The tacit understanding here being that the funding and feelings of the police is more valuable than the lives of senior citizens.
The tacit understanding here being that the funding and feelings of the police is more valuable than the lives of senior citizens.
Agree with all of this and we’d be in much better shape if the Dems were 1% as good as the Mensheviks
Agreed. People kinda forgot that Kautsky, despite his disastrous influence on western socialism, himself still wanted actually communism in the end and not idk hiring freeze on hiring pigs or just defensive weapons to the genocidal state. Modern day DSA would have never demanded an 8-hour workday or, they would have advocated for being “good” not “perfect” and asked for a 11.5-hour workday which only applies for those employed for 10+ years.
the average person in NYC probably does not know who Kautsky is but does know what a free bus and daycare is
Not remotely my point but whatever.
I was snarky about it but what I really mean is that all this fantasizing about having the Mensheviks around and how puny pissbaby DSA would have been in the 1800s does nothing for the people of New York like having a free bus and daycare would, and the free bus and daycare guy is the frontrunner, so I don’t understand the emphatic opposition to the free bus and daycare guy. Like, drop your kids at the free daycare and take the free bus to protest his ass when he steps out of line. At the absolute bare minimum, people in New York are more aware that they have the right to demand a free bus and daycare from their government. That’s a good thing.
I’m sure you’ve heard this line of thinking a million times but still
The issue I was speaking to is that he will drop even the meagre crumbs he is promising for the sake of a nebulous future win, of making socialism more “acceptable” as streamers like hassan postulate. And it only promotes further defeatism, apathy and lessening of class struggle. Instead of opening the populace for further and grander demands, he makes their world smaller, makes them think only modesty and surrender are achievable.
Its not about being against “free daycare” and the contrapointian line of thinking of leftists as “only wanting to critique power and not wield it” - this criticism is something the DSA refuses to engage in, and why they do not grow but stagnate into complicity.
DSA is exploding in membership and political influence so I don’t know where you’re getting your last idea from.
The former idea, yeah maybe but I see this view as very cynical, like, “he’s probably just going to give up on these ideas so I’m going to give up first.” I don’t agree with that, and I don’t see the counter suggestion - “class struggle”? Should the streets run red with the blood of the proletariat, while the bus fare rises? I also don’t see how city-operated grocery stores, a political idea I have not heard from any USian political candidate with a lead in the polls in my lifetime, “makes their world smaller”.
I just fail to see the real world connection between your prognostications and the actual things a mayor has the power to do that this guy says he is going to do if elected, which currently he is the favorite for, because of the material changes he is running on
If he is a chickenshit he deserves to be castigated, if he is kneecapped by Democrats I think it will only increase their general disdain, if he actually does the shit he says he will with the power he will have then material good will come of it. Personally I’m rooting for the latter.
I’m in a chapter of the org and we are constantly having this discussion internally. People within the chapter are skeptical of electoralism. What’s your feeling on how they should utilize members time and funds? I’m not on a steering committee or anything but they listen to every member.
Serious Marxists of the past were very clear that participating in electoral politics is at least sometimes constructive, but that’s not the same as electoralism (a plan predicating on victory through the primary means of winning elections) or entryism (trying to have electoral success within a rightist party to steer it toward socialism somehow). Supporting DSA dems who are already campaigning is whatever, I guess, if they have good policies, but the best thing to do is actually have your own platform that you have full authority over so that you can spread a message of undiluted socialism (rather than play PR games like Mamdani) and force reactionaries to contend with it.
of all the
I’ve seen recently about the Zohran campaign this is the most reasoned and theoretically rooted take I’ve seen, thank you for it
Mao said to “move among the people as a fish swims in the sea” so how about asking the members themselves, perhaps also asking people within the local area that the chapter operates in? See what problems come up and see what forms of collective action can help overcome them. Political education would also be great.
Anything but having having things to do with the fascist democratic party or the bourgeois electoral system as a means of achieving pro-worker change. Now that would be a waste of time and money imo
It should not be your only basket or your main one, but it’s silly to dogmatically oppose participating in elections (under your own banner) when they can be good vehicles for agitation.
Break with the democrats. Create a stable financial backing system which could support workers on strike for example, create a safehouse net and secure methods to go undercover, infiltrate labour unions, acquire guns and train people, make connections with other like-minded groups, if there are local issues - ensure active change by your chapter. If possible create an anonymous and untraceable closed system of communication. And focus heavily on logistics workers and infrastructural nodes.
Of course part of my recommendations are likely to get you all on a list, especially these days. Regardless in the end if you want to force the dems hand or more radical measures, the path to that power is the same.
In the most polite way I can put it right now: this is magical thinking. It would make a great movie or video game, but it is simply not something any serious organizer would try to do. It doesn’t even make from the perspective of anyone who has had to work with others to build a house or piece of software or anything more complex than a college group research project. In no way is this more realistic than the idea that Mamdani is going to do communism in NYC (which nobody has ever claimed in the history of hexbear.net).