that there “is no such thing as a third camp” and that “to publicly critique a government or movement that stands in opposition to the American government is to do the US State Department’s work for them, from Iran to Palestine.”
The pro-Hamas link that Romer tweeted was a Red Star article that described the PFLP and DFLP, two Arab Socialist terrorist groups, as “our socialist siblings” and endorsed their joint operations with Hamas, arguing that “the Palestinian communists are fighting alongside Hamas against Israel, and that by doing so they’re building support and legitimacy for socialism in Palestine.” The article argued that supporting Hamas would “push them towards a socialist horizon.”