My opponent Shaun Scott is not a Democrat, he’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA party held a rally, at Fremont’s monument to Lenin. Shaun Scott does not plan on representing the Democratic 43rd — he seeks to represent the Democratic Socialists of America in the 43rd.
No Red Baiting
I will not bandy around the terms bolshevik or communist. Red baiting is a right wing cliché. To advance their own political agenda, hideous Cold War era figures like Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy persecuted people. Not that I’m dismissing the crimes of communism either — and we’ll get to those shortly. My point is how the terms bolshevik and communist actually describe Shaun Scott’s agenda. There is no avoiding this.
Symbols have meaning.
Scott held a rally at Fremont’s Lenin statue. Do not dismiss the statue as kitsch; the location of the campaign event is a serious statement. Indeed, Lenin’s head in the image above features a jack-o-lantern. It’s hardly cute considering the DSA quoting Lenin’s 1902 Bolshevik manifesto, What Is To Be Done?.
The hands on the Bolshevik monument have been painted red for a long time. Kudos to whoever made that statement. It’s telling — and troubling — how the image in the social media post show the tyrant’s bloody fingers holding Shaun Scott’s campaign flier.
The DSA advocate for the redistribution of wealth. This is hardly the old-school Democratic notion of everyone pay their share of taxes for the common good. It goes well beyond progressive income taxes for those who can afford to pay more. Lenin, a Marxist, made all people poor. His regime took everything from everybody by building a state terror apparatus which killed and imprisoned millions for most decades of the 20th Century. The Soviet Union, which maintained a gulag archipelago, cast Fremont’s Lenin monument. The USSR was the ultimate carceral state — holding zero value for human life and liberty. Shaun Scott is a mess of contradictions. He calls for abolishing the police beneath a monument glorifying the architect of the greatest police state ever built!
In 1918, with an infamous telegram to his henchmen, Lenin ordered the murder of 100 middle class farmer / property owners who opposed the Bolshevik totalitarian program.
I do not believe the DSA will soon be hanging our farmers. However, to quote What Is To Be Done? is reckless and insensitive to the millions of victims of Soviet domination.
No DSA Middle Course
Seattle’s 43rd LD is unique with it’s economic makeup. The district runs the gamut from the highest incomes to the unhoused. Not many places in the state or country feature this kind of dichotomy. That said, the taxpayers, property owners and others in the higher end of the 43rd’s economic scale are not stingy. This is a reliable Democratic district which votes the values.
The difference is — Scott and his DSA are not Democrats! They openly espouse Marx and Lenin in their campaign materials. (Is it now OK for Democrats to do this?)
Mores don’t necessarily change, however, many in the 43rd could want to stand their ground while the DSA marches towards Leningrad.
Realignment
How much radicalism can people take? The pressure is starting to show. A schism is emerging within organized labor. The current divide is with service workers and public employees on one side and trade unions on the other. The issue is the decreasing latitude within the Democratic coalition. The trades are not aligning with the dogma. It goes back to the tyrant Lenin,
“There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.. . . . and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.” [My emphasis.] (What Is To Be Done? II {B})
(Look at my endorsements — I appreciate the support from the trades!)
Here is a fundamental difference between Scott and I: By referring to Lenin’s tome cited above, the DSA consider the trade unionists “slaves” of the bourgeois. There were no trade unions in the Soviet Union. What Is To Be Done? features a whole section on how useless trade unions are compared to a one-party “workers state”. The communist party was the state because to have it any other way, would be to “strengthen bourgeois ideology”. If a person opposed Bolshevik ideas, they were swiftly shot, hanged or enslaved in the miserable gulag system.
Shaun Scott holds large swatches of the 43rd in contempt as “bourgeois”. Lenin’s values are also shared by local Seattle legislative district groups where it’s all Social Democracy or nothing. No wonder the trade unions are bailing on Democrats?
Vote for me, Andrea Suarez to maintain the kind of Democratic Party that built Seattle.