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)

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  • KollontaiWasRight [she/her,they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.