Re: the comparison of the 1952 Republican platform with the DSA's

[Robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

Nevertheless, with the latest DSA platform, I expect that its membership
will narrow further to the mostly white and the mostly young.

 > From: Noelle <noelle>
 > Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:38:09 -0700 (PDT)
 >
 > speaking of DSA from electoral-vote.com:
 > 
 > D.A. in Brooklyn, NY, writes: In "Who Are the DSA Members?," your 
 > discussion of Nate Silver's analysis of the Democratic Socialists of 
 > America (DSA), you wrote:
 > 
 >     A study by the DSA of its membership showed that most of its 
 > members were working as teachers, nonprofit workers, social workers 
 > or government employees. They were not working class at all, and 85% 
 > were white, which is not even representative of the Democratic 
 > Party, let alone the country. 
 > 
 > You are confusing "working class" with "industrial working class." 
 > This is a mistake for three reasons. First, as a matter of 
 > definition, "working class" means people who: (1) work for 
 > wages/salary, (2) do not own the means of production, (3) have no or 
 > little say about the conditions and terms of their employment and 
 > (4) typically have little in the way of job security. The latter is 
 > becoming especially true for a wide range of occupations (university 
 > and other teachers; doctors, nurses and other health care workers; 
 > etc.). This process is called "proletarianiztion" and it has been 
 > going on since the birth of capitalism.
 > 
 > Second, the U.S. has very much become a service economy: teachers, 
 > most nonprofit workers, social workers, and government employees and 
 > other white- and pink-collar workers are a large part of this 
 > economy.
 > 
 > Third, if you look at the areas where the union movement is growing 
 > , you will see both independent unions (organizing Amazon warehouse 
 > workers and Starbucks baristas) as well as traditional "industrial" 
 > unions (like the UAW) organizing... graduate student TAs.
 > 
 > While it is true that the industrial working class (factory workers, 
 > longshoremen, truck drivers, railroad workers) remain a strategic 
 > key to a successful revolutionary struggle against the ruling 
 > capitalist class, it constitutes a minority in the population and is 
 > less crucial in the kind of politics that Electoral-Vote.com covers 
 > (bourgeois democratic electoral politics).