The DSA is a joke.
The DSA's right wing is poised to purge all that distracting "identity politics", like BDS, police abolitionism, BLM, disability rights, trans rights, criticism of western imperialism, and anything about 'minority' representation in politics generally or within the DSA itself.
The DSA now stands for Medicare for All and that's about it. In other words, they're Rockefeller Republicans.
Harrington drew his influence from middle-class white liberals unhappy with the pro-Vietnam-War, pro-big labor Democrats of the sixties and seventies. He wanted to capture that disaffection for the DSA, but stay linked to Democratic Party politics. And that's what the DSA was/is.
A lot of younger people came into the DSA since the mid 2000s wanting something more radical, and seeing the DSA as the most viable electoral party on the left. They are now being ejected from the DSA; the graft didn't take.
The DSA was never in the least radical. That was a misunderstanding of its founding, nature, and purpose. It was only minimally social democrat, much less "socialist" in any recognizable way.
I pretty much always thought the DSA was a waste of time.
Anyway, here we are.
(I don't know what isn't a waste of time, politically, though)
The DSA’s right wing is poised to purge all that distracting “identity politics”, like BDS, police abolitionism, BLM, disability rights, trans rights, criticism of western imperialism, and anything about ‘minority’ representation in politics generally or within the DSA itself.
I call cap on this. If anything identity politics are the DSA’s bread and butter. It’s relatively much easier to talk about minority rights than about class rights in America. Also, didn’t the dropped Palestinian committee that started all this drama get reinstated after backlash? Idk I didn’t follow it super closely.
Yeah the DSA walked back on that idea, which originally wasn't getting rid of BDS but moving its responsibilities to the foreign policy committee.
DSA is as useless as electoral politics generally, but I think it still has a role in getting the more radical message out there. Literally who else had a good take on Russia-Ukraine?
seeing the DSA as the most viable electoral party on the left
Well that just shows this person had no clue what the DSA even is. Nobody runs on the DSA "ticket".
Obviously the DSA is not a revolutionary organization. If it spouted radical rhetoric it would be destroyed in about five seconds by every three letter organization there is. There are a ton of well meaning people in local DSA chapters throughout the country. Some of them are radical, some are not. Some people are pragmatists and think that revolution in the great Satan is impossible. Some people don't want to get turned into red mist my a tank. People need to stop beong mad at the DSA for not being something that it very explicitly says it is not trying to be.
I think the issue is...what is it trying to be?
What's it's ultimate goal? Is it revolutionary? Is it reformist? Is it an agitprop org? Is it just a big tent left talking shop?
If it had a coherent political program then people could take or leave it, but it keeps trying to maintain ties to the dems on one and and trying to become an alternative on the other. Until the contradictions are resolved it cannot be useful.
Isn't resolving that dialectic in the org in for communism an important fight though? The whole of society is rife with contradiction but just abstaining from it because it's not perfect would be absurd. Would the same not apply to the largest and most active left wing organization in the US?
It is, and there's probably a better chance of actually making the DSA Socialist than say, Militant had in the Labour Party. The fact many of the most active cells are RevSoc dominated is very positive.
But, and I admit I'm not clear on this, there doesn't seem to be any acknowledgement from revolutionary factions that RevSoc involvement with the DSA is inherently an entryist project, and that there's a goal that ends in supplanting the leadership of the organisation and breaking with most if not all Democratic candidates.
I mean, that's what they want right? A mass Socialist organisation with a revolutionary, or at least a hard-reformist program. Not just a few more members of the squad and a few more SocDem mayors?
DSA is a membership driven organization first and foremost. Its focused on building a pro-socialist environment by local organizing and education. Its structurally more like the NRA than any other organization.
Trying to compare it to vanguard socialist orgs like SAlt or PSL is like comparing the NRA to the libertarian party. DSA's not a vanguard party, and it has no delusions that it could be. Vanguard parties see DSAs 90k membership and wonder what they could accomplish with those numbers. But DSA wouldn't be as big as it is if it wasn't big tent and multi-tendancy.
SAlt already has a caucus within the DSA to push DSA to make a socialist/labor party but that's more likely to be an offshoot of DSA not a transformation of DSA itself.
Ok, so it's an AgitProp/Lobbyist/Funding org like the NRA. That's not a terrible strategy as long as people realise its limits are shitposting at the cracks in the political system in the hope they widen far enough to shove someone in there and making politicians afraid for their lives, or worse, their wallets.
The NRA is of course far more unified and vicious (and arguably lead by a political vanguard that couped the sports shooters in the 70s.) It would be nice to see the DSA take a similar road.
Ok, so it's an AgitProp/Lobbyist/Funding org
That's basically what the NPC wants it to be and how its structured. They don't really care what members do beside pay their dues.
Local chapters however do whatever organizing they think is most relevant to their community. Whether that's tenant unions, labor unions, mutual aid networks, political agitation, reading groups, pipeline protesting, etc. is up to the members of the chapters.
Its that multi-tendancy, base-building strategy that explains why DSA has continued to grow even after the Sanders campaign. That growth is something vanguardists continually fail to understand. There's no point to a vanguard party if there is no socialist movement to begin with. And the only vanguard party model that can make its own socialist movement are Maoist peoples army which haven't worked in the imperial core.
That's is why SAlt is mostly irrelevant and PSL even more so. Do the local chapters of these organizations actually have any outreach programs or do they just show up to protests with a banner?
I pretty much always thought the DSA was a waste of time.
(I don’t know what isn’t a waste of time, politically, though)
I don't know who this person is, but if they aren't actively involved in the DSA, or similar orgs, I don't really value their take is on them There's a lot of people doing good things inside the DSA, the International Committee and intense backlash to national's attempted disassociation from BDS proves that. It's silly to call their activism a "waste of time" from one's armchair.
This reads as someone who doesn't know what the DSA is or even does.
They're very much not purging idpol or any kind of social issues in lieu of M4A. If anything they lean in hard into social issues since economic issues tied to socialism is a hard sell for dumbass Americans and a lot of people in the DSA don't want to do the work to defend it without having to capitulate or concede to libs and cons in order to avoid backlash.
Also the DSA isn't an electoral party, they don't run anyone :-I
Once again, the power of DSA, right now at least, is in the local chapters. DSA isn't big enough to wield any national power, or have any fucking impact at anything larger than local level.
Working at the local level, working with local issues and relating those local issues to the wider capitalist decay is the work. Medicare for All isn't going to happen (at least not without mass movement), but I campaign for it because it's such an easy on-ramp for Socialism in general.
Nah it sounds a little ridiculous, especially since the DSA is about the local chapters, not national.
The DSA’s right wing is poised to purge all that distracting “identity politics”, like BDS, police abolitionism, BLM, disability rights, trans rights, criticism of western imperialism, and anything about ‘minority’ representation in politics generally or within the DSA itself.
Seems like jumping the gun. They haven't neutered the International Committee as far as I know.
:geordi-no: democratic socialism
:geordi-yes: democratic centralism
I guess I agree mostly. Building a communist party in the United States doesn’t seem like a waste of time politically tho
If you're crapping on the whole org you'd better be doing some irl organizing yourself and not just whining about the NPC libs because that's all you know about the org.
This has the same punchline as that joke about the penguin who is asked why it looks like he’s wearing a tuxedo.
spoiler
“What makes you so sure I’m not?”
Need a citation on the claim about a full-scale purge. The rest is just a mix of gloating and failing to recognize how close the most recent convention came to electing a majority-radical NPC. The attempt to radicalize the DSA into the party we need was not a bad project, it just failed. I left the DSA recently over the prioritization of electing useless socdems over international solidarity in procedurally unacceptable ways, but I don't regret trying to use it for revolutionary struggle.
This person is getting their information like 5th or 6th hand. The NPC as shit as they are aren't going to purge, BLM, abolitionism, trans rights etc, that's pure slander. They did kick the BDS working group chairs from their posts but that's framed as an internationalist vs electoralist fight within the DSA. People I know who've been to convention often highlight the extreme cattyness that goes on nationally.
Either way, the idea that DSA is about to get coup'ed from the right by the NPC is absurd. They have only 3 out of 8 seats filled on the steering committee. There's already a national campaign for a special convention to kick out the rest, put in an internationalist slate, and restructure national to put more power into the locals.
The DSA sucks, but there are good people in the DSA, if that makes sense.
