If I want to read The Hill or the Center for Effective Lawmaking or whatever center-right think tank makes it to the top of c/politics I would watch MSNBC.
Stop with your “body language expert” tier horseshit and actually criticize these succdems from the left how fucking hard is that.
That's an incredibly bad faith reading of that passage.
What's bad faith is WSWS calling those comments from AOC "denouncing socialism and praising the Biden administration."
Is it a bit sensationalist click bait? yeah, maybe. I don't think it is entirely off base though. You don't have to read between the lines too carefully in the context of US politics to see this as being critical of revolutionary politics and that she thinks that, "we cannot allow for that in our movement."
To be fair, she's not wrong. I whole heartedly agree that socialists shouldn't be getting mixed up with social democratic politics.
Remember the moment the primary was over and the democratic party turned on the socialists in the party and blamed them for everything? And now she is going on about "class reductionism" and "bad faith criticism from the left." Now she is using her national platform to redefine socialist politics as something that should take place within the confines of the democratic party or it is the devil's work of privileged bad faith actors.
Reading a negative message between the lines is kind of the definition of bad faith, right?
She's a DSA member.
So, you admit that her role is to redefine socialism as reformism within an openly and explicitly anti socialist party and dismantle revolutionary socialist movements by labelling them as bad faith actors, yet you can't understand why revolutionary socialists would see her as someone that is.... trying to dismantle revolutionary socialist movements and write articles pointing that out? And it is bad faith for me to read between the lines that she is trying to dismantle revolutionary movements.
The privilege thing is just offensive. Was Malcolm X a privileged bad faith actor? Fred Hampton? Angela Davis? Harry Haywood? What an absurd and offensive claim. Accept the soul crushing jack boot of American fascism or be ejected from the AOC fan club.
Are we really doing this? Come on, let's just have a conversation.
She's doing as much as any individual in the country right now to make "socialism" a term that's acceptable in mainstream politics. However one defines socialism, and whatever your socialist project is, breaking Americans of their reflexive rejection of the mere mention of it is crucial. At very least that's worth critical support and good faith.
As for revolutionary socialists -- what revolutionary socialists? There are no armed bands fighting the state from the hills of Appalachia. There is no Weather Underground 2.0. There was a historic wave of protests last summer, but they largely stayed peaceful until the cops instigated violence, and they had a much narrower focus than socialism. What's there to get upset about, assuming she was referring to revolutionary socialists at all?
And she's clearly not calling Fred Hampton a bad faith actor with the privilege comment. The point is that it's easy to say stuff like "Democrats are just as bad as Republicans," but people in marginalized groups might reasonably feel safer when a Republican president isn't emboldening bigots.
Revolutionary socialist doesn't mean a socialist who is armed with a gun, a revolutionary socialist is someone who believes that the status quo of bourgeois rule is unacceptable. They believe that the problem isn't with figurehead A or B or that the problem problem isn't a conspiracy X or Y, but that the problem is systemic and that the system needs to be overturned.
It would be impossible, even by the wildest straining of credulity and imagination, to see Joe Biden as a revolutionary figure. Not least because he admits in plain English to not be a socialist, that his mission is to "prove that capitalist democracy works." Not democracy, not even the thinly veiled term liberal democracy no. Capitalist democracy.
So when she says that anyone who attacks Joe Biden from the left as someone that can't bring about about change as privileged bad faith actors when he says "nothing will fundamentally change" I think that's a pretty serious statement. It is a clear repudiation of revolutionary politics. Very clear.
She didn't say anything about Biden as a revolutionary figure, and she's did say anything like "no criticism of Biden is allowed." She's criticized Biden herself! How is this not a bad faith reading of her comments? It's a sweeping, negative inference that goes far beyond what she actually said.
It sounds like she's making this point:
That's not portraying Biden as a revolutionary figure -- "none of his actions pose any threat to structural problems" -- but it makes the extremely practical point that if you just ceaselessly dump on Biden no matter what he does, even persuadable people will eventually tune you out. That's the type of "bad faith criticism from the left" (i.e., criticism even when something's an objective improvement) that's reasonable to infer from her comments.
It's not bad faith, that's just how I read it. Maybe she has a secret plan to establish socialism via one of the most murderous right wing organizations in history. I wish her the best of luck in that endeavor.
You're making negative inferences that go well beyond the words she's actually using. What is bad faith if it's not that?
Say we make plans for tonight and you have to cancel late. You say something came up with your family so you can't make it. If I make a negative inference that goes beyond what you said -- maybe I assume you never wanted to hang out in the first place because you don't really like me -- that's treating your words in bad faith, right? You never said any of that.
Who do you think class reductionism refers to if not Marxists? The folks that say we should take class seriously and that is the principal contradiction in society?
Any marxists knows what she means because they have been called class reductionists dozens of times by anti Marxists.
And you know what? She has every right to be anti marxist, and Marxists have every right to not be supportive of her politics, which to be honest I think are laregly irrelavent.
Do you not see how this mentality is poison? A guaranteed way to lose is a bunch of small leftist groups doing their own thing because of imagined slights.
Marxism. Small leftist group.
Why do you say so? It seems pretty clear to me that the minute she brought up that DSA is intersectional they accused her of being an anti-communist. How do you interpret that passage?
To add to the other guys point, throwing in "deprioritizing human rights" as shade to other leftist groups outside the DSA absolutely has anticommunist tones to it.
Edit: And sure she might not be "consciously" doing it as an anticommunist sneaky thing but this has been a long ass trend with her not critically thinking about shit like the human rights propaganda industry and a bunch of other stuff, at some point when all the calls for her to improve has fallen flat and she basically just throws shaded insults back, then you gotta just say "Ok, theres no point in supporting her when she refuses to improve or answer to supporters".
And if you go "harm reduction/shes the best we've got" then nothing will ever make her too bad to support except if she literally becomes a republican so all of this is meaningless anyways.
AOC is gonna say the word tankie this year
There is a big difference between saying that the DSA is intersectional and saying it is intersectional and not class reductionist, as if class analysis and intersectionality are somehow mutually exclusive.
What she said here (or at least how it is portrayed) was basically "we're cool and good, the other leftists are class essentialists who disregard human rights". If the context of the quote is accurate, then what she said was that these things are specific to the DSA, throwing shade against other socialist groups. Not sure if that was the context because I don't follow this shit, but that's what the article seems to be trying to get at, not accuse her of being intersectional.