Defining Democratic Socialism
While there is a wide spectrum of opinion within the Party, it is not unlimited, and the Party reserves the right to exclude those who will not operate democratically.
Liberalism – First of all, liberals have no place in the Party. A liberal is one who accepts the current system while working for improvements on it. Socialists, no matter how gradualist their approach may be, all believe the present economic system must be replaced. David McReynolds, Presidential candidate of the SP in both 1980 and 2000, described the difference between liberals and radicals in terms of choice: a liberal, if given the choice of death by fire squad or the gas chamber, will agonize endlessly over which is superior. A radical will try to escape. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the radical will be killed trying to escape, but a hundred out of a hundred the liberal will die from one of the two choices he or she could not see beyond.
Leninism – In 1920, the Socialist Party in the U.S. split into three groups: the SP, the Communist Party, and the Communist Labor Party.
The SP, while sympathetic to the initial stages of the Russian Revolution, could not accept Moscow’s compete domination of the Comintern (The Communist International), and thus was not eligible for membership. Rosa Luxemburg, in Leninism or Marxism and The Russian Revolution, criticized the extreme centralism of Lenin’s notion, a vanguard party, which would lead the working class. Party discipline is to be enforced internally by “democratic centralism,” which means party members cannot deviate publicly from the party line. In practice, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” has been the dictatorship of the vanguard party, often under the control of one of a few men. (“Men” is used deliberately; there have been women in the lower bodies by not in the Soviet Politburo.)