cars posted:le_nelson_mandela_face posted:i do think it's fair to criticize demsocs for not being critical enough of imperialism but i do think it's a good entry point for them to get exposed to critiques that necessarily have to criticize imperialism. and in my own experience i also think that there are a lot of people out there who are thinking "oh, the establishment was wrong about deregulation, iraq, trump winning, police brutality, the popularity of socialism, maybe they're wrong on this too" especially when you consider that there is no popular support for our various wars and trump proved that the consensus blob has no natural constituency and pretty effortlessly managed to convince republicans that bush sucked and iraq was a disaster. the real threat to my mind isn't that the DSA won't radicalize leaners, the threat is that establishment Dems will win and then turn on left foreign policy critiques as being Unserious and Helping the Republicans
I agree and what would also be bad is if the DSA was in charge of the government. because their foreign policy plank is to team up with NATO and purge the world of “human rights violators” by multilaterally bombing neighborhoods into cinders, and the response of all the dumbshit DSA kids would be “Wow can’t believe it’s 30th anniversary of I can haz cheezburger, anyway time to fucking murder some Arabs, but woke”. basically if DSA achieves its own goals than any hope that people in it will improve anything about the world immediately disappears.
see, i don't think this is true. i'm not in DSA but i am friends with people who are and their foreign policy is much better than you think. obviously they have not accepted the Immortal Science of Reading Troop Forums Until Your Teeth Shatter Under Pressure but they're much further to the left than this. what you're describing is the neoliberal model which is dying but i fear will be resurgent once we get another centrist dem in charge
cars posted:“Somehow”
Well just because he has his own personality cult and backlog of bland technocratic socdem ideas rattling around in his brain doesn't mean he's not the only candidate in my lifetime who has been worth one single damn.
dsa troop was mocked by some extremely online party members til they remembered psl and wwp both organize active duty soldiers.
Parenti posted:maybe i'll post about this in the secret pdf forum
why? its just pdfs
Parenti posted:i feel like there's a split coming in the DSA. any gossip on this? i've heard a few things, and even though i've been hearing it for a year in the past few weeks it seems more serious. maybe i'll post about this in the secret pdf forum
i dunno, i'm not really sure that this seemingly randomly cobbled together agglomeration of vaguely left wing ideas might come apart at some point. seems far fetched
Sepia posted:Well just because he has his own personality cult and backlog of bland technocratic socdem ideas rattling around in his brain doesn't mean he's not the only candidate in my lifetime who has been worth one single damn.
Bernie Sanders was very good at getting young people to vote for exactly what they bragged to everyone they were voting for, which was the Republican Party platform from the Korean War era, which is real real bad & sucks. I'm sorry if you got con-gamed out of money by the Democrats by their recuperation dude though, as we say in this forum, I Guess This Is Growing Up. Well come and goondolences.
Parenti posted:i feel like there's a split coming in the DSA. any gossip on this? i've heard a few things, and even though i've been hearing it for a year in the past few weeks it seems more serious. maybe i'll post about this in the secret pdf forum
A bunch of people are going to quit when they find spouses probably
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:see, i don't think this is true. i'm not in DSA but i am friends with people who are and their foreign policy is much better than you think.
I think of a lot of DSA people differ from their organization's leadership and luminaries on foreign policy issues, and I also think a lot of the ones who do will clam up, or even attack people who endorse those differing positions, if they can get like five DSA-endorsed candidates into Congress who talk about the benefits of limited aerial bombardment and black-ops "police actions" to contain and assassinate foreign leaders who "kill their own people". DSA's leadership will present those positions to a bunch of former, or otherwise-likely-to-be, Democrats as something many of them already understand as "their" politicians' lot in life: a game of triangulation to defend what they've "won together" from the wolves at the door.
I'm always reminded of the recent DSA poll of their members, where respondents were asked to rank what they thought the organization's top three goals should be, and behind only the then-current main DSA slogan of "Medicare for All", the top-ranked choice was by far to get more DSA-endorsed candidates elected to office, with, y'know, democratic control of the means of production ranking way behind both of the above, and foreign policy questions even further behind that, meaning not even in the top three answers from a question where respondents were prompted to pick three responses.
So now we have stuff like Cynthia Nixon announcing she's a "democratic socialist", nailing down that DSA endorsement, then kicking off her campaign by denouncing local unions' victories in wage disputes, which to me is even more eyebrow-raising than Ocasio-Cortez backpedaling on Palestine. People within the media-approved political spectrum in the United States tend to get addicted to what those media are selling, which is first and foremost the daily horse-race politics that get people looking at the advertisements that keep news companies afloat, and those DSA poll results and the business with their current candidates suggest to me that if the DSA succeeds even to a minor degree in getting media-friendly people elected who talk about moderate expansions to already-popular social programs—even if they don't succeed in making them happen—it may mean that not just foreign policy issues, but also many domestic labor issues, will quickly fall by the wayside as too extreme to mention in the current political climate. My guess is they'll attack "middle-class" student debt next, which, great, that's a good idea and a winner politically, but it's not socialism, and my next guess is that a lot of the rank-and-file will be prompted to argue that if young adults get that debt off their backs, they'll finally be able to start that big fight for socialism everyone's been talking about.
What I'm saying is that compared to a lot of people on this forum, I'm pretty optimistic about the rise in DSA membership meaning good things for socialist politics. I'm just optimistic in the sense that I think those rank-and-file members are going to grow frustrated with DSA very quickly, specifically with its leadership and its nascent version of what's called the "parliamentary party" in Labour in the UK (though DSA isn't really even a labor party in the sense of depending upon a base of organized workers separate from its professional activists). I think that level of frustration is likely to outpace DSA making the sort of electoral gains that its leadership can then use to pressure dissenting members into obedience by pointing at the never-ending campaign cycle in the U.S., in the same way the Democrats at large have done to their rank-and-file, their trade union funding machine, etc., since at least the days following the presidential election in 2000, if not before under Clinton. The necessary conditions for that strategy won't come together quickly enough given the economic pressures on most of DSA's newer rank-and-file members, which are substantially greater than those faced by the book-publishing Harrington/Ehrenreich set that kept the organization afloat over previous decades.
Since a lot of those younger DSA members are active types with a good work ethic and have been willing to contribute a lot of time and effort to DSA, and since those who leave will be, by definition, people with enough backbone to choose their politics over hollow promises, I think it's likely some of them will move out of DSA to found or rejuvenate genuinely socialist and anti-imperialist organizations that will prove beneficial to socialist politics at large. I also think that socialists in the imperial core have something to contribute to those politics in the first place, for which I will eventually face the almighty forums banhammer and fly to the bosom of the LORD.
Petrol posted:The serious answer is to read this and see what you think http://links.org.au/node/4629
Good read. Sorry if this is annoying, first post and I am basically a left-liberal.
"For Marxists, an ability to distinguish between the imperialist centre and the countries of the periphery and semi-periphery – that is, between advanced capitalism and its prey - is an indispensable tool."
How does this relate to a world that seems to be moving to be more multipolar, without an entirely uncontested centre? If the capital predators of the world find themselves at serious odds, what implications does this have for class struggle? For example, "Chinese companies, in many cases led by state-owned enterprises, were responsible for some $183 billion (163 billion euros) of foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2016...The rise saw China rise from fifth to second place in the ranking of the world's largest foreign investors, behind the US." (https://www.dw.com/en/china-leads-growth-in-global-investment-un/a-39147639).
If some semi-periphrey countries are able to start competing with the centre in terms of their monopolized industries (again see China with their massive operations stealing (robin hooding?) US IP) does this change the analysis? Or is it just going to be more capitalists competing for a smaller slice of the periphery pie?
swampman posted:
love too pursue my needs. love too chase down what I need to survive Indiana Jones style. love too
annysandy posted:How does this relate to a world that seems to be moving to be more multipolar, without an entirely uncontested centre? If the capital predators of the world find themselves at serious odds, what implications does this have for class struggle? For example, "Chinese companies, in many cases led by state-owned enterprises, were responsible for some $183 billion (163 billion euros) of foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2016...The rise saw China rise from fifth to second place in the ranking of the world's largest foreign investors, behind the US." (https://www.dw.com/en/china-leads-growth-in-global-investment-un/a-39147639).
If some semi-periphrey countries are able to start competing with the centre in terms of their monopolized industries (again see China with their massive operations stealing (robin hooding?) US IP) does this change the analysis? Or is it just going to be more capitalists competing for a smaller slice of the periphery pie?
"Foreign direct investment" doesn't actually have to be conducted at gunpoint.... China's military budget is a quarter of USA's, or one sixteenth when measured per capita. Just sayin
annysandy posted:Petrol posted:The serious answer is to read this and see what you think http://links.org.au/node/4629
Good read. Sorry if this is annoying, first post and I am basically a left-liberal.
"For Marxists, an ability to distinguish between the imperialist centre and the countries of the periphery and semi-periphery – that is, between advanced capitalism and its prey - is an indispensable tool."
How does this relate to a world that seems to be moving to be more multipolar, without an entirely uncontested centre? If the capital predators of the world find themselves at serious odds, what implications does this have for class struggle? For example, "Chinese companies, in many cases led by state-owned enterprises, were responsible for some $183 billion (163 billion euros) of foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2016...The rise saw China rise from fifth to second place in the ranking of the world's largest foreign investors, behind the US." (https://www.dw.com/en/china-leads-growth-in-global-investment-un/a-39147639).
If some semi-periphrey countries are able to start competing with the centre in terms of their monopolized industries (again see China with their massive operations stealing (robin hooding?) US IP) does this change the analysis? Or is it just going to be more capitalists competing for a smaller slice of the periphery pie?
It's a good question. From the outset I would caution against taking western perspectives on Chinese FDI at face value - there is disagreement about where its activities stand in comparison to the traditional capital exporters (is China the world's top net capital exporter, or not yet really in a stage of net capital export?).
Anyway, I think a good way to approach this question would be to refer to the links article about Russian 'imperialism' and research the same data points it relies upon (financial capital and GDP per capita, capital export destinations, etc). I leave this as an exercise for any motivated reader as I honestly don't have the time to devote to this right now, but I'd be keen to see the results.
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:i went to a dsa meeting on sunday on boston and im pretty sure they thought i was a fed because of my fitness. this is bodyshaming and its not ok
