On the Recent Press Release About Me

Let’s just say that some misleading things were said.

It appears that an individual working at a firm professionally representing me on some fronts had a few facts about me wrong. Some of the claims this person included in a package meant to promote my writing that was recently sent without my knowing to a news agency and wound up being published by several outlets are simply misleading.

I am not at all invested in the Democratic Party. Its leading self-described “democratic socialist” figures- Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cynthia Nixon, and the like- are nothing more than welfare capitalist gatekeepers that work to keep people with revolutionary potential from discovering the blueprint to actual socialism.

Nor do I have any meaningful interest in the 2020 United States presidential election or any other contests between bourgeois/capitalist political parties. And before anyone asks, I do not believe that any of these parties can or should be reformed into genuine democratic socialist parties. We democratic socialists must form genuinely and explicitly democratic socialist political parties of our own. Entryism isn’t, never has been, and never will be, the way to go.

And unlike the author of the package in question might have you believe, I don’t speak of the lands under the control of the United States government collectively as “the country” or see myself as an “American”. I am a Southerner. As the usage of my home as an environmental standard race to the bottom and labor devaluation tool and the gentrification and cosmopolitan bourgeois commodification of its cities and many of its rural landscapes, along with the countless other contemporary “domestic” atrocities of national non-self determination, among them the management of the Hurricane Maria Crisis in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands “of the United States” and the continuing expansion of the US Department of Defense’s presence on Guam, demonstrates, this “country” that is spoken of is a prison of nations under the whip of a bloc of capital that locally legitimizes its rule with its “American” state. As a left-wing nationalist and proletarian internationalist, I can’t play along with the lingo it uses.

Just clearing that all up.

-Strom McCallum

(Republished from my blog)