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bernie was destroyed. he clearly doesn't have another presidential campaign in him. the party said :bugs-no:. he bent the knee. let the poor guy rest.
at the less spectacular level of local politics, a bunch of DSA branches are involved with campaigns for demsoc candidates. turns out politics is actually hard, whether it's elections, labor organizing, mutual aid, terrorism, whatever, it really does amount to slow boring of hard boards.
Buffalo, NY literally elected a socialist as the Democratic nominee for mayor last year. In a district where the Republican never wins and the Democrat always wins the mayoral race. After that, Buffalo considered abolishing the position of mayor. That didn't happen, but what did happen is that the establishment stooge who lost the primary decided to run as an independent in the general, got millions upon millions in funding from corporate donors, got the full support of the Democratic party, and ran a huge propaganda campaign against the socialist insurgent. The socialist lost. Propaganda works! Especially when the media is created, controlled, and funded by capitalists.
So, people can be excused for being a little bit hopeless for democratic socialism in America.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/buffalo-new-york-india-walton-mayoral-election-byron-brown
that was so frustrating. fuck brown. India def did some stupid shit, but nothing in comparison to what the dem party did to make sure she wouldn't win
Best is when Neolibs say "See the Dem's ran a socialist and she lost to a write-in!"
Three things (1) Bernie was defeated (2) after his defeat, lots of DSA people poured energy into BLM/George Floyd protest. BLM was defeated. (3) The pandemic. This disrupted organizing (which was already weak). Some people were comfortable organizing or had more time to organize, this was disrupted by the pandemic "ending" last year.
DSA in my area is still doing shit, but from what I understand they have greatly reduced capacity from what they had in 2020.
I'm cautiously very optimistic about what happens when the pandemic ends (meaning it becomes endemic, aka less deaths than the flu)
The left is the most suppressed by the pandemic, because they're the least willing to murder people.
There might be a lot of in person organizing pent up
Here I was thinking the BLM protests were possible in part BECAUSE of the plague shutting things down and causing economic strife.
That's true, but the BLM protests were a new organizing. Whatever organizing was happening before the start of the pandemic was disrupted.
Covid had a mix of seemingly contradictory effects; like I stated in (3) covid both disrupted organizing and gave some more time/motivation to organize.
The Bernie shit fizzled out and died because Bernie lost, but plenty of people are still doing things - see for example all of the labor organizing. Bigger things will take a long time and a lot of work to materialize, and will only attract mass appeal when the circumstances become more desperate.
The Bernie campaign was never "everything".
Giving a shout out to Therednation.org bc Indigenous people have always been resisting the amerikkkan empire.
still something that could theoretically be moved towards Scientific Socialism
Not to be rude but fantasy isn't theory.
Where did those people go? Many retreated back into conventional liberalism, the others are waiting for the next election because that's what brings about change, those who seriously thought the SocDems were revolutionaries are disheartened and disillusioned.
It was never grassroots, it was always an astroturfed distraction. Bernie and the Squad are useful idiots in the game of 'keep people away from actual socialism at all costs'.
What is there to do anymore? What people should have been doing in the first place rather than worrying about the dog and pony show that is Federal elections.
People need to be organising locally and agitating locally. There are already groups set up, join them if they're near by. If they're not, time to set up your own.
The fascists are, the fascists are getting organised. The fascists are getting organised and they're as angry as we are and they have guns and they're pointing those guns at us as if we're to blame.
It's as simple as setting up a small local group to discuss theory, organise protests, conduct mutual aid, train to fight, then network with other groups on a national level.
When you have your network, you keep agitating, locally, nationally, any and every protest you can. BLM, union strikes, statue protests, climate protests, everything. You keep your group organised, you keep them disciplined, you keep their spirits up, you keep helping everyone you can in small ways - encouraging labour militancy, feeding the homeless, protecting peaceful protests from fascist counter-protesters, local clean-ups. Show you're a part of the community and you're hear to support it, you're allies not enemies.
Then the next crisis is gonna happen. Disease? Drought? Famine? Recession? Don't know, doesn't matter, it's gonna happen and it's gonna suck. People are gonna be angry and looking who to blame, you know who to blame, you've read your theory, you've been dispensing the theory and your community trusts you. That's when you start taking direct action against the state.
That's how its always worked before that's how it will work again. Stop waiting for bourgeois news to tell you what time the revolution begins, it's a gradual process that people are standing in the way of by trusting closet libs wearing the skins of socialists.
You're not gonna win in a voting booth, you're gonna win in the streets.
That's a low bar tbh, unless you count left-friendly protests like the Anti-War protests in the early 2000s or the anti-globalization ones in the late 90s, which were mostly radlibs.
At the end of the day, most Americans still get their treats.
People are still doing work. Join the DSA or some other org, do work yourself. Nobody is going to liberate you.
It's retreated in disappointment around the lack of expansion of the liberal welfare state. The broad US left has not yet confronted its own Lassallean-esque view of the state. They fail to recognize the government is a bourgeois one.
That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.
Karl Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Programme," Part III
The German Workers' party — at least if it adopts the [Gotha Programme] — shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; in that, instead of treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical, and libertarian bases.
And what of the riotous misuse which the program makes of the words "present-day state", "present-day society", and of the still more riotous misconception it creates in regard to the state to which it addresses its demands?
"Present-day society" is capitalist society, which exists in all civilized countries, more or less free from medieval admixture, more or less modified by the particular historical development of each country, more or less developed. On the other hand, the "present-day state" changes with a country's frontier. It is different in the Prusso-German Empire from what it is in Switzerland, and different in England from what it is in the United States. The "present-day state" is therefore a fiction.
Nevertheless, the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite or their motley diversity of form, all have this in common: that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense, it is possible to speak of the "present-day state" in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.
The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'state'.
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
There is. I know it looks like it fizzled and the establishment put the boot into the progressives, but these things ebb and wax with crises, and Covid put a stopper in a lot of irl organising which made things look worse than they are. Many Bernie/Corbyn supporters went back into their shells until the next figurehead to rally around comes out. Some dropped back into lib land.
But more than I could have hoped radicalised into revolutionary politics.
I'll tell you this, the revolutionary Left in the Anglosphere is bigger and more organised than at any point since 1992. I was there in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was fucking bleak, everyone thought it was doomed, the only people with any initiative were the nihilist insurrectionist anarchists.
And now we have an actual fucking ecosystem that might not be a mass movement yet, but is almost ready to spark one. Yes, we lost, but it was a loss that left us stronger.
It's nice reading perspectives like this from older comrades. Makes me feel less demoralised to think of how far we've come from those days. I grew up in the late 00s and remember them feeling very much as you describe. Being on the left was a really marginalised position and 99% of people I knew were totally disengaged but with the instincts of Clinton/Blair-style liberals. We are in a much better position now, even if part of that is that the world has become much more obviously fucked. There's a latent class consciousness developing across larges parts of society that if cultivated can help us create a better world
Remember that in 1915 Lenin said that a revolution would never happen in Russia during his lifetime. Be patient, be disciplined, get organized
We wil fail, horribly, terribly. Again and again and again. Until somehow we don't, and the world trembles.
There's something the old people in my party love to say, it's like a paraphrased quote from Marx with their own added analysis I believe
"Historical progress is akin to the tides at the beach. When the tide rises it doesn't just all flow in in one go. It comes up slightly the first time then retreats - that was the Paris Commune which lasted just over 70 days before being drowned in blood and gunpowder. As the waters fell back everyone wondered if the tide was actually rising or if it was just an ephemeral wave.
Marx, Engels, and even Lenin thought that next swelling wouldn't happen in their lifetimes but regardless went to work building the movement in preparation for that moment it would be needed the most with the same fervor as Noah did as he built he Ark to survive the great floods that he knew were coming but knew not exactly the moment when.
The waters rose once again as is inevitable during the rising tide and we saw the Soviet Union come and went. That great experiment lasted for nearly 70 years. We went from 70 days to 70 years with each advance of the tide, and so we must wonder what will come with the next tide. That's no excuse to sit back and act like socialism will sprout up from the ground like the trees in a forest, Comrades! Just like Marx, Engels, and Lenin had done before during the periods of drought, we must do the same as them - and that is build the power of the Party into the General-Staff of the Working Class! That is to move our cadre among the working class, in the Unions, in the Trades, in the individual shops and workplaces! We have to work to organize the people as we've done in the past! We have so much work that needs to be done and as Lenin said, there will be weeks that feel like months much like how there will be months that feel like weeks."
They/we were all comfortable middle/working class people people who turned back to Netflix when it became apparent any accomplishment would require sacrificing said comfort.
im just sitting around waiting to die :shrug-outta-hecks:
Sometimes I don't know where This dirty road is taking me Sometimes I can't even see the reason why I guess I keep a-gamblin' Lots of booze and lots of ramblin' It's easier than just waitin' around to die
One time, friends, I had a ma I even had a pa He beat her with a belt once 'cause she cried She told him to take care of me Headed down to Tennessee It's easier than just waitin' around to die
I came of age and I found a girl In a Tuscaloosa bar She cleaned me out and hit in on the sly I tried to kill the pain, bought some wine And hopped a train Seemed easier than just waitin' around to die
A friend said he knew Where some easy money was We robbed a man, and brother did we fly The posse caught up with me And drug me back to Muskogee It's two long years I've been waitin' around to die
Now I'm out of prison I got me a friend at last He don't drink or steal or cheat or lie His name's Codine He's the nicest thing I've seen Together we're gonna wait around and die Together we're gonna wait around and die
