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AUGUST 29, 2023

On the Prospect website

* David Dayen looks at how the rise of electric vehicles may change the
way we fund
<[link removed]'s effort
<[link removed]' commemoration of the March on Washington
profiled participants, but skipped their politics.

This past weekend, both The New York Times
<[link removed]'d worked to organize and
publicize the march, which was an event both long envisioned and yet
without precedent.

The interviews in both papers were wonderful, providing a fairly clear
picture of how the march's organizers pulled it off, what the
attendees experienced, and how it affected their lives and that of their
nation.

But both totally skipped the politics from whence the March emerged.
They neglected to note that every planner and organizer, and a number of
the speakers-most particularly King-were lifelong democratic
socialists.

As I noted when I wrote a

**Prospect** feature
<[link removed]'s
then-leader, Eugene V. Debs, Randolph had been imprisoned for opposing
World War I, but unlike Debs, he only served a few days.) Randolph first
conceived a March on Washington in 1941 to demand the desegregation of
the armed forces and defense factories; he called it off when FDR agreed
with that latter demand. He renewed his call in 1948, and again called
it off when Harry Truman agreed to desegregate the armed forces.

Throughout the '50s, Randolph's lieutenant, Bayard Rustin, had
organized smaller protests in Washington; one, in 1957, to demand voting
rights for Southern Blacks, at which King spoke with the refrain of
"Give us the ballot!" Rustin had briefly belonged to the Communist Party
in the 1930s, but belonged to the Socialist Party thereafter. King was a
democratic socialist as well; while he never publicized that for fear of
weakening the civil rights movement, he didn't shy from advocating
social democratic economic reforms in a number of his speeches. King's
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was one of the six civil
rights groups that were the march's core sponsors; the other one of
the six, and the one that had initiated the more radical practice of
"Freedom Rides," was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), also headed
by longtime SP member James Farmer.

Rustin's lieutenants in organizing the march were young
socialists-chiefly Rachelle Horowitz, the march's transportation
coordinator, who figured prominently in both of last weekend's
features-to whom a slightly older young socialist named Michael
Harrington (later, the founder of both DSOC and DSA) had suggested they
go to work with Rustin. The march's key funder, the United Auto
Workers, was suffused with secondary leadership and key national
staffers who were SP members, while UAW President Walter Reuther, who
spoke at the march, had been an SP member in the '30s and retained
much of those politics throughout his life.

All that said, at the time the march took place, the socialist movement
was at the nadir of its institutional life. Nationally, the Socialist
Party was down to a few thousand members; Communist Party membership had
suffered major declines in the aftermath of Khrushchev's 1956 speech,
which belatedly revealed to the party's true believers the crimes of
Stalin; and the New Left was still confined to a handful of small
groups. As Gary Dorrien documented in his book

**American Democratic Socialism** (which I reviewed
<[link removed]'s
conclusion, they would have said: "Brought to you by your friendly
neighborhood socialists."

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter <[link removed]'t pay
it. How do we deal with that? BY DAVID DAYEN

Pricing a Lifesaving Drug
<[link removed]'s Running Big Pharma's Last Stand Against Slightly Fairer Drug
Pricing
<[link removed]'s efforts to defend it fall short. BY ANANYA
KALAHASTI & WILL ROYCE

[link removed]