So anyway here's a link to join the PSL
Edited by Bukku_Man ()
sovnarkoman posted:
hmm alexandria occasio-cortez the woman who didnt mince words about israeli massacres and got elected anyway would now like to mince her words afterall. teh united $nakes indeed..
ilmdge posted:hmm alexandria occasio-cortez the woman who didnt mince words about israeli massacres and got elected anyway would now like to mince her words afterall. teh united $nakes indeed..
Ocasio-Cortez was a filthy activist then, so her previous statements on Palestine are now inoperative. Over her last couple weeks as a candidate for the Democrats, she's grown older and wiser, and, you have to understand, that's why she's turning you in.
(a) sticking to her guns in spite of a strong third-party challenge by the incumbent, and, in the face of the sort of pessimistic, crooked and shitty establishment campaign Crowley is sure to run, using that national profile to pressure some amount of reflexive anti-Palestine lefty types or cowardly enablers into, at the very least, learning to accept & support candidates who don't pander to imperialism, and at best, into examining their own pro-imperialist positions critically in the face of the same;
...than she ever could by:
(b) denouncing her own views all the way to Congress, where she disappears into a closed committee somewhere and comes out, Bernie Sanders-style, holding, in her very hand, a list of Ten Woke Military Interventions Democratic Socialists Must Support, while convincing young, blossoming socialists that the only way to get people noticed who even pay lip service to their politics is for those people to flee in shame from the positions that fire the kids up as soon as someone notices them.
But as I've already said in this thread, I'm pretty sure the practical political function of DSA is to achieve option (b) above, not to further socialism, and I believe it all the more given the DSA types I now see graduating into pure horse-race politics and shouting that Ocasio-Cortez's campaign should have been prepared to "neutralize the issue" (or whatever opportunist phrase they're using) of the IDF running Palestinians over with bulldozers paid for by Congress.
getfiscal posted:i have grown to respect the more electoral / jacobin angle DSA activists because they have a pretty clear picture of what they consider success and they put in a lot of work to make it happen. they joined a reformist organization and do reformist things. a lot of the more left groupings (edit: within DSA) are filled with lunatics. if you joined a reformist organization to rail against "electoralism" then you probably skipped the brochure.
i think they bought into the "multi-tendency" horseshit and are trying to make it a reality within the org instead of joining "microsects" (read: parties that have also had huge membership growth, admittedly not as much as dsa). they don't want to appear to be abandoning the major org of the movement, that is to say the major org for the people they think matter — middle-class white kids with twitter accounts.
Edited by cars ()
In my experience theres a few good anarchists in the DSA but a lot of them are simply fake anarchists a who call themselves that because they don’t want any sort of infrastructure within the org. They simply don’t want to say no to any work that is being done and are fine with locals becoming just sort of these clearing houses for any and all local activists, which I think is a concept getfiscal describes a ways back in a different thread. Needless to say they are also averse to reading not only theory but even basic left history, so every time a Democrat betrays them it’s this brand new thing they could never have foreseen. It’s a trip to watch them experience the roller coaster ride over and over again—like someone did some sort of eternal sunshine of the spotless mind on them but for the history of American politics
I’ve said this before but I think the DSA is essentially a husk of an org that various groups are fighting for control over. The org of course was formed with the asinine goal of dem realignment but in reality the DSA wasn’t actually doing anything concrete outside of jacking off Max Schachtman in their newsletters. I still believe it can be a good vehicle to build and recruit a base of MLs that could then align with other groups to form a mass movement far in the future. People here have already said that they joined DSA and slowly became more radical and while I respect the hell out of PSL and WWP there’s a lot of people who just wouldn’t or aren’t gonna join those orgs for whatever reason. A lot of the 45,000 or so members are never gonna be socialists and just want to meme online and cause a scene on Thanksgiving but a lot more will become radicalized.
rolaids posted:Needless to say they are also averse to reading not only theory but even basic left history, so every time a Democrat betrays them it’s this brand new thing they could never have foreseen. It’s a trip to watch them experience the roller coaster ride over and over again—like someone did some sort of eternal sunshine of the spotless mind on them but for the history of American politics
some things never change I guess. My experience as an anarchist was watching this happen over and over again in a local group with fly-by-night leadership (who could never be acknowledged as such) and back then, the only attention paid in the press was when one of us got a quote published in the newspaper during a street action that we got the paper to attribute to “Alex Berkman” or something. You’d think more people paying attention from the outside would mean the same from the inside.
Re: anarchism it just strikes me as THE 19th century revolutionary ideology which has been completely unable to evolve to meet the 20th a century state. Like good on them for wreaking all sorts of left wing havoc and killing heads of state back in the day but like are you really talking about feeding the world with a community garden in the year of our lord 2018? Their critique of MLs as larping the past is bizarre given hat they’ve not updated their ideology in a century outside of some weird Vermont Zionist.
If you’d asked most of those folks less than five years ago whether the term would appear in that part of the world’s news press in 2016 or 2018 as much as it does, with ambivalence and even tepid support in some corners (vs. pure disdain, disgust or treatment as a dead relic of history), most of them would have said, No, it’s sad but that’s probably decades in the future at best, and that’s if they were optimists. The prediction that Bernie Sanders would win even a single state in a U.S. presidential primary while still repping that term would have been unheard of, again, even among the organizations that are now most associated with his campaign.
And yeah, okay, sure, the rehabilitation of that term is not a clear path toward a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, and it’s being used by the Democrats to capture what may be (and, I think, is) a sizable potential support base for socialism among young workers, and some of that stuff happening among those younger supporters reflects ignorance of, or a failure to accept, the failure / decline / capture of social democratic parties in Europe, or those social-welfare states’ dependence on transfers of imperialist loot, and so on. This is elementary shit that most people here would agree on, that “socialism” isn’t socialism, not necessarily.
But that doesn’t change how the failure to predict that rhetorical shift is a fuck-up and one that needs to be addressed, and it also means that if socialists decide now to keep pushing out their timelines and coming up with their own rhetorical justifications for why it doesn’t really matter that socialists aren’t perceived as space aliens anymore in that part of the world, or acting like it doesn’t really matter that they didn’t see that coming, and so on, well, no one’s going to give them points for that now or in the future, no matter where that goes. It’s a weak excuse.
What’s good is that even though I haven’t seen a lot of public self-examination of the failure to predict what happened among socialists, I have seen a lot of acceptance and flexibility among e.g. ML parties in the U.S., who are overall doing a good job of accounting for the shift in their current and future plans and communications, at least those available to the public. I think that’s a good lead to follow, and I think a full reckoning with the past could only help it. And I know that shift occurred because that reckoning has happened and is still happening out of the public eye for some parties and groups, and I hope it continues to happen.
But as far as the brilliant / superior tier of discussion in our favorite online forum goes, if you’re not a pure third worldist, first, you’re banned from this forum forever, and second, it’s probably time to reckon with self-criticism and a change in course to match.
cars posted:No joke, though, I'm expecting to spot a stencil tag of Ocasio-Cortez in a hoodie and aviator shades in the next month or two.
I question the possibility that you could spraypaint someone with a hoodie and aviator shades and still get across that it's Ocasio-Cortez. I guess you could add text? Let's be realistic here.
getfiscal posted:cars posted:
No joke, though, I'm expecting to spot a stencil tag of Ocasio-Cortez in a hoodie and aviator shades in the next month or two.
I question the possibility that you could spraypaint someone with a hoodie and aviator shades and still get across that it's Ocasio-Cortez. I guess you could add text? Let's be realistic here.
the devil horns will give it away
getfiscal posted:cars posted:No joke, though, I'm expecting to spot a stencil tag of Ocasio-Cortez in a hoodie and aviator shades in the next month or two.
I question the possibility that you could spraypaint someone with a hoodie and aviator shades and still get across that it's Ocasio-Cortez. I guess you could add text? Let's be realistic here.
From past experience, I bet I could do it.
From Meagan Day in Vox
From Shawn Gude in Jacobin
From Desain and McCarthy in Jacobin
From Neal Meyer in Jacobin
what's striking to me is that they all portray a fairly obvious idea of socialism, as a sort of march of progress towards good things by making things more democratic, but without much serious talk about imperialism. there's talk of cleavages but they tend to seem somewhat arbitrary instead of imposed by specific groups in a particular historical bloc. each of the explainers has strengths and i know and like most of the authors above but i don't know why the average 'struggling' person would really care much about subordination in some extremely abstract sense. these are clearly targeted at making left-liberals who follow politics consider themselves democratic socialists.
Also you have an extremely good avatar
shriekingviolet posted:Was it purely for fundraising or was it some kind of ideological compromise pandering
"please money bcuz dangerous russia traitoring"
shriekingviolet posted:Also you have an extremely good avatar
Cheers, been sitting on it for awhile before finding this good forum.
shriekingviolet posted:errybody in the listserv gettin tipsy
now
Sepia posted:Somehow got an email from the DLCC last night after it apparently filtered down to them through Bernie stuffs a couple years back. It was terrible. I had to write a long email in response saying "Please eat my entire ass".
“Somehow”
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.
