"We applaud the democratic revolutions that have transformed the former Communist bloc"
I love the rising wave of neo-fascism in eastern europe - National DSA
(many DSA chapters are good and based ok, this post is dunking on the National DSA, not all chapters or the DSA on its entirety)
I'm curious what happens long term when you try to actually implement or push for actual communist policies and you've been repeating USA state dept talking points about the USSR and other similar experiments for so long people are reticent to change. Seems like the ground work for moving past red scare propaganda is better education not appropriating talking points that were designed to undermine our policies.
Me tying the noose this is fine
Me handing the noise to the hangman this is still fine
Me stepping off the platform We made the right decision
It's a pipeline, and DSA isn't the full extent of the pipeline. If they get libs and apolitical folks to take a few steps left, those people will find other leftist ideas -- including analyses of the Cold War that are much more favorable to the USSR and similar experiments. It's far more important right now, with how small the American left is, to get mass numbers of people into that pipeline in the first place.
i'm concerned that it will just end up being a :maybe-later-kiddo: but "socialist." If the dsa gets big enough and ultimately becomes corrupted by recuperation if it gets to big to be dealt with the old fashioned way, i.e. what they did to strikers in the early iww and the bpp party.
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That's a legitimate concern, but considering how many Bernie supporters wound up sprinting left in the wake of his campaign, I think it's far from a foregone conclusion.
maybe, but I think there's also historical reasons, particular in america, to be hypervigilant about this. Petite-bourgeois privilege has been an alluring and undermining power to (especially white-led) socialist movements in america and has successful derailed them when raw power didn't (or was being used on poc instead).
It just seems like there's way to onboard people without setting yourself up for more work down the road, and it also seems especially dubious to use that kind of red scare rhetoric if you're thinking "down the line we'll be able to come back around to this." seem like it would have been better to just say nothing at all.
Also tangentially related but I think it's fine for some people to not see the dsa platform as aligning with their politics and criticize it for that. We don't admonish anarchists for not agreeing 100% with ML positions and vice versa, just bc the dsa is big doesn't mean we should have to capitulate to it. It's the same energy as democrats doing "blue no matter who" or setting their candidates up as the most pragmatic even tho they're full of compromises.
edit: also I don't necessarily think bernie supporters are really indicative of how a larger mass of people would operate. Seems more like wish fulfillment than material. I think the berniecrats that ended up going super far left are mostly a particular type of group and I can't imagine they make up most of the broader left in the us. I don't think most people will naturally find their way more left if we're repeating propaganda that would work to keep them intellectually uncurious about
If there's a better way to onboard people in mass numbers, no one else has found it. It's fine to discuss alternate ideas, but we can't assume that a superior approach definitely exists. And we may never need to address any of this down the road -- we're talking about governments that have not existed for decades.
And you can't say nothing at all, because you have to have some response to the #1 reactionary talking point.