Undermine or Take Over the Democratic Party ?

I see and hear many people who completely reject working with the Democratic Party as uselessly corrupt and more of an impediment than enabler of progress.

I'm not sure I personally know anyone like this.  All of my friends have always promoted and voted for Democrats.

But I'd heard of such people for a long time, and was immersed among them, and mostly people like this it seemed, when I attended the US Social Forum in 2007.  Democrats were criticized endlessly, Republicans rarely even mentioned.  If you tried to say Democrats were "less evil" than Republicans you could anticipate being cursed and shamed.

DSA was a notable exception, and the reason I decided to join DSA (and am still a dues paying member).

CPUSA was an exception too, or has been at least since 1989 or so when they stopped running Presidential candidates, and I joined in 2019.  Local Communist leader John Stanford was a long time Democratic Party Precinct Chair when he passed away in 2015.  He often argued in favor of voting for Democrats with other leftists and Greens who were opposed to doing so.

Frances Piven has been long associated with DSA, and I first heard her defending the "take over the Democratic Party" approach at a DSA-hosted seminar at US Social Forum in 2007.  I later rode in a car with her and several DSA luminaries at the USSF in 2010.

So I found it interesting that in this article about movement strategy, DISSENT (a magazine I'd characterize as having social democrat leanings...NOT socialist or communist) puts Piven on the left side of the spectrum of this issue.  (I see her more or less in the leftist middle.)  She is arguing for "disrupting" the Democratic Party.  (But that's still a form of engaging with it.)  And apparently with the aim of taking it over.  The other "side" of the debate in this article is a more cooperative approach.

Now it's hard to say this, while Biden continues pushing for WW3 type confrontations in Europe and the Far East and has been much of a disappointment to leftists including me.  (But I doubt Trump would have been better in any way, and significantly worse in most.)  Nevertheless I will almost certainly continue voting for Democrats in the future, following advice by Chomsky and others.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/should-we-disrupt-the-democratic-party-or-take-it-over